Zoe Williams thinks the UK can accommodate millions more
people and that we should have more compassion for the plight of our fellow man
in the form of refugees. Obviously she wasn’t commuting to work at six o’clock in
the morning, negotiating roads filled with killing machines all trying to get
to their destinations early enough to avoid the greater masses and find an affordable
parking space within an hour’s walk of the office. I suppose when you have the
luxury of working from a keyboard, at hours to suit your cherished and
privileged work-life balance it is easy to ignore the sheer tide of ‘humanity’
that daily slogs from bed to treadmill.
To give her a modicum of credit she doesn’t go for the ‘all
the world’s population could fit on the Isle of Wight’ claptrap and she does at
least acknowledge that we need to leave a little bit of the countryside unspoiled
but still she says “Nevertheless, the
potential here is vast – were productive industry nurtured, developed but
underpopulated areas would have jobs for people to move for.” But then she
spoils it by invoking the Marxist within: “Were
development undertaken systematically and with a social purpose, rather than
up-against-a-wall and on the cheap, population growth could be welcomed rather
than dreaded.”
Hmmm... So, spend money on developing industry in less
well populated areas such as the north, for instance? Maybe, you know, create a
‘Northern Powerhouse’ – oh I bet Zoe daily roots for George Osborne’s plan. Maybe
she hasn’t noticed it yet, but the sort of people who have the creativity and
wit and élan to build businesses based on loveliness are somewhat outnumbered
by the lumpen proletariat. It is a sad reflection of human nature that the
majority, for all that they will complain otherwise, are only really suited to
the drudge jobs that mass industry brings.
Zoe says “Immigrants
have been successfully, egregiously framed as a threat. All sources of
immigration have become one. The debate refuses to distinguish between a student
and an engineer and a cockle picker and a refugee.” But, the exact same lack of distinction
has been made by all the lefty academics arguing for more immigration: that it
is an unalloyed good, that it is a force for betterment. As always they want it
both ways; allow in those hundreds of thousands of unskilled workers, who
depress the wages of our own unskilled who are bound in welfare and do it in
the name of diversity and the improvement of humanity.
Presumably she would have us invest in building from scratch
whole new communities in green belt areas, provided with roads and hospitals
and schools and jobs and fun and laughter and fill them with new arrivals? For
it is certain that were that possible, we would have already done it for our
own population. The evidence is very much that, apart from centres of education
and selective expertise, immigrants are largely dumped in areas where they simply
displace the indigenous who then resent them. She flies the flag for enrichment
and diversity from the ivory tower of one who only meets the minority of
incomers who bring admirable qualities and complains that those who oppose mass
immigration are deliberately skewing the argument against.
Room for one more?
“The result is that we
will now stand by and watch people freeze and, in some cases, literally rot
in makeshift European camps, because they’re probably “economic” migrants, and
even though we know they’re not, we can’t have them because they take up space
and we’re too tiny. The deliberate lack of sophistication has led, inexorably,
to a lack of humanity, sitting on the terrain like a toxic fog, choking any
pride we could reasonably take in our national character. Those purporting to
protect Britain from the outside threat of the stranger are actually destroying
its values from within.” Or maybe those destroying Britain from within are
doing so by villainising all who live here and want to preserve our own values
before taking the considerable gamble of importing unquantifiable future social
problems? The argument for immigration is absolutely not helped by telling
those who were born here and can’t find a job or afford a decent place to live without being on welfare that we can easily take
in millions more.
