british jobs for polish workers

Even though postal workers elsewhere have refused to deliver it, round here the British National Party leaflet has come through the door.

British Jobs For British Workers - Because We've Earned The Right
Trafalgar - The Somme - Dunkirk - D-Day - The Falklands

It's illustrated with the picture of a Spitfire in flight and the slogan Battle For Britain.



The Spitfire was the key to defending Britain in the Battle of Britain, the time in 1940 when the Nazis, who had so readily rolled into countries across Europe, were poised to invade.

It was a peculiar moment in history. The coin was flipped and came down in its edge, teetering. After the Germans were repelled, Nazi expansionism lost its sense of unstoppability, followed by the Soviet Union and USA joining the war, Allied victory becoming all but inevitable, and onwards to the death of the militarist colonial worldview.

But in June 1940, it could so easily have gone the other way. It's a decisive moment and the victory came down to such a small number of key people that it's possible to read a list of their names. Churchill saw this at the time and declared it with the line 'never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few'.

Those bold men, the pilots now known as The Few, weren't all British. Around 20 percent were foreign, mostly from the British empire and Europe. Had the British truly stood alone it could well have meant defeat and Nazi invasion. We were bolstered and, in all likelihood, saved by our immigrants.

Very few pilots were more experienced, and none fought more doggedly, than the great number of Poles. The Spitfire on the BNP leaflet has a red and white check on the nose just behind the propeller. This denotes that it's from a Polish squadron. Those pilots fought and many died. So if you're going to use Spitfires and the Battle of Britain as your measure of entitlement, the slogan should be British Jobs For Polish Workers - Because They've Earned The Right.

I'm genuinely struggling to see the link between the five military events named, except that they involved some British forces.

Trafalgar and the Falklands were victories, but Dunkirk was a retreat from a failed campaign and the Somme was the hideous pointless massacre of men for nothing at all. The first day of the Battle of the Somme saw 20,000 British men killed, sent slowly walking in lines laden with rucksacks towards machine guns that mowed them down like hay. They were joined in slaughter by large numbers of empire men, notably Canadians and Irish.

Still, as the BNP want the Gurkhas to stay out (their battles don't earn them 'the right' even though they actually fought, which most of us didn't personally do at Trafalgar) , presumably all the others who fought on the British side on the Somme don't count either.

So the list isn't about British victories or even British fights. There was an all-in-it-together spirit of the scrabbling retreat from Dunkirk, but that doesn't apply to the small professional force fighting in the anachronistic colonial afterecho of Thatcher's vanity project, the Falklands. The list is as confused and misplaced as the use of the Polish pilot.

Racists being stupid and historically inaccurate, whatever next.



'It's not racist to oppose mass immigration and political correctness'. That's debatable. It certainly is racist to ban people from joining your party because they're not white, though.

It's always difficult to know what is meant by political correctness. It's always a perjorative, people accuse you of it (usually with the suffix 'gone mad' to reinforce the wrongness without having to explain it). I've never heard anyone claim it for themselves.

It seems only to be used to denigrate measures that aim to improve equality and respect, to reclaim some kind of superiority that the speaker feels is threatened. It's that sense of superiority, of white supremacy, that underpins the BNP.



The 'doctor' is fake, a stock image from an American site if you search on "caring health professional". Still, let's deal with the sentiment.

I see what immigration is doing to our NHS.

Yes, so do I. On the front line, the NHS would collapse without the foreign nurses, people trained at foreign expense then imported here do do our low-level jobs.

A huge proportion of our recent immigrants are here to work. They are, in other words, an influx of younger people paying taxes as the NHS has to care for the ageing British population. They are making up the difference to save us, just as immigrant pilots did 70 years ago.

The leaflet talks of the injustice of 'fighting foreign wars'. As opposed to, er, foreign wars we're supposed to worship like Trafalgar, The Somme, Dunkirk, D-Day and the Falklands.

The soldier in the picture - the one person on the leaflet we know is really British - didn't actually say the quote attributed to him. He said that the BNP

are scumbags and I'd never vote for them in a million years.