The song of the Bulgar Votemen

Another week closer to January 1st and another frenzied attempt to close the empty stable door. Sadly, it’s been banging to and fro in the Westminster wind for far too long and its hinges are close to being ‘un’. Still nobody in government or opposition knows anything at all about what will happen: There won’t be a dangerously numerous Bulgar/Roma influx because they are already here; to take the sting from UKIP's mass influx scares, we have been quietly letting them in for years… or… There will be a massive brain drain of their best-qualified graduates leaving Bulgaria perilously short of expertise… or… All immigrants come here to work and even on their sub-minimum wage jobs will apparently contribute more in tax than they will use in benefits and services... or… There is a horde of barbarians at the gates and they are coming to rob our welfare state. What’s the truth? We will never know because we haven’t the means to find out.

One very simple thing could overcome all of this uncertainty and as an island state it is something we could do and used to do, quite easily. But of course it is now racist to have border controls; to check that those arriving here have the right to remain and that we can – as we seem to be able to do very easily with UK citizens – track their movements. It’s a mess, isn’t it, and the thorny issue of who is to blame is impossible to untangle, mired as it is in years of duplicity and head-burying by all flavours of government.

We knew scores of years ago ago that machines would displace more and more manual work and yet we still bred uncontrolled – practically encouraged it - from labouring stock. At least they occasionally came in handy as cannon fodder for Tony Blair’s wars. We’ve known for decades that an educated workforce would be needed to acquire skills beyond the ability to develop callouses and yet education has let them down. Or is it, as Boris has said, that some don’t have the IQ to compete. And given the abundance of cheap foreign labour the knuckle draggers can’t even compete for manual work now.

In a desperate attempt to pacify the public mood (And at this late hour, what possible other motive could there be?) David Cameron is trying to restrict access to out of work benefits for three months. Three months, seriously? For somebody arriving from an impoverished country, still emerging from communism that’s just like a queue for bread. As somebody on my Twitter timeline said, look out for Big Issue sellers every ten feet. Bizarrely the migrant self-employed can claim straight away – something that British self-employed cannot. And how will local authorities react to homelessness on their streets – theenk of ze cheeldren – we know they’ll be a soft touch and once they’re in, they’re in; our record on deportations, even of violent, convicted, incarcerated criminals is laughable.

So if you have lived and worked here all your life, as many have found it is quite difficult to claim sufficient benefits when you need to, to maintain a lifestyle even close to that of some of your neighbours who have never contributed. But come to Britain and cram three families to a house for a few weeks and the welfare banquet is all yours; why we’ll even bring in an army of interpreters and lawyers to ensure you get every mouthful.

The Volga Boatmen by Ilia Efimovich Repin

The EU is an avowedly socialist project – why else would they be forever piling on the taxes to ‘reach out’ to poorer countries? Mass unemployment is also unfairly shared out across the EU – we hear daily about the problems in Spain and Greece. As good socialists the EU knows that the fair thing is to take from those who have to give to others – to level down - and it applies just as much to unemployment as to anything else. Where there is abundance, goes their mantra, we must redistribute it. So, effectively, we are importing Eastern European unemployment to Britain, Germany and France. The Eastern Bloc countries feared their Soviet masters but now, as they journey west to the land of milk and honey their cry is “The rations are coming!”