In reply to cragtaff:
> With Mr Corbyn declaring that the UK does not have too many immigrants he just about seals the fate of Labour under his leadership.
There are two things that are basically doing my head in about British politics at the moment.
The first is that we don't have a clear leftist voice standing up and saying, "look, we've all been told that people have legitimate concerns about immigration, but immigration isn't really the issue. People are legitimately concerned that they can't get a council house, but the problem isn't that they're all being given to immigrants, it's because the Tories sold them all off. People are legitimately concerned that there are no jobs for them to do, but that's not because the jobs are being taken by immigrants, it's because the Tories are starving regional economies of investment and letting them stagnate and fester. People are legitimately concerned about the waiting list for a hip operation, but that's not because there are too many immigrants, it's because despite being one of the richest societies on Earth, we won't pay the taxes to fund the health service that we need. And what we're going to do isn't to pull up the drawbridge and shut ourselves off, but we're going to grasp the nettle and raise taxes and borrow where necessary (gasp!) and build the council houses and invest in the infrastructure and build the health service and the education system that, as a country, we can and should have."
I don't expect everyone to agree with all this, by the way, but it does seem like it's at least a coherent political position which addresses the "legitimate concerns" of the white working class without buying into the idea that immigration is the root of all our problems. And it feels like a really obvious position to take.
The second thing that does my head in is the idea that actually people are saying all that stuff and are getting ignored because when you get down to it, a lot of us are nasty little xenophobes who'd rather blame foreigners for stuff than take responsibility for ourselves.