Demos be joking!

The migration figures were out yesterday. Even the painfully high, record one-third of a million net immigration hides the much larger figure of double that for inward migration only. Over 600,000 means that our non-British-born population is increasing by 1% every year (if ‘official’ total population numbers are not wildly under-estimated). Twice as many coming in as going out; think about that. Then consider their make-up.

Those coming in come to make a living from the British economy and no matter how loud the rhetoric that this is a marvellous thing it is a simple fact that sub-£30k workers will always cost more in demand for services, housing and general infrastructure than they pay in tax. Those who come for a short period don’t integrate and those who come from certain world sub-cultures will never integrate. The proportionately few who genuinely pay for themselves and cause no harm would have been able to come anyway and would have been welcome. The rest; well look around you.

Watching your neighbourhood change before your eyes may be a joy to behold if you have swallowed the line that immigration is a natural good. You probably also believe that nationalities are a construct of racist ideology and that all people are of equal worth to society, that every possible variant of gender identity is exactly as ‘normal’ as that held by 99% of humans, that money is shit out by magical rainbow unicorns and Tories hate everybody so much that they would rather see their own children die than put a single penny into the NHS. You may well hope for a Jeremy Corbyn government even, heaven help you.

But what of those leaving the UK? Some of them, it is true, are returning to their own countries, having made their pile, no doubt to start businesses, start a family, etc... good luck to them, but they are still net takers. Others are going back as broke as they arrived having made little difference but, hey, no hard feelings. Some are no doubt a small number of working Brits seeking their fortunes abroad? For all the pleading that, look, we do just the same as ‘they’ do, relatively few Brits go off to do entry-level work abroad; being a waiter in Romania or a labourer in Poland does not pay – ask those who come here to do that work.

That leaves me to consider the rest of those leaving these shores; the natural born Brits. How many are retirees going off, not to contribute but to simply make their British pensions go further? How many are business owners who have shut up shop and cashed in to retire early and become economically inactive in Britain? You may say good, they are also exporting their health concerns, but it’s far more likely those who have problems will stay in the UK for the NHS alone. It has to be a consideration that we are losing some of our best and a glance at our inner cities could leave you with no other conclusion.

Soon – within a generation maybe - you who remain will have no idea what an Englishman ever was; they will be historical relics. Long dead will be the fighters we used to honour, but now denigrate, on Armistice Day and hollowed-out husks will be those who still remember them. The real shame is that they believed in and fought for a flawed ideal; democracy. True democracy can never work in a multicultural society with ideals as disparate as the backgrounds they come from, but it is due to notions of ‘representative’ democracy that we have such a society.

There is a lie that diversity itself produces success whereas the truth is that success attracts and tolerates diversity. For too long our governments have pursued the fallacy and ignored the facts. But the true facts of yesterday’s immigration figures are yet to be fully analysed and accepted and it is doubtful that the authorities on all sides even want to know the truth as it appears to the displaced, the demos, the bulk of voters. And who needs facts to get in the way of election campaigns anyway? Even were the raw data available in a form capable of being rationally scrutinised, the vast majority of those with a ballot would be incapable of drawing meaningful conclusions. Our ‘representatives’, as ever, will decide and they already did, decades ago. On Fridays I normally post a joke. Are you ready for the joke? Here it comes: Democracy.

Oh Calcutta!

Do androids dream of electric sheep? So mused Philip K. Dick in 1968. Writing in the Daily Mail yesterday Richard Littlejohn recalled the domestic privations of a similar period, when Shop Stewards stalked the land. This was a problem entirely of our own making; not the result of any invading force but a concerted attack on British people on British soil by British people. And by ‘our making’ I mean by politicians both in and out of Parliament. Back then the unions were all avowed Marxists; they weren’t coy about it, as they are today, because they genuinely saw the Soviet dream as a utopia to be emulated. In their eyes the ends of the cause were far more important than the means of the tiny people they would gleefully deprive of basic amenities. They knew better and eventually the proletariat would see it too… they thought.

It was an ugly time and it was largely due to weak Conservatives and a Labour Party afraid to confront their paymasters and bring the dogs to heel. I remember it clearly – it’s the backdrop to all of my schooldays - but I don’t believe I am scarred by it. It’s in the past, in the place where we keep all the stuff that didn’t kill us but made us stronger; made us the people we are. No, it wasn’t particularly nice but neither was it horrific. We weren’t tortured - for sure, many old people died for lack of heat or from being old (nothing new here) - but we accepted such normal occurrences back then. We just had to do the British thing and put up with it … A bit like dealing with that naughty Mr Hitler. But attack from the inside? This was sinister stuff, especially as the ones who wanted to destroy us from within supported the very ‘evil empire’ we were at cold war with. The sinister USSR, where they ate babies and everything!

We genuinely do have it easy these days and memories fade but the old ‘uns seem to cope so much better than the relatively pampered youth of the twenty-first century, having had to fend for themselves and go out to work from the age of fourteen or fifteen. In relative terms today’s kids are wealthy in comparison. You are supposed to be shaped by the events of your lives but too many people today experience virtually no actual events and have little contact with reality, viewing the world from the comfort of centrally heated, electronically connected homes and classrooms and receiving opinions fully formed from ‘the meeja’, who unrelentingly still blame ‘Fatchaa’ for everything.

Thus a 25 year old can be seen wearing a “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” tee-shirt and ranting about how “Fatchaa destroyed this country” without any knowledge of who she was, what she stood for and with absolutely zero direct experience of the very real social ills she almost rid us of. Almost… before her own wets stabbed her in the back. You can’t be properly shaped unless you are presented with both sides of the argument and are suitably equipped ‘up top’ to understand the stakes.

Enter Nick Robinson and what was billed as a balanced presentation of the hitherto forbidden discussion of “The Truth about Immigration” which aired last night on BBC 2. I should have known – I was warned – but I watched it anyway. The first few minutes of introduction was beautifully ironic - a rosy-glowing, look-at-all-the-lovely-rainbow-people bit of fluffery, in which they came, we welcomed them, became ‘a nation of immigrants’ and we all got richer. I expected at any moment the sound of a stylus being dragged across the LP of soothing ‘world’ music to be abruptly replaced by thrash metal and grim black-and-white footage highlighting the tensions, the downsides, the cultural tragedies of many city communities. But no, the ‘introduction carried on and on… and we all got richer.

In fact we all got richer so many times during the irritatingly on-message ‘Ode to Immigration’ (How do I love thee? Let me count the ways you enrich me...) that by the end I felt an urge to go out and buy a yacht. And an island to moor it off. If you never went out of doors but gained your entire life experience electronically the message you were delivered, over and over again, was we needed immigration, without it we are sunk, that immigrants are all unremittingly lovely people and we need them, we need them, we need them… repeat after me. They are here to work for us and it is all good and anyway, we need them because we all get richer.

Once again Robinson brought up the cosy ‘national reliance on’ Polish plumbers, Estonian nannies, Lithuanian cleaners and those charming corner delicatessens without which British society would collapse forever. From where does he get this bilge? (Rhetorical question.) When he went to see the Roma in Sheffield, he only really saw what his on-message brief told him to see. A slight cultural anomaly, he shrugged and gave his trademark oily grin –wait, he seemed to imply, you’ll see, the delicatessens will surely follow.

Nannies and coffee shops, coming soon!

So, the ‘truth’ we were presented with was that we have no choice at all, but we are free to talk about it if we wish. Today’s pensioners have a life of work and struggle and triumph and failure to look back on and it has shaped their character. Their memories of choices and their outcomes appear in their dreams and all their dreams are different. But will tomorrow’s pensioners only dream as they are told, like electric sheep?


Coda:
If, as a result of all this 'essential' immigration I could retire, right now, to a mortgage-free pension of around the average wage, index-linked, I would be delighted. So how come that's not possible and in fact I will have to work for longer to receive a pittance? And how come we have a growing number of British-born youngsters who may never know a life beyond subsistence on meagre state handouts? If Nick Robinson's "we all get richer" mantra was the truth, indigenous Brits would all be living in palaces, lording it over the incoming workers who earned our living for us. Make up your own mind, but from where I'm standing it all looks like a crock.