Here’s a great line from a piece in the Guardian about the BNP’s campaign in Barking and Dagenham:
And there [Nick Griffin] is, like a Bond villain relocated to the set of the Royle Family
But here’s a very strange paragraph:
Margaret Thatcher’s Right To Buy scheme changed things for ever, though only once former tenants sold up and moved on. As that happened, thousands of ex-council houses contributed to the cheapest rental market in London, drawing more and more of the economic migrants who now keep so much of the city running. The borough was thus transformed from a largely white community where abundant accommodation ensured that extended families lived within doors of each other, to a multi-coloured milieu in which people at the sharp end had to compete for scarce supplies of just about everything: decent jobs, adequate schools and, most of all, somewhere to live. The result: a tinderbox, where issues get reduced to race and nationality.
So while the houses were in the control of the Council, foreigners could be kept out, but when housing moved to the free market, those pesky darkies started to flood in. Is that really what the writer meant to say?
I suspect, in his haste to blame Margaret Thatcher for Labour’s electoral weakness in the constituency, the implications of this paragraph escaped the author.
