I live in a small town in Suffolk and like you, enjoyed the county council election circus on Thursday. I say enjoyed as if I mean it - I don't. And thanks to 995 closet racists in denial we now have a UKIP councillor "representing" our town.
Through speaking to the locals I learnt they were going to vote UKIP on Thursday just "for a change" or "to see what someone else can do". All of them, bar none, told me they were not going to vote Tory this time; they were going to vote UKIP. They made the usual references to sorting "that lot out" meaning the Polish and Portuguese immigrants and smiled at me, expecting me to do the same. I am in a position where I cannot state my political preferences in my day to day work, so I suck up the ignorant comments whilst gently steering the conversation towards safer ground.
And to be fair I can understand why they might feel the way they do. The town has changed over the years and is no longer the isolated little England they once knew, or so they think. In fact there has been a Polish population here since the end of the Second World War when ex-servicemen settled. It is predominantly a bungalow town and being Suffolk the landscape is flat, making it easy to walk to the local shops and stop to talk to one another in the market square. It all sounds idyllic, and compared to south London where I grew up, it is. I think it is fair to say Suffolk people don't like change and they don't like to be rushed.
And we suffer incidences of vandalism and burglary the same as anywhere else, albeit to a much lesser degree, but locals are quick to assume the vandal or car thief must be a foreigner. In fact since moving here I have observed the worst behaviour coming from the "London overspill" but that's another story.
The Poles and Portuguese are labelled "them" with white English being "us". I'm an incomer myself and it took a good while to ingratiate myself with the community I can tell you. Folk here are insular, (although once you get to know them they are easy going, funny and rather kind). I have heard of people moving in from Norfolk 20 or 30 years ago and still only being tolerated, never fully accepted. If there is little hope for me becoming one of "us", what hope is there for the Eastern Europeans?
So now we have a UKIP councillor representing "our" interests. What this person will do to sort things out remains to be seen but I suspect nothing will come of it; he is thankfully a lone voice on the council at the moment. What worries me is the fact these people voted UKIP in the first place.
The human capacity for stupidity will never cease to amaze me!
ReplyDeleteIt shows that they lack a basic understanding that politics is the centre of our lives, they run our services, they make the laws and they keep the poor down.
If you went into hospital for brain surgery and were told Dr Lifesaver or Mr Brainexpert would be operating you wouldn't say:
"No, wait just a cotton picking minute. Let's have it done by Jeff the janitor, I fancy seeing what someone else can do with it, I fancy a change!"
So why do it with a decision just as important.
The morons march on and the power brokers line their nests.
A bad day in the bat cave :-(
It's truly astonishing how very little thought goes into making these decisions. They vote for someone else, just because he's someone else. No political analysis or thought for the consequences of their actions.
ReplyDelete