Aside from the provocative title, this article is actually pretty tame. I'm neither a BNP activist, nor a racist, not a xenophobe, nor an idiot, but I wanted your attention.
Mark Reckless is a candidate in tomorrows Rochester & Strood by-election and he answered a question a little bit poorly yesterday, during a hustings organised by ITV and 38 Degrees. He was asked, "what would happen to, the Polish plumber who lives in Rochester? Would he be able to stay, would he have to go back?" and his response was "Well I think in the near term, that we'd have to have a transitional period, and I think we should probably allow, people who are currently here, to have a work permit, at least for a fixed period".
Now the fact is, when you break this down, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with this. He's not talking about repatriating anyone as the left claims and as the media have been spouting all day, with this, he's talking about following the procedures laid out by UKIP immigration policy, which is taken from immigration policies that similar nations have, such as the USA, Canada, NZ, Australia, etc. Anyone who is not a citizen, is either a resident with a visa, a visitor on a work permit, or a visitor on a visitors permit. Either way, unless you're a resident of a citizen, you have no indefinite right to remain, you have a fixed period of time, where you are allowed to remain and if you have a work permit, you are allowed to work, during that time period. Once that time period is up, you re-apply, or you apply for residency, or if you've been in the country long enough (In most countries it's 5 years) you apply for citizenship. This is how it works and it's how it works for our immigrants from places other than the EU.
The questioner then decided to rephrase, with a ruffled brow and a lot more hand gesturing, just to make his point seem even more important, he says "Forgive me, if there's a plumber who's got a house, got a family, got kids at a local school, are you gunna deport him? And his family?" Now the problem Mark encountered here, is that he didn't respond to this question properly. What he said was "I think people who've been here a long time and integrated in that way, I think we'd want to look sympathetically at" and then tried to move on from the question to address the policy for new people coming in. What he should have done, is reacted in disgust at the questioner and pointed out, that should an existing Indian, Chinese, or Pakistani immigrants time limited visa or permit run out and they re-apply, we look at their situation and decide whether or not to renew that visa or permit, so why should this be any different for a Polish plumber?
Whichever way you try to spin it, Mark did not, under any circumstances say that people would be deported, the questioner said that and he implied that Mark had said it, even though Marks answer to the original question, was that we'd give them a visa or a permit for a limited time, which to me, considering they currently will have an EU passport and the current govt has no plans to make them all British citizens, is a fair response. At no point did he say, "And at the end of that time, we're going to deport him" he didn't even say "At the end of that time we'll consider whether to deport him or not", he never used the word deport, not even once, the questioner did.
As usual, this has been blown WAY out of proportion, but this time, they're all in on it. When the Guardian and the Daily Mail and the Mirror and Guido and the Telegraph are ALL running the same spin, on the same story, you can pretty much tell instantly, that it's a) anti-UKIP and b) it's bullshit.
You can watch a video of the small exchange here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30111694 It's the second video down.
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