The government is naming 27 areas which it says need intensive support because of pressure from recession, migration and social change.Oh oh! And just where are these benighted places?
Here’s a list:
North West: Blackburn with Darwen, Cheshire West & Chester, Cumbria and Liverpool
North East: Sunderland and Gateshead
Midlands: Birmingham, Stoke, Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln
South West: Poole, N Somerset and Swindon
South/London: Milton Keynes, Bexley, Bromley and Barking and Dagenham
East: Broxbourne and King's Lynn
Yorks/Humber: North Lincolnshire
Something familiar about all those places. Can’t quite put my finger on it…
Communities Secretary John Denham said the areas would be targeted to help residents understand they had not been forgotten by decision-makers.Ah, right. Not ‘targeted to help them’, targeted to ‘help them understand’…
The BBC's home editor Mark Easton said: "The 100 areas have been identified as disengaged and alienated with a sense of resentment and prone to exploitation by the far right."Aha! That was what I couldn’t quite put my finger on!
The areas, some as small as a housing estate, have been identified from economic data, broader measures of what local people think and analysis from local officials.Really? Not just by looking at those seats with large BNP surges in local voting, then?
In all cases, existing funding and regeneration plans have not led to a change in perceptions.Rather than spend yet more wodges of taxpayer cash on pointless exercises, why not read a few blogs?
Mr Denham said £12m would be spent across the areas to work out exactly why people in these areas feel aggrieved and under pressure.
You could start with this one by Obsidian:
“Two of the things Labour have managed to do is destroy social mobility, and turn multiculturism into a collection of insular enclaves. Rather than keep mixing things, they've allowed society to settle into distinct strata, and in such conditions views and behaviours start to become entrenched.There, Mr Denham. That was easy, wasn’t it?
Worse, it makes spending decisions look questionable - if you spend money on an area, and that area is pretty monocultural it looks like favouritism regardless of whether it is or not. That breeds resentment.”
Some more? OK then:
“The benefits class and low-paid working classes are starting to get fed up with what they see as the Islamification of the UK, and the bourgeois middle classes ignore that at their peril. We're in dodgy economic times, and we're due another dip in the economy, and that's just going to engender more anger.”So rather than get your army of flunkies working out a way to further gloss over or spin this, how about actually doing something for those communities?
Oh, but of course. You don’t really see the problem, do you?
“The problem being that the people able to do anything about this exist in their own strata, alienated from those whose anger is bubbling away nicely, and so not really able to understand what the hell is going on.Quite.
From their rarified heights they see racism, they see people being unreasonable, what they don't see is how these people have reached these points and their day-to-day lives. They go off theory, and how they expect people to act - when the only Muslims you know are the very reasonable middle-aged doctors, lawyers and media luvvies earning a small fortune, it's hard to see the see the young, angry lost ones trapped between western temptation and imported cultural expectation earning pittance.”
We live in interesting times. I think they are about to get more interesting…
"Help"?
ReplyDeleteSo what will that be then? ANOTHER youth club for the bastards to burn down within days, like the LAST three they were "helped" with?
Another swingpark for them to wreck within minutes of the mayor leaving tthe opening cermony?
Two or three trees and a rose bush for them to rip up yet AGAIN?
MORE three month "job opportunitys" to brush out the council offices twice a week?
We have seen it before arseholes, some of us MANY times. You are all STILL full of bullshit.
Election coming is there?
My my NuLab have just noticed that the people they used to represent, no longer believe what they say & some are turning to other parties.
ReplyDeleteSteady on Von Spreuth, you nearly spilled the soup churn and it is all there is today.
ReplyDeleteThey've done this "forgotten white middle England" thing before. It's an attempt at winning votes away from other parties. They know white middle England is fed up with minorities getting all the attention and funding whilst they're being left to pick up the bill!
ReplyDeleteprone to exploitation by the far right.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there's any exploitation involved.
It wasn't for the good (snarf) rail link to Central London that the HQ of The National Front was in Bexley.
Hi Julia
ReplyDeleteI think you may have missed an important point here. Look up the meaning of the word 'sugging'.
Now look at that statement again..."Mr Denham said £12m would be spent across the areas to work out exactly why people in these areas feel aggrieved and under pressure".
£12m of tax payers money on 'research' (sugging) in the run up to elections.
Call me cynical... but I doubt that the Labour party is really undertaking research here. As you pointed out; people already know the reasons.
cheers
Cheers for the link! :)
ReplyDeleteI know Blackburn and parts of Stoke quite well, and they're armpits. Armpits with potential, and seething with resentment.
Stoke's a bit funny, wouldn't say prone to the far right, but they are fed up the three main parties acting as a bloc in that area, and they've been using the BNP as a protest vote.
Blackburns a little different, I had one of my more unusual hairstyles and was accosted by some daft old bat for being a 'Paki' until she saw my lilly-white face, and she then apologized. Lots of anger there, and when you go around nearby Nelson you can see why.
But I wouldn't say it was in danger of becoming a hotbed of racial hatred.
Darwen though, Darwen's weird. It's Lancashires version of Keighley, an odd place filled with fucking Morlocks.
Julia- keep an eye on the Wednesday Guardian in the coming weeks & months to see where exactly this £12 million will be spent.
ReplyDeleteI expect it will be on non jobs with titles like 'Community Engagement Officers'. Their brief will be to preach the virtues of multiculturalism to the deluded masses.Labour party activists will doubtless be encourage to apply for these posts. And they will all be on short fixed term contracts, probably expiring in late 2010 (ie after the election!).
How very odd £12 million spent on traditional Labour supporting areas to combat the "far right"
ReplyDeleteProblem being the "far right" aka the BNP are very much to the left of Labour which is why they're losing votes. This is just a desperate bribe to stave off impending electoral oblivion by Labour using taxpayers money to support what used to be their own voting base.
traditional Labour supporting areas
ReplyDeleteI don't think you can call Bexley and Bromley traditional Labour areas.
Old Bexley & Sidcup was Ted Heath's constitiuency for like forever and then top trougher Derek Conway ( even then a tory will walk it next year).
Bexleyheath & Crayford elected a Labour MP in 1997 in the wave of Tory hatred, but got rid of him in 2005, when they realised with what contempt Labour showed for the South East in general and saw all the money going elsewhere.
I'm from Swindon, and find it odd that its on the list. Generally speaking the economy is fairly good here - despite being hit by the Honda shutdown etc, unemployment here is still well below average.
ReplyDeleteI can't see much evidence of BNP activity either, and its got a Tory council too, so its not a case of funnelling cash to Labour councils.
Swindon's a bit of a back water really, a place to do business, a dormitory for commuters etc, but no great shakes in itself. But not some sort of downtrodden, immigrant over-run, ex industrial area either.
Hey - Julia. Fancy bidding for this and splitting the 12 mil?
ReplyDeleteJust looks rather like a list of potential Labour marginals to me.
ReplyDelete"So what will that be then? ANOTHER youth club for the bastards to burn down within days, like the LAST three they were "helped" with?"
ReplyDeleteNothing do concrete (if temporary), I fear...
"I think you may have missed an important point here. Look up the meaning of the word 'sugging'."
Cool! What would they be selling, though?
"...keep an eye on the Wednesday Guardian in the coming weeks & months to see where exactly this £12 million will be spent.
I expect it will be on non jobs with titles like 'Community Engagement Officers'."
Ah. Maybe this?
"Hey - Julia. Fancy bidding for this and splitting the 12 mil?"
Yeah, why not? We could use immigrants to do the surveys - they'll work for peanuts! :)
Startled to see Nottingham on the list, I checked the details. Only Aspley warrants this special attention. From this I deduce that an area which is largely or substantially inhabited by white working class people (not a slum, not an underclass paradise, just an area that has changed very little in its ethnic makeup, down-at-heel, yes, utilitarian and out of the swing of the general zeitgeist), this is the kind of area which requires that special brand of help. And too many of 'em voted BNP, obviously.
ReplyDeleteI would suggest the researchers visit St Ann's, Hockley and the far reaches of Lenton. Gun and knife crime, extreme alienation from the society at large and bundles of multiculturalist council interventions.
I meanwhile write from a nice part of the city, a rather pleasing melting pot of nations, and only the white working class youth get pi**ed in the park at night.
"Gun and knife crime, extreme alienation from the society at large and bundles of multiculturalist council interventions."
ReplyDeleteAmazing how those always go together without actually solving anything, isn't it?