Oh, the plucky foreigners! How jolly!

Comrade Reuben at the brilliant ThirdEstate.net had a wonderfully scornful piece on Yasmin Alibhai-Brown the other week, which is well worth a read. He also referred to a supposedly dispassionate little reality-doc about immigration (hosted by goggle-eyed economics monster Evan Davies), that turned out to be an hour long vindication of the middle class view that the underclass aren't pulling their weight.

In the dock is the sort of pro-immigrant statement that is actually a subtle attack on our own (white) working class. A classic example: "Oh, we Brits are so uncultured; why can't we be more like the wonderful French?". Who, exactly, is 'we'? This person is not referring to themselves at all; they actually mean: "Well, I'm actually quite cultured, but everyone else should be more like the French". Quite objectionable, I'm sure you'll agree.

From Reuben's article:

It is something of a commonplace amongst middle class liberals praise the work ethic of immigrants in relation to the more dissolute Brits (this is rarely true self-deprecation, when they talk of “the English” they mean the lower orders, not themselves).

What follows is a brilliant, line by line fisking of Alibhai-Brown's silly response to the aforementioned Davies program, in which she cited her rich husband as an authority on working class opinion, and tried to associate herself with the toiling masses by outlining her completely voluntary work at a friend's restaurant.

It's good stuff.

So I sent him this little gem from Lucy Managan's review (in the Grauniad) of the same program. It is unbelievable, and I quote the last paragraph in full:

"You looked in vain for a glimmer of shame or embarrassment in any of them, but came up emptyhanded. You could try to tell yourself that their attitudes masked the insecurities that come with unemployment, and at times Davies bent over backwards to put a better gloss on their behaviour: at one point, he tried to suggest to the farm owner that availability of foreign labour had made employers lazy when it came to ‘coaxing and motivating’ local workers. But it was hard not to suspect, as you watched the infuriating dozen, stunned by the prospect of physical labour, resentful of any advice, childish and utterly unmotivated by the presence of a television crew or the knowledge that even their greatest perceived sufferings would be over within 48 hours, that the natives might just be revolting."

These 'infuriating dozen' were white working class men, some of whom had been out of work for two years, competing with Poles who had been at various jobs for quite a while. According to Managan, when a man has been out of work for that time, and is asked to spend hours bent double, skewering stalks of asparagus with a screwdriver in the hot sun, being outdone by younger men - for the minimum wage - he should be grateful.

Reuben takes her apart in this piece. It's very good.