A terrible fortnight full of shallow populism

What a long way, in politics, a few foreigners will get you. Last week in Bournemouth, the day after Gordon Brown’s big speech, I stopped off in a newsagent. The local paper carried a big front-page headline – something like MIGRANT DANGER – which topped a story about bad Eastern European drivers killing everybody. The young woman at the counter, with her high cheekbones and soft accent, was obviously a migrant from somewhere Slavic, but she somehow managed to sell me a magazine and a flapjack without either of us suffering.

It was a minor irony, of course. I am sure that she wouldn’t have felt targeted by the article, any more than she might have been by Julie Spence, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, seemingly blaming migrants for overburdening her force with demands for translation – or the rash of “Migrant Assaults Child” yelps that accompanied the tale from Chatham of the Slovakian mother who set about a junior Ku Klux Klan tormentor with the sort of peremptory dispatch that many regret the police no longer using.

That’s the mood that the parties are catching, and that’s why the word “foreigner” as a term suggesting both threat and blame, has become almost fashionable. Foreigners, said the PM, would get ID cards first, would be expelled if they had guns or sold drugs, would be asked to play by the rules and to learn English. “Wealthy foreigners”, we were told by the BBC news yesterday, would pay for the abolition of stamp duty for first-time housebuyers under plans announced at the Tory party conference.

There is a constituency in this country – one that often writes to me – that was well represented by Lord Tebbit when he was wrote in the latest edition of The Spectator. He wondered why – in this anarchic shambles of a country in which teachers are routinely assaulted in classrooms, illiteracy is rising, where “foreigners” have even taken our doctors’ jobs (gaining access to our quivering, vulnerable bodies) and all is debt, profligacy and woe – the Tories were trailing the treacherous new Labour architects of dystopia.