Monday, December 03, 2007

That Morrissey row

I've stumbled upon the row over Morrissey's comments on immigration. I even went out and bought the NME for the first time in a long while to fully appreciate the context over his comments.

The interviewer, Tim Jonze, started asking about music, etc, but the subject of immigration came up. Bizarrely, he has asked for his name to be removed from the feature.

He says, in a nutshell, that he won't come back to live in England because it is "a terribly negative place". And that this is possibly because "Other countries have held on to their basic identity...England was thrown away..." as a result of uncontrolled immigration.

As if to re-iterate one of Morrissey's points, that this is a subject that dare not speak its name, the paper goes on to draw some fairly harsh conclusions likening him to the BNP, which is absurd.

My view: an out of touch popstar who exists in a rarified world tries to comment on a country he hasn't lived in for far too long (he uses Knightsbridge as an example, for God's sake). A paper which has always sought to occupy a moral high ground hasn't the maturity or the sense to grasp that and has thus defaulted to student-style politics and crude sloganeering.

There's a link here, to more hissy fitting from Morrissey's "people" and a strange legal threat that isn't a threat at all.

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