Sometimes politics writes its own jokes. This week’s news, for example, that Pauline Hanson, who built her political career in Australia on a virulent anti-immigration policy, is herself to migrate to England would seem to belong to the world of satire. Her announcement that she is moving to this country in search of “peace and contentment” is the perfect punchline.
Hanson’s brutalist stand against Asian immigrants and in favour of cutting help for the Aboriginal culture once played well to Australians, many of whom, to put it mildly, have a robust attitude in these matters. When asked of the terrible dangers of multiculturalism, they tend to point, with unmistakeable smugness, to what has happened in the UK.
Yet it is Britain which Hanson has chosen for her new home. She loves our culture, she says. Australia is no longer a place for go-getters. The government there is full of toadies. There is over-regulation. Taxes are too high.
One has to take compliments wherever one can find them these days. Welcome, Pauline Hanson, to multicultural Britain, the land of opportunity.
Independent, Wednesday, 17th February 2010
