Floundering Around

After the "events" of the last week or so, it is rather good to see normal politics resuming. Unfortunately, it's the same people involved, and none of them seem to have a decent grasp on the scale or nature of any Britain's problems:

The government is "floundering around" on UK immigration because it believes the issue is an "electoral liability", the shadow home secretary has said.

We've known this for a while. Labour sees the ethnic minority vote as "theirs", and therefore has a vested interest not only in not talking about immigration in any real way, but not doing anything about it either. That's why Phil Woolas, the Immigration Minister's talk about an "upper-limit" for the UK population is meaningless, and downright suspicious when he says that "there has to be a balance between the number of people coming in and the number of people leaving".

The shadow home secretary is attacking, yes, and not for the wrong reasons. But they're not all the reasons, nor the best ones. They talk of Britons getting "thorny" about losing jobs to foreigners, of overburdening infrastructure, etc. Well, quite. But no one yet seems prepared to admit that the real problem with immigration is a cultural one. That's because all of them, Labour or Conservative, believe it is an "electoral liability".

And no one seems prepared to turn around and remind everyone that these people can't keep out those from the EU, or those from outside the EU that managed to get in to another member-state.