Immigration: nothing to see here

And so, after another mindless stabbing of an innocent child, this one in Leicester Square, the police clamp down on the identity of the assailant.

Before pictures become available, there is much social media speculation as to his ethnicity but, when a video is posted by a member of the public, it turns out to be a white man. One notorious race grifter then starts crowing: “Alot (sic) of racists suddenly silent”.

Possibly because the attack was in such a public place, with so many witnesses, it is pointless for the police to play their usual games of “going dark” to let the furore abate, before going to court whence the assailant’s details are released.

Thus, with commendable speed, the case comes to court and his identity revealed. The assailant is Ioan Pintaru, a 32-year-old Romanian citizen of no fixed address. The charges were read to him through an interpreter so one must assume that his grasp of English is poor.

Immediately, the Metropolitan Police intervened on social media, with the message: “Media and the public are strongly reminded that this is an active case. Nothing should be published, including on social media, which could prejudice future court proceedings”.

At first sight, this is a blanket prohibition, preventing further speculation and the police do nothing to elaborate on the restrictions, leaving the reader to guess what might, or might not, prejudice future court proceedings.

This, however, should not preclude the asking of general public policy questions such as why Pintaru is in the country, when he entered, and why – given that he is “of no fixed abode”, and presumably unemployed – he hasn’t been deported.

In the circumstances, such questions might be an entirely valid contribution to the debate on immigration – and especially if this is yet another Home Office failure – but the very last thing the establishment wants is a public discussion on this topic.

This is especially so in the case of the Guardian which recruits Indian-heritage race grifter, May Goodfellow, to come up with a piece headed: “We keep hearing about ‘legitimate concerns’ over immigration. The truth is, there are none”.

From her sub-title, we then see that Goodfellow’s thesis is that: “Immigrants aren’t to blame for a society designed to benefit the wealth – and it’s time Labor started telling the public so”, a weary straw man argument that manages to skirt round just about every substantive argument on immigration.

Expanding on her theme in the text, she tells us that concerns about immigration are demonstrably not legitimate. People who arrive in the UK aren’t to blame for an economy designed to benefit the richest while exploiting and abandoning the poorest.

Citing a Migration Observatory study, she then argues that immigration is not a significant causal factor of low wages and it is not why people have insecure jobs.

Those, in themselves, are debatable arguments, but Goodfellow isn’t interested in debate. Instead, she moves from one polemical point to another. “Anti-immigrant feeling isn’t a natural, inevitable reaction to change either”, she asserts.

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