- Joe Priestley

The establishment right and immigration

Sir Max Hastings - clapped-out Tory

I’ve read a couple of Max Hastings’ books, Victory in Europe (1992) and Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-5 (2004), and they were interesting enough reads, but he lacks the ‘unputdownableness’ of such writers as David Irving and Antony Beevor. Hastings is a journalist turned historian. He comes over as a bit of a stuffed shirt, or maybe my impression of him is coloured by his pompous and self-satisfied air, and his over-the-top plummy accent that betrays a too-privileged background.

Sir Max Hastings is an establishment man through and through. Privately educated at Charterhouse School followed by Oxford University and a career in the media, he made his name on the back of the Parachute Regiment in the 1982 Falklands war where he became the first man with the task force to enter Port Stanley. For this he received a couple of journalism awards, and the rest, as they say, is history.

After ten years as Editor and then Editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, in 1996 he edited the Evening Standard until his retirement in 2001. He was knighted in 2002. He currently subsidises his pension with occasional comment articles for the Daily Telegraph and more frequently for the Daily Mail.

Class warrior

Hastings’ conceit comes over in almost every article he writes, particularly those that appear in the Mail. You see Hastings is like the rest of the establishment ‘right’, they both want their cake and eat it too - and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the issue of immigration. The title of his latest comment page piece (Daily Mail 30/03/06) says it all: ‘Immigration - the left perceives a prospect of destroying for ever a traditional middle class white Britain which they hate and despise.’

That’s Hastings and the Mail through and through - they only ever half argue the case. It’s not that the left hates traditional middle class white Britain, or even that it hates traditional Britain; it’s that it hates traditional white Britain because it stands in the way of the multiracial utopia. Hastings and the Mail are so utterly gutless (or is it deceitful?) that rather than speaking the truth about immigration and race and their impact on the British people they prefer to hide behind the outmoded concept of class struggle. As if it’s a matter of left and right! If he’d shown as little nous during the Falklands conflict Max Hastings would be stumbling around Goose Green still, dressed in fatigues and wondering where the hell everyone had gone.

The evidence tells us that the establishment despises traditional white working class Britain even more than it does its middle class equivalent - politicians invariably choose white middle class neighbourhoods to set up home rather than the working class areas that their immigration policies have devastated. Yet Hastings bleats on about the middle class plight and how the left aims to do it down.

You see, Hastings and the Mail have nothing but contempt for the British working class, “Few people doubt that we need some immigration, not least to do jobs the British no longer care for.”

What Hastings means is that British working class people won’t do what immigrants will do for the price immigrants are prepared to do it - or rather what the likes of Hastings are prepared to pay. He doesn’t want a working class, he wants a serf class, and whether it consists of white British people or sub-Saharan Africans is of no concern to him and his ilk. The great historian is so transfixed by the events of 20th century Europe that he’s unable to work out what effect the destruction of the ‘white working class’ by mass third world immigration will have on his ‘white middle class’. So much for this great conservative intellect.

For and againstIt’s the same old establishment story - a barrel of contradictions. You can’t make any sense of it. Hastings argues both for immigration and against it. He is for it to maintain his place in the establishment, and he’s against it to maintain his conservative credentials. What dithering cowardice.

“Many menial and manual jobs are being done by immigrants because no amount of money will induce us to do them.” Get that, “no amount of money” - have you ever read anything so damned stupid in all of your life? And in any case, immigrants don’t do useful ‘menial and manual’ jobs - how often do you see them emptying the bins or sweeping the streets.

“Without foreign nurses, the NHS would grind to a halt, because our own people do not want to care for the sick and old.” Is this man a thinker or a parrot? Aren’t you just sick of hearing this worn out pro-immigration mantra? It’s about time the Lib, Lab, and Con set got themselves a new CD.

No job vacancy will remain unfilled if the money is right; it’s odd isn’t it that people like Hastings who worship at the altar of market forces can’t grasp this simple fact. And yet no doubt he’d be quick to quote the workings of the market place to justify the vast sums the Telegraph and Mail pay him.

His thinking about the NHS is just as shallow. Thousands of trained white British nurses are unable to find work because so many of NHS jobs have been filled by foreign nurses. He cites no evidence to back up his argument that we don’t want to care for our own sick and elderly - but whatever it is, doesn’t the surplus of trained nurses over job vacancies rubbish it?

I’m just waiting for someone to argue that because such a high proportion of immigrants are unemployed we need immigrants to do the jobs immigrants won’t do. Or that we need immigrant nurses because immigrants place a disproportionate demand on our health service and they need to be treated by people of their own culture and ethnicity - all in the cause of equality you know. Remember you read it here first.

What Hastings wants

Immigrants tend to vote Labour and that’s what irks Hastings and the Mail. If they voted Tory you can bet your last penny the Tories would be calling for open borders, with the only proviso that the immigrant hoards should be compelled to stay away from leafy middle class suburbs.

But as it is, the ‘right’ tells us we don’t need millions of (Labour voting) immigrants, but that we do need some, “.Polish decorators, Nigerian nurses and parking wardens, Pakistani office cleaners, because without these newcomers our public services and some of our private ones would grind to a halt,” bleats Hastings.

The man is a fool. If we’re short of decorators, which I doubt, then will not market forces remedy the situation? When demand outstrips supply price increases and attracts newcomers to the market which equalises demand with supply and reduces prices - that’s how the market works so we’re told. But just like the rest of the establishment, ‘left’ and ‘right’, Hastings prefers the short term fix and to hell with the future.

Why import Nigerian nurses when so many of our own nurses are unemployed? To turn Hastings’ idiotic argument around, what makes Nigerian nurses prefer to look after our sick and elderly rather than look after their own? Pay and conditions Mr Hastings, pay and conditions. Improve our nurses’ pay and conditions and any shortage in supply that exists will evaporate as people choose nursing over other careers. The argument applies to traffic wardens - it’s simple really, but apparently it’s too complicated for Tories to comprehend. Or is it that it’s all too easy for them to understand and that what they are really concerned about is cheap immigrant labour as an alternative to paying white British people what the job is worth?

And as for importing Pakistanis so they can clean our offices; the unemployment rate for Pakistanis in Britain is about 30%, need I say more?

The only difference between the establishment right and the establishment left is the pace of immigration that they favour. The left want to rush it along so that they can retain power forever (or so they fool themselves), whereas the right favours a more gradual approach - just high enough to provide a ready source of cheap labour and thus keep wages down. In the long run both amount to the same thing, the destruction of British culture and the British people.

Is this what Sir Max Hastings wants, or is it that he’s too cowardly to face reality because if he did he just might have to change tack - and that wouldn’t do his reputation any good, would it?

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