Bizarre populist claims disguise the paper's real concern - UKIP splitting the Tory vote.
“Mass immigration, the subject that dare not speak its name, has been all but airbrushed from this election, even by the Tories.”
That was the message on the front page of yesterday’s Daily Mail, in what must be among the most bizarre moments in a very odd election campaign.
For any one awake and literate (or semi-literate) over recent months, the claim that immigration is ‘the subject that dare not speak its name’ is enough to make one’s head spin.
The paper’s comment ran next to its report that among Tory voters in 2010 who plan to vote UKIP this year, 94 per cent named immigration as the reason for the switch.
The paper ran a rare full page editorial headed:
IMMIGRATION: It’s the issue of our time. So why is it being totally ignored by the major parties?
The piece calls on David Cameron to reassure these UKIP voters and urge them to ‘come home’ to the Tory party. Today the paper got it’s wish. The Mail’s front page screams:
MILIBAND WILL BRING BACK UNCONTROLLED MIGRATION
Cameron appears inside with his own full-page editorial doing just as the paper wanted. (Almost as if the whole thing was contrived by the Mail and Tory HQ…)
What makes this so surreal is the fact that everyone is talking about immigration. All the time.
It’s possible the Conservatives are keen to skirt over their missed ‘tens of thousands’ target, with immigration in the year up to September 2014 at 298,000. (In 2010 Cameron told voters: “If we don’t deliver our side of the bargain, kick us out in five years.”)
But the idea the subject has been put on the back burner is false.
Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband gave speeches in November and December respectively focussed solely on immigration.
‘Controls on immigration’ is one of the Labour party’s five election pledges. They even put it on a mug.
Miliband made a speech just last week on immigration arguing for tough controls and saying Labour would succeed where the Tories had failed.
And in March, UKIP, a party whose main election platform is reducing immigration, launched its campaign at the white cliffs of Dover with posters of escalators to show how easy it is for migrants to reach Britain. (I think they might regret that one in light of recent events.)
The recent deaths of hundreds of migrants crossing the seas to Europe have placed migration at the centre of public and political debate.
Today, as the Mail gives space to Tory propaganda attacking Miliband, the Labour leader is giving a speech on foreign policy with special attention on what to do about migration from Libya.
All this and more (newspaper stories, for example) about ‘the subject that dare not speak its name’!
Perhaps when the Daily Mail calls immigration the central issue in this election, what it means is the central issue for the Daily Mail, and for readers who might split the Tory vote.
Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter
Read more: Tory cynicism as press takes Salmond’s budget joke seriously
Daily Mail spins BBC leaders’ interviews to toe the Tory line
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41 Responses to “No talk of immigration? What planet is the Daily Mail living on?”
Guest
“JEWS R WORSE THAN MY MAIL”
Right, I’m now allowed an argument in your world, because Jewish. Same old, same old, Lord Blagger.
JAMES MCGIBBON
Britain has a reputation for honouring agreements. We entered WW11 because the Nazis invaded Poland. We signed up to EU treaties and honour them as we should. We should vote to get out of the EU then we have no obligation. All we need is a trade agreement with anyone that wants to trade fairly.
damon
Aren’t you meant to stay off the internet during Shabbat Leon?
Jonathan Lunn
You are really irritating. Having mass immigration of dumb, uneducated people from other countries doesn’t boost our economy. It crushes peoples wages and stop young people and poor people from ever having a good income to get ahead in life.
A Romanian, Polish or German person can get on a plane, come to the UK and within a mouth have a National Insurance card and be claiming benefits, using the NHS and even be eligible for a council house. But my Filipina friend, who is a nurse and speaks perfect English, loves English culture and TV programmes and has grown up listening to British music, if she wanted to come to the UK she would have to pay £900, be sponsored by someone, and she can’t claim NHS or benefits for 2 years. We let in dumb Eastern Europeans but block educated people from other parts of the world from coming here. It’s disgusting. We don’t need loads of cheap labour we have a million young people unemployed already.
Zippy
Sounds like JoeDM loves the NHS enough to want to save it from the massive increase in demand from unfettered open-doors immigration, and probably also wants to protect both the green belt and the urban environment from imillions more immigrants who all need homes to live in, who fill our schools with children who can’t even understand English or are even culturally opposed to the teacher and basic subjects like science, art, music and religious studies that include other religions than their own, and will further jam up the packed transport infrastructure until it totally grinds to a halt.
Not wanting to limit the number and quality of arrivals is admitting a desire to intentionally overpopulate this island until it too resembles a third world wasteland and an Islamic state. We must secure the border now and reverse Islamic immigration or we will lose all of the things that you and I presumably both hold dear, not least of which is to ensure that our own mothers, wives, sisters and daughters will never face enslavement and rape in the coming decades at the hands of homegrown Islamists from among our muslim populations (and I stress ISLAMISTS who obey Muhammad’s orders to fight and kill or enslave disbelievers everywhere, not the moderate so-called muslims who don’t know or choose to ignore those commands from Allah).
The alternative is to remain blase about immigration and border control and just assume that it could never happen here, which sounds like your position on this imminent crisis we all face.