In my post on Greece yesterday, I came in for withering fire over my statement about elections. OK, that’s an exaggeration. I’m often surprised at what gets the attention of readers in my posts, but also in stuff I read on various sites. The comments sections have become the place where you can take the temperature of that portion of the reading public with similar interest to your own.

Anyway, the objection is that elections are not about problem solving and I can see the point. Often elections are nothing more than beauty contests. When writing that post I was looking at elections as an ongoing process. Individually they may be meaningless, but string a few together and you have a meaningful series that reflects the attempts by a society to solve a problem.

Still, that leaves the other objection, which is that current elections are not addressing the important problems. The country is being overrun by foreigners and the pols debate trivial changes to the tax code or how they look better in a blue suit than the other guys. In America, the 2016 election will have little to say about immigration, even though the public is concerned about it. In the UK, the only guy talking immigration is dismissed as a racist.

That last bit really did not resonate with me until I looked up some polling on immigration in the UK. In the US, the numbers have been creeping up, but immigration is still low on the list of issue important to voters. Americans are still far more concerned with the economy and the general chaos in Washington, than immigration issues.In the UK, immigration is the top issue. It’s not just the top worry, it is the top worry of most people.

The people in charge of Britain, however, are doing everything they can to keep the topic out of the election. So much so that the BBC stacked the audience during the last debate in an attempt to discredit Nigel Farage.

He will take audience questions in a 30-minute programme called Election 2015: Ask Nigel Farage.

The discussion, held in Birmingham, will air after the News at 10 and will be chaired by journalist Jo Coburn.

It will be held at the same time as a Question Time special featuring the Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders who will take turns answering questions from the same audience in Leeds.

A Ukip insider raised questions over the timing of the announcement from the BBC amid a growing bias storm engulfing the broadcaster.

It earlier emerged that Thursday’s debate featuring the leaders of “challenger” parties had an audience where just ONE THIRD leaned towards the political right.

The Ukip leader was booed on the programme when he suggested the make-up of the BBC election debate audience was left wing “even by the left-wing standards of the BBC”.

Host David Dimbleby even insisted the audience had been “carefully chosen” by independent polling organisation ICM to represent the balance between all parties.

But when the make-up of audience members was finally revealed it showed that nearly 70 per cent were left wing.

Think about the people who would risk a scandal in order to get a few more jeers at the UKIP candidate. There’s a level of fanaticism here that goes beyond the normal partisanship. UKIP is not going to win the election. They are taking a bigger bite out of the Tories than the even more leftist parties. Strategically, UKIP is serving the interests of the BBC types. Yet, they cannot stop themselves from attacking UKIP.

The question, of course, is why? Immigration should be no more emotionally fraught than zoning ordinances or garbage collection budgets. It is just another policy that free people must administer. But it isn’t to the people in the charge. Flooding their nations with foreigners has become a holy mission and those who oppose them deserving of the worst they can throw at them.

Immigration, of course, is tied to citizenship. Limits on immigration mean there are benefits to citizenship, which means there is such a thing called a citizen and that’s become the greatest taboo in Western societies. The idea that people are citizens and their government is obligated to protect their interests is a heresy amongst the ruling classes. They no longer see themselves bound to their host countries and the people of those countries.

That’s why immigration may be our greatest taboo now. In the UK, the people in charge desperately want to fold the country into the amorphous blob of Europe. The far less sophisticated rulers of America imagine themselves ruling over it all. The fact that the people may not be willing to go along with it makes the need to sacralize the immigrant and demonize the nativist.