Political Scare Tactics

According to the picture in this blog post, "29 million Romanians and Bulgarians will gain the right to live, work and draw benefits here" with the UKIP being the only group apparently taking this threat seriously. I understand that all political parties will have used sensationalist scare tactics like this in the past, but for an emerging party such as the UKIP I would have expected a little better. Also, are all 29 million really going to come over here in one fell swoop? There are a few here already, and if I'm being honest I'm sure our doors have been open since 2007 anyway.

I'm not going to get into an argument about the rights and wrongs of immigration, its far too big a subject for me to be able to even try to put something together, so I'll stick to my core point. Scary and threatening supposition made by posters such as the above might make short term gains, but its the wider/other policies that will keep the voters. If you are a UKIP supporter then please don't be offended by what I'm saying, but the party started out as a single issue which was Europe. They went through a stage of having to quickly think up of a lot of policies, some of which at first seemed a little crazed to many. Some perhaps still do, but even I have to admit that many of their current policies are not that bad.

The trouble is the way they are put across, using such posters as above is very scary to me at least. It worries me that there are people in the UK who will get excited and giddy when seeing something like the above. Yes I concede that immigration can be a serious issue, but are you not wary about being considered as a possibly touch racist, in that the poster above is the good end of the spectrum of what I'm sure gets worse down the line (though not just with the UKIP). I feel a genuine shame about living in the UK sometimes, and I really do wonder why many of us are such xenophobes. Just think about how many British citizens are living abroad, if we are to bar immigrants from certain countries, should be not bring back all our ex-pats too? Many of the Polish folk who came over in 2004 are net contributors to the UK economy, and a lot of them are hard working folk, more so than some British people I have met.

I'll get a lot of people disagreeing with me over what I have said, and you are entitled to your opinion as much as I am. Yet all I will leave you with is a single thought. Whatever your views on immigration, is there anyway you can put it across so it doesn't look quite as hateful; for all the Romanians and Bulgarians out of the 29 million who don't come over here, I still feel bad that they're going to think we are a country full of hateful bellends. It seems we have a massive problem at times with anyone who is foreign, yet we're quite happy to munch on Chinese & Indian takeaways, Italian pizza, Mexican (Chiquito), Portuguese (Nando's) and even the humble chip from McDonalds (French Fries).