Finnish Prime Minister Alexsander Stubb continues to surprise us. This time he proposed giving the UK, or Prime Minister David Cameron, ‘a medal’ for immigration. Taking into account how Cameron sees himself threatened by the UKIP and how he’s caved in to anti-immigration and anti-EU rhetoric, the distinction proposed by Stubb is odd to say the least.
Cameron’s anti-immigration rhetoric is nothing new.
One of the matters that becomes clear in Martin Barker’s The New Racism (1981) is that the same anti-immigration sound bites are used today. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher claimed before the 1979 general election on BBC Radio 4 that Britain was being ‘swamped’ by immigrants and alien cultures.
Remember when Cameron warned how Britain was going to be swamped by Bulgarians and Romanians that on January 1, 2014? Such claims were totally false.
Why do politicians make such irresponsible statements that victimize whole groups? Is it because they lack backbone and seek political gains at any cost? Is it because immigrants and minorities are easy targets to bully publicly?
Read full story here.
I never could understand how a country that was a colonial and imperialist power like the UK is so touchy about immigration. Since Cameron is into populist anti-immigration rhetoric, certainly we can make a case for the abuse of hundreds of millions of people under colonialism. What about its complicity in the slave trade?
Whatever happened to that Subb before the 2011 parliamentary elections, when he took a strong stand against the xenophobia, racism and ignorance gripping the debate on immigration and immigrants in Finland?
Should we give the Finnish prime minister ‘a medal’ for forgetting that intolerance and populist anti-immigration rhetoric, parroted by Cameron, have little to do with our Nordic values?