Jean-Marie Le Pen (?sp) hasn't become President of France. Now most people would agree that that's a good thing. He was clearly racist, but apparently there are a lot of people out there who agree with his sentiments. Admittedly the choice was made harder due to the opposition being Jacques Chirac, who would have had to go to prison if he hadn't stayed President! French politics, eh? Not that us Brits can talk, not really. Sleaze and all. :-)

There was a lot of anti British National Party stuff in the papers last week - all because of the local goverment elections. I'm not completely sure what different voting in those elections actually makes. Okay, so if you know someone was a good councillor then by all means, vote for them again, but otherwise? We had two leaflets dropped through our door, and there wasn't much to choose between them. It's not like they get to make any exciting new policies. I don't think local government has much power, really. But the British National Party thing was worrying.

I just noticed that the BNP website I linked to is a rather biased anti BNP one. But amusing. I think the Hitler moustache might be a tad over the top, but..! This is the real BNP website. If anyone cares. :-)

Anyway, they're racist too, to put it bluntly. And they have the same main argument as Le Pen - immigration is bad. Now, for a country whose entire history is full of immigration, from cavemen crossing over from the continent to Saxons to Normans and so on, it seems odd to suddenly say immigration is bad. I can see why they say that, but for the first time in history immigration is giving us a chance to help people we hear about on the news. People fleeing from wars, for example. How to tell who really needs asylum and who's just trying to get a better way of life in the affluent west is the problem. And even then, denying people the chance to have what we take for granted seems mean.

To start with news coverage was on the side of those people. It showed us how terrible the plight of people from Eastern Europe was. People caught up in terrible wars that we were involved with - peacekeeping and the like. But over time people started to say that these people weren't really fleeing from warzones, rather they were just on the scrounge.

Can we afford to help these people? Can we afford not to?

It's a tough one...