OK so there’s much debate about the EU expansion and how this is seemingly going to lead to mass immigration from Eastern Europe as all the Slovaks and Poles flock en masse to Dover to get into Britain. Leaving aside the obvious question -Why do they want to come to a Scheissladen like this anyway? [Answer -doesn’t it make you think about the circumstances that they’re coming from?] I would like to address a couple of points based around my existing views and what I have heard recently. Firstly it is irrefutable that the British public, or at least the majority, are seriously concerned about immigration. Most people will say “I’m not racist but this country doesn’t have any more room” the less liberal will say, “Britain for the British” etc. etc. So is there a genuine immigration problem, what is it caused by and what is the solution?

Is there an immigration problem? Well that’s debatable and you can find statistics that can back up the point of view of yes and no quite easily. Proportionally Britain does not take more immigrants than many other countries in the EU, furthermore there are large sections of the country that are suffering from a shortage in the labour force, particularly in unskilled work which by and large is the staple of the economic migrant. This shoots down the notion of immigrants coming and taking jobs away from the British, that is a ludicrous idea. Most immigrants who work illegally do so in bad conditions with no labour rights and pay that is often far below the minimum wage, most people living here legitimately would not take such a job as they would be better off within the benefits system to which the illegal refugee is not entitled. Most refugees do not want to come to this country to ‘sponge off the state’ they are as proud as those who live here and the stigma attached to not working is often stronger in many poorer countries. The refugee is seeking a better life for him/herself and often his/her family and will utilise whatever is at his/her disposal to acheive this. This is natural and is part of the human instinct for self-advancement and protection of the family unit. If this country wasn’t so affluent there would be many people here who would look abroad to do the same and this happened amongst the middle classes with the ‘Brain drain’ to the US through the 1970s and 80s. It is not a decision to be taken lightly to uproot and travel across a continent to seek a better life in another country and after all there are never any guarantees that life will genuinely be better there so you have to be pretty sure that life is shite where you are to want to take the chance.

“Why do they all come to Britain, it’s not the first EU country they get to, why can’t they stay in Germany or France?” Well my dimwitted friend the answer to this is simple, you reap what you sow, England has rammed its culture and language down people’s throats for so long that it is now a worldwide lingua franca -so, sorry but you’re the victim of the sucess of the British empire and US TV and film for that one. Why would anybody coming to a foreign country want to make life more difficult for themselves? If they speak English, they’ll go to England, if they speak German like many Czechs and Poles they will like as not go to Germany. Likewise the French have influx of Algerians and many other North Africans and areas where they once had a substantial influence, it’s basic common sense really.

“Britain for the British -charity begins at home” Oh goody, I hoped you might say that, who are the British? How far back in history do you want to go? Let’s start with the easier known historical quantities, when the Romans (from Rome, so they’re Italians basically not British) invaded in the first century AD there were existing tribes who are collectively known as the Celts although the Scottish variant are the Picts and actually the Celts is a rather loose formation of a number of tribes who have various origins including France and Germany but let’s assume for the sake of arguement that they are the indigenous population. So you have Celts and Italians, then the Italians shipped out in 410 AD (Emperor Honorius I believe, if you pressed me for details.) You then have a period of time that isn’t studied a great deal where all sorts of people came over including Angles from Northern Germany, Jutes from Denmark, Saxons from Central Germany one suspects the odd Gaul or hundred and other Barbarians from many quarters. What a multi-cultural land it must have been, how did they get on surely there were race riots on the streets of Londinium? Add to this in the North a plethora of Vikings coming over and doing a bit of raping and pillaging you have to anticipate a fair amount of norse children knocking about. Not only that there was even a Viking king, Canute. By the time we get to 1066 the population is collectively known as Anglo-Saxon -so German then. Now the Normans who were by this time French, originally came from Scandinavia but let’s stick to French it’s easier, invaded and conquered Britain -(Britain has various names -Brittania is used by Tacitus in Roman times and Anglia is often used in the Middle Ages, we still use East Anglia today) So from 1066 you have a ruling class who were French (of Scandinavian origin) and a working class who were German, then some Vikings and quite a few Celts who were still staming around in the West in N. Wales, Scotland and good old Hibernia. Now after that there isn’t really an invading force so whilst you get migration there is no complete shift of the native race. Which means that if you are ‘British’ you can pretty much choose to be French, if you’re feeling hoity toity, German if you’re feeling oppressed or Celtic if you’re feeling militant or druidic. Bear in mind of course that many of these tribes in continental Europe didn’t just go to England they went all over the place, look at the Huns -somehow some of them seemed to end up in Finland hence the fact that the Fins and the Hungarians speak a language more like each other than any of the neighbouring tongues Scandinavian or Slavic. So in fact most of continental Europe are related to us, we populated the US and the Antipodes, we all originally come from North Africa as a species so really it’s the Chinese and the Antarcticans who shouldn’t be allowed in because they have no claim to be here, ah but the Chinese have provided us with tasty food that has in fact become part of our way of life so we have to keep them. So it’s just the Antarctic. Penguins Out -get back to your own glacier boo hiss! There’s no room for Polar Bears here.

Sorry went off on a tangent there, I hope though it does go some way to showing the utter futility of a racist arguement, it just has no sense. So we’ve tackled the fact that there isn’t a great deal of a problem and also why people are coming so what is to be done? There are 2 fundamental points here and they are probably the most important points I wish to make in this whole blog entry.

The first is that the rabid media must be curbed, the incitement to racial hatred is absolutely blatant, it is particularly severe in the right-wing press (which is most of the press) but the ‘left’-wing press doesn’t put much forward to counter-bbalance, it tends just to stay reasonably silent. Most people’s views on immigration in this country are fuelled by what they have heard/read in the media and this is very dangerous indeed. In fact in reality when Radio 4 has sent people to Slovakia and Poland to report on whether there will be an influx of people they have come back with the information that it is highly unlikely to be that many and these are people working for Migrationwatch and such like. Mori recently polled people and it transpired that 80% were worried about the immigration situation and thought there should be tighter measures, but the people who thought that the country had too many immigrants were largely those demographically from White areas of the country with a proportionally far lower amount of immigrants. It is not true to say that people are inherently racist or even exclusively clannish. If you look at Russia after 1917 there was not an explosion of anti-semitism, there weren’t huge areas of racial tension. Views like the racism and concern for immigration are being spoon-fed to people who do not have access to the same level of counter-arguement. If you tell somebody that there is a problem and you tell them often enough and you use alarmist and apocolyptic language then it is small wonder people will be concerned. I will come back to the media in a future blog and tackle them as a seperate issue.

The second point is this: Does nobody ask the question exactly why there is such a migration of people from many more easterly countries, do they just think we have a nicer blend of tea? If Romania and the romanys are such a tricky problem why not look at what the causes are, what is going on in the country that seems to make people so desperate to leave. If you address the problems in a country you will automatically decrease the desire of many people to leave. There will always be people who will choose to seek new horizons but others will not feel forced and that’s the crux. I know I’ve made this point before and I’m sure many other people have too it just seems so obvious that it astonds me that you don’t hear it mentioned in mainstream politics, and the only thing that says to me is that mainstream politicians have far more to gain by immigrants coming here and being used as universal scapegoats rather than to ‘stem the tide’ and make life uniformly better. Of course business wouldn’t be pleased if the influx of cheap labour dried up overnight, how would the BNP recruit from the dissolutioned working classes without the foreigners to blame all the problems on.

That’s all for now, I’d be interested in your comments my fellow blogsters.