ENGLAND and IMMIGRATION

LIFE QUALITY

There is much debate about immigration, and yet the key issue, somehow, never gets discussed. This is what happens when the TV talking head zealots get together. They completely miss the point.

The discussion about immigration into Britain — which means chiefly southern England and mainly London — should be about one thing only. Never mind religion, skin colour, financial migration or refugees. Only one thing matters: how does it affect the quality of life of the people who already live here? If a particular level of immigration by people of a particular type is necessary, then the debate is over. Let's have immigration.

So is all immigration bad? Obviously not. People have come here and settled since the beginning of human history, though arguably the Romans and The Normans brought few benefits (and we are still living with the damage the Normans caused). Therefore the next question must be: what kind of people do we want and how many? This may seem like a rather selfish approach. However, we are an island with little space, relative to say, America, India, China, Africa, etc. and there are only so many people you can squeeze on without the effort to accommodate them all being disproportionate to any benefit. So common sense and land mass dictates we have to be a bit choosy. For example it is ridiculous trying to reach zero carbon emissions when we are simultaneously building huge numbers of twenty storey-plus apartment blocks in East London in an attempt to house the rapidly increasing population. How is it possible to deploy heat pumps, which is current government policy, which require digging shafts into the earth, if most of the living quarters are hundreds of feet in the air? If tower blocks are being constructed shoulder-to-shoulder where are the wind turbines going to go? And I am not even going to go into the issue of how you process all that sewage without polluting the watercourses.

Fact: Thames Water processes 36 million litres of sewage per day in London [2023 report].

To all those high-minded politicians and self-appointed opinion makers these are trivial matters not worth mentioning, in the same way that ordinary folk struggling to make a living is a trivial matter. It is worth remembering that so many of these propagandists have second homes in Florida, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. They will all be perfectly fine when all that unprocessed excrement hits the fan. Just how many of these TV pundits live in Plaistow?

Who benefits?

Before I set out 'the bleedin' obvious it is worth analysing why, if the current system for immigration is not simply no good and is positively harmful to the country, do successive governments stick with it? The answer, as always, is that certain groups of people are benefitting very nicely from the harm being caused. For starters big business has more customers every year. Supermarkets, utilities, airlines, builders, car makers, the Local Authorities that earn vast amounts of extra council tax — it's a long list. Every time another million immigrants arrive the tills go 'kerching'. Of course they all lobby for lots more immigration.

Then we have the enormous army of people paid from public funds to look after all these people: immigration lawyers, left wing political groups, social services, the police, benefits bureaucrats, immigration officials. The number of people earning salaries and pensions from the immigrant industry must run into millions. We now have a class of people with no other qualification, other than to somehow look after those who cannot speak English, have no job, have no home, have no prospects, and need medical attention or counselling because they arrive here damaged. All these bureaucrats vote and many are unionised so of course collectively they have enormous influence. Who in their right mind would vote to be out of a job?

And who do they all vote for? Labour naturally. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are quietly taking bungs from the companies that are making bumper profits from all these new people.

Who loses?

The rest of us.

Over a hundred years ago someone said, "Now people say England has beauty spots, whereas once it was simply beautiful." I don't know who said this and Google is useless for anything important. My point being, the Lady in question was lamenting the damage caused by the Industrial Revolution. Long ago we ruined huge tracts of this country and current generations simply accept the fact, though maybe some don't which is why emigration is so high. We are now embarking on another massive slums-of-tomorrow construction project thrown up in a hurry to create sufficient accommodation for the on-going enormous influx of people.

What went wrong?

We simply do not require immigration on this scale to maintain our standard of living or GDP.

Tony Blair famously said "education, education, education" — and what did we get? A school building programme (in concrete that is now collapsing); pay rises for teachers (want a pay rise? Vote Labour); and young people amassing huge student loan debts in return for attending dubious courses.

The problem with education is that it is run by academics. For those who wish to become Professors of Greek and Roman literature that's fine. But what about the poor white boys (and all those immigrant kids) who have been subjected to a 'Comprehensive' education? Being not academically gifted they get conned into Micky-Mouse degrees run by Universities who see them as cash cows.

The people who have always run this country look down on those who get their hands dirty, and that is why technical eduction has always been so utterly crap; courses run by semi-retired guys who have already been 'let go' by industry. Then there is the problem of what to do with all the girls who expect a career, many of whom would once have gone into retail. The answer has been to actively create non-jobs, often in the state sector were there is no such thing as productivity.

There are thousands of sinecures soaking up millions of employees who would otherwise be unemployed. Most, of these posts, if they ceased to exist tomorrow would not be missed. If all these people were in a form of employment where the product or service actually generated a saleable commodity — even better one that could earn export income — the economy would be transformed.

How did this all come about?

Back in the early 1970s when our heavy industries became uncompetitive with the cheap labour and bad working conditions overseas, the term 'invisible earnings' was coined. This was a king-has-no-clothes moment if ever there was one. In fact it was parodied in the TV series Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The idea that, somehow, chartered accountancy would fix our trade imbalance was laughable. Yet it suited the British public's mindset at the time, that we would all be able to sit in comfy offices pressing the occasional button like in the children's cartoon The Jetsons. It was a mass delusion. You might as well believed that aliens were going to throw money from passing flying saucers.

It is an old adage that a country gets the government it deserves. The general public did not demand better technical education for their children and those with financial and Establishment connections made sure their children negotiated their way around the lacklustre state education system. Meanwhile the people still expected their children to have all the opportunities of a thriving economy where workers actually produced things that others wanted to buy. So this set the scene for the make-believe economy.

Employees with almost no education or skills were given the title of 'manager' of something or other in organisations that did not actually produce anything. By the early 1980s we had legions of Quangos (Quasi Autonomous Governmental Organisations) — organisations that appeared on the surface to be independent and somehow self-sustaining but that were in reality paid for by the taxpayer. As the European Union entered existence that became other great creator of non-jobs in Britain. It now required more people to administer Euro-laws than it did when we enacted our own. Local Authorities were given more power and responsibilities — and seized even more than they were given — and that created new tiers of inspectors, supervisors and investigators.

From the late 1960s, when all this started, millions of non-jobs have been created. More unemployment has been soaked up by keeping school leavers in sixth forms and univeristies until at least their early twenties. Those millions in government-related jobs, who had non-contributory pension schemes, had the option to retire at age fifty-five, thus people who might easily live into their nineties need spend less than thirty years in work. I remember a London Police Commissioner in the late 1990s saying he was retiring early because his index linked pension would increase faster than his salary.

And so, there we have it: a population that demands free healthcare and a massive social security system, that produces very little of monetary value. What is there left to bridge the gap between expenditure and income? Well, it turns out there is a world full of desperately poor unskilled people. Could we somehow farm them? If we bring them to this country and get them to do some menial work that can turn a profit only if they are paid the same rate as, say, a Chinese peasant, then, not only will big business make obscene profits, but there might be a little something over to help the balance of payments. It's a brilliant plan as far as it goes.

Except there are downsides.