The growing protests by groups of workers over the use of foreign labour is evidence perhaps that working people, battered into submission for years by a contemptuous governmental, cultural and media establishment, are finally turning. Enough, they are saying, is enough.
Against a surreal - and indeed, obscene - background which has workers imported from Europe keeping their heads down in massive floating hotels, British workers are tentatively and, indeed, in a very orderly way, questioning quite how such a situation has been allowed to arise and indeed accepted as the norm.
In today's Times, Janice Turner is spot on:
"Many will dismiss the protests at the Lindsey oil refinery as evidence of the meat-headed ignorance and default racism of our white working class... In 2007, when Gordon Brown announced that he would be “drawing on the talents of all to create British jobs for British workers”, I was lambasted by friends and colleagues, even called a BNP stooge, for agreeing. Because I interpreted his words to mean that it is amoral to leave an idle British underclass to rot on sink estates just because the CBI finds it cheaper to employ young, willing Eastern European graduates than give Britain's poor training and hope...Some who would call me racist have themselves the most hateful, almost eugenic disgust for the white working class: the chavs, the pikeys, the Tennants-swilling pram-faces and hoodies whom they mock and fear."
That disgust Turner talks about permeates much of the cultural establishment, which is in all essentials the PR/window-dressing wing of the political class.
But contrary to what the political class might think, ordinary people are not stupid.
They were always sceptical about claims that the 'amazing economic dynamism' of the past ten years was soley due to mass immigration, and the 'free flow' of workers. They have taken the implied insult with remarkable good humour, just as they have seen - indeed have experienced on a daily basis- how the massively increased outlay required of our public services has cancelled out any real benefits.
It was always, of course, a spectacular lie. And as we learn that Britain is likely to have the worst recession of all the major economies, those who propagated the argument, and squashed any opposition to it, have gone remarkably quiet. Let's hope it is out of shame.
