Freeborn Adam

I don’t know if Gillian Duffy is a bigot or not. She is quoted as saying “You can’t say anything about the immigrants. All these eastern Europeans what [sic] are coming in – where are they flocking from?” to Gordon Brown. To me, that reads as an elderly woman with anxieties about immigration. Now I think those anxieties are utterly unfounded, but I also want to live in a pluralistic society where people are understood and accepted as having differing opinions and concerns. So, if she were willing to talk about her anxieties, I would be willing to discuss them and put forward arguments that aimed to allay those fears.

But what does our Prime Minister, the leader of our elected (and supposedly representative) government do? Goes and gets himself recorded calling this woman a bigot behind her back.

I live in a constituency that a few years ago had 25% of those who voted in the council elections voting for a BNP candidate. 25%. 1in 4. Now I walk through the streets, go into the shops, visit the park with these people every day and it is not easy to dismiss them all as bigots. Most of them are normal every day folk who have anxieties about the world they see around them. And no one in main stream politics is taking those anxieties seriously. Taking them seriously does not mean agreeing with them, it means not dismissing them simply because you disagree with them. Because the alternative is disenfranchisement, and creates a society where those who disagree with the government are “dissident”. Disenfranchised dissidents prove fertile soil for minority extremist parties who promise to lend an ear to those concerns.

All it would take is for politicians to acknowledge opinions and feelings within the electorate that are contrary to their own. Why is that such an unreasonable thing to expect?

Addendum: The point I am trying to make is that the problem stems from an approach to politics that discards and devalues difference, that only surrounds itself with like thinking, complacent in the belief that it is “right” thinking. It is NOT acceptable in my opinion to lazily vote for a party like the BNP that appeals to your baser fears… this post is not an apologist post for BNP voters. But nor is it acceptable for those in power with the responsibility of representing the elctorate to marginalise swathes of that electorate because they express opinions that you might find uncomfortable. It is also dangerous.