Quite a number of you have been in touch since reading Saturday’s report in the Daily Mail which we wrote about in yesterday’s blog.
In particular, they drew attention to the way that views seem to be changing on immigration issues.
Council Leader Pete Bedford – in his only “proper” quote to appear – seems almost to have relegated the debate to trivial proportions.
He is reported to have told the Mail’s Robert Hardman: “One of the biggest issues is one of noise.
“Boston was always a quiet town and a lot of Eastern Europeans are not, shall we say, used to talking quietly. You walk round town and you hear these loud foreign voices everywhere.
“You go into the local doctor’s surgery and you have a lot of locals sitting quietly as a loud foreign voice tries to deal with the receptionist. So people think: ‘They’re taking over.’”
Yet this view coincides with the announcement in Boston Borough Council’s monthly good newsletter  that local efforts to tackle the challenges posed by population change have made “some dramatic moves forward” with a visit to Boston by members of an all-party  parliamentary committee from the House of  Commons to study the impact of population change.
Based on Councillor Bedford’s latest interpretation, what are we going to tell them?
If all we’re going to do is moan about the noise, we may as well spare them the bother  of making a visit.
Yet, in his New Year message published a year ago, Councillor Bedford told us: “We have continued to emphasise to the Government that Boston is a special case in terms of its rising population, and should have more support for the impact immigration has had on services.”
A government grant for the distribution of ear defenders, perhaps?
And message came not long after Councillor Bedford  and other council group leaders issued a joint call for action to help with Boston’s growing population … urging our MP Mark Simmonds – remember him? – to raise issues of the “significant impacts and strains” caused by the “rapid and significant” population change in the area over the past decade.
We know that the rising population and the pressures that it brings cause concerns, and that there is now a worry that things will start all over again when our borders are opened still wider next year.
But there have already been suggestions that political correctness might have affected the “evidence” given to the council inquiry that reported last year.
However, to back away when the national press comes calling helps none of us.
On one hand, Councillor Bedford blames the problem on noise.
Elsewhere in the same report a fellow cabinet member with community responsibility – Councillor Mike Gilbert – hints obliquely that immigration could provoke a Boston  Bypass Party style landslide at the 2015 local elections if it were to become an issue.
According to the Daily Mail report: “They’ve stopped mincing their words in these parts. Even the social workers and the worthiest public sector grandees have given up dancing around one of the great taboos of our age and realise that it needs to be addressed head-on.”
Reading between the lines, we’re afraid to say that in some quarters, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
And we were also concerned to read that two Boston Borough Council employees encountered by the Mail writer  – who reportedly shared the views put forward by a friend of theirs who is a member of the local protest march group –  said that if he were to use their names in the article, they would be fired.
Why on earth should they fear such a backlash?

You can write to us at boston.eye@googlemail.com Your e-mails will be treated in confidence and published anonymously if requested.

Our former blog is archived at: http://bostoneyelincolnshire.blogspot.com