77% of the British population think that immigration is too high and should be controlled and reduced.
A small liberal, metropolitan elite think otherwise and are intent on importing as many immigrants as possible regardless of the consequences….and they are ready to denounce you as racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic in order to try and silence you and any criticism of them that you may have.
The pro-immigration lobby, of which the BBC is a prominent and powerful member, is fanatical and reckless in its abandonment of all reason as it presses for completely open borders to allow in unlimited numbers of people who have no loyalty to this country, no idea of its laws, its culture, its norms, and often have no intention of adhering to those anyway.
It is a quite extraordinary example of people who allow their ideology to over-rule common sense and a total and deliberate failure to address the issues that such a policy might result in, ultimately the total breakdown of the society this mass influx of immigrants profess they want to join and, we are told, will ‘improve’.
It was known that the EU was intent on importing millions of Africans into Europe and now with wars in the Middle East the UN is trying to force millions more upon us…
The UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants has said wealthy countries should agree to accept one million Syrian refugees over the next five years to help end the series of boat disasters.
Not sure millions of Muslims entering Europe would be good for social cohesion and stability.
The Times on Monday told us that 25% of Britons will be from an ethnic minority by 2051, double what the level is now….driven of course by immigration…the population rising to over 77 million.
This will have dramatic effects upon services, infrastructure and of course society itself especially if different groups fail to integrate and continue to segregate based on race or religion.
David Coleman, professor of demography at the the University of Oxford, said:
“Many of the consequences of large scale migration are damaging. We do not need up to 13 million more people by the mid century. Almost all that increase will be immigrants and their children. It will not make the UK a happier or richer place. Crowding and congestion will have entirely negative effects, increasing pressure on schools, hospitals and particulary housing.”
Simon Ross, director of Population Concern, said it was time people looked at the consequences migration had on quality of life.
“There’s a lot of people with vested interests in immigration, the universities and employers for instance….People talk about the taxes that migrants pay but that is a short term view. Migrants have children and get old and we need to take account of the services they will eventually use. We should not reduce migration simply to a taxation issue. We should talk about its effect on British society including the need for more housing which effects the green belt and transport infrastructure. These are quality of life issues.”
Such thoughts would be ‘ramping up the rhetoric’ and an unacceptable tone for Evan Davis and Co.
Left leaning David Goodhart also had his doubts…..
Too diverse?
Is Britain becoming too diverse to sustain the mutual obligations behind a good society and the welfare state?
The nation state remains irreplaceable as the site for democratic participation and it is hard to imagine how else one can organise welfare states and redistribution except through national tax and public spending. Moreover, since the arrival of immigrant groups from non-liberal or illiberal cultures it has become clear that to remain liberal the state may have to prescribe a clearer hierarchy of values.
Goodhart did conclude something similar in this BBC programme….
The gulf between conservative Islam and secular liberal Britain is larger than with any comparable large group….for those of us who value an open, liberal society it is time to explain why it is superior to the alternatives.
He told us that…
Some claim that if people understood Islam more everything would be fine, they would be more tolerant, I think quite the contrary….the more they understand about it the more alien they would find it…authoritarian, collectivist, patriarchal, misogynist…..all sorts of things that Britain might have been 100 years ago but isn’t now.
He also said this in another interview…..
I am pro-immigrant but against mass immigration.
I believe in human equality and the unity of the human race, but I am sceptical about the economic benefits of large-scale immigration for the bottom half of British society, and worry about too much rapid change leading to segregation of communities and a withering of the kind of fellow-feeling needed to sustain welfare states.
There is nothing remarkable about those views and there are now plenty of others on the centre-Left who share them — Jon Cruddas gave my book a favourable review in the New Statesman — though official Labour remains somewhat uncertain of its position on this territory.
Like many metropolitan liberals I had very little direct experience of immigration yet I came to see it as beyond the normal trade-offs and interest calculations of political life. It was simple: good people were in favour of it, and bad, bigoted people were against it.
Alongside this belief was a twitchy ambivalence about my own country, no doubt reflecting a twitchy ambivalence about myself. Left-wing and liberal intellectual scepticism about the national was particularly strong in England because of its dominant imperial past.
I now, of course, believe this disdain for the national was immature and premature as well as loftily dismissive of majority opinion.
How did I come to change my mind about that and about large-scale immigration?
No doubt becoming a more grounded person and mixing with a wider spread of people knocked some of the undergraduate ideological gaucheness out of me as I entered my thirties. But what I like to think really changed my mind was good ideas, or openness to better ideas than I had been carrying around.
It was David Willetts, the leading Tory, who had first drawn my attention to the “progressive dilemma”. Speaking at a Prospect debate on the welfare state in 1998, he noted that if values and lifestyles become too diverse it becomes more difficult to sustain common norms and hence the legitimacy of a risk-pooling welfare state.
“This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.”
That is to say, people are readier to share and co-operate with people whom they trust or with whom they believe they have significant attributes, and interests, in common.
Willetts’s dilemma seemed to me a true and powerful idea. I remember thinking when I first heard it: why is this issue not discussed more, particularly on the Left?
Having experienced the tribal irrationality of part of leftist Britain on the issue of diversity I found myself extending my critique to other aspects of the argument: the nature of community, the role of national identities in liberal societies and more.
The other idea that broke through my inchoate left-liberal instincts was even simpler than the progressive dilemma. It is this: embracing the idea of human equality does not mean we owe the same allegiance to everyone.
For most people commitments and allegiances ripple out from friends and family to neighbourhoods, towns and nations. This does not mean we should not care about the global poor. But we have a hierarchy of obligations that means we spend 30 times more every year on the NHS than we do on development aid. Is that wrong?
Immigration, at least on a significant scale, is hard for both incomer and receiver, especially when multi-generational poverty is being imported. People are not blank sheets, societies are not random collections of individuals, and objection to the arrival of a large number of outsiders in a community is not necessarily racist.
When middle-class social scientists like Michael Young in the 1950s and 1960s discovered what a high attachment people in working-class communities had to stability and continuity it was considered something to celebrate by left-wing sociologists. When people objected to that continuity being disrupted by the churn of mass immigration they were denounced.
You may want to read this forecast from 2007 of what the future may well bring….and indeed has…
I’m bemused by the way that David Goodhart, (and others), put themselves into a ‘left wing-liberal’ tribe, as though they have to support certain views and ideas just because they are spouted by others in their group.
That raises two questions:
1) Why can’t they think for themselves? (Are they like the concentration camp guards, ‘just obeying orders’?).
2) If they see themselves as part of a group why don’t they realise that others value groups too, (family, friends and nation)?
As a bit of an economist (not sure which bit) I have to challenge this:
“Simon Ross, director of Population Concern, said it was time people looked at the consequences migration had on quality of life.
“There’s a lot of people with vested interests in immigration, the universities and employers for instance….People talk about the taxes that migrants pay but that is a short term view.”
Inward migrants often do not pay taxes in the short term. We heard just yesterday how the traffickers often take passports from those loaded onto their boats or tell the migrants to destroy their passports. This means that they will be treated as refugee asylum seekers and their claim to be admitted on that basis takes time to process. If my understanding is correct, if that is, or were to be, in the UK with our presently overloaded system it is likely that an ‘asylum seeker’ would not be able to claim a National Insurance number and start seeking work – let alone paying taxes – for some considerable time. In the meantime they would have to be housed, fed & clothed by the State or by charity.
Simon Ross is correct to also look long term, to an ageing population increased by immigration, but generally it is a mistake to blame an elderly population for health service & care woes for the simple reason that the greater number of elderly people is due to the fact that they are healthy and not sick!
Even if Ross was only considering economic migrants using their EU right to live & work here, he again is overlooking an important short term issue.
If anything, the greatest use of the NHS occurs from pre-birth to age 18 along with the pre-pregnancy & pregnancy care of females. As it is likely that a migrant is younger & likely to form relationships and have children, the pressure on the NHS is much more likely to be in the short-term (0-5 years as the Bank of England label it) where the tax contribution of an inward migrant is most likely to be at its smallest amount.
Add the provision of housing and any other State assisted service or benefit, the greatest fiscal contribution of inward migration would appear to be in the mid-term (long term in BoE terminology) of 15-40 years and then into the next generation as working adults from age 18 or 21.
I agree with his final statement about purely looking at migration as a taxation issue but even when this is done, mistaken assumptions appear to me to being made, even by highly educated & qualified researchers & academics.
If immigration is so good why don’t the liberal left Gramscis encourage it into Africa ? . They need a leg up more than we do
On the whole they appear to have missed that although the BBC have given a little (very little) coverage of things like the return of London Ghanaians (to Ghana) and the beneficial effect that their skills (and finance) has had on the economy.
Its time to limit child allowance to only two childen. This then may help in putting off ethnic minorities having such big families. Ethnic minorities are breeding at a much faster rate than white indigenous and this might prove to be the most effective way to keep the cultural balance in check . Infact it might be better still to stop all child benefit which would mean that money is not being paid for kids who live overseas. If you want kids you should have to pay for them. I know this would not be a vote winning policy for any political party but I think many would agree that something needs to be done to prevent this little island from sinking!
You are probably right. It is always assumed (even by economists who are largely unchallenged on their assumption) that you need a positive birth rate in a country.
A post on the BBC web-site on Wednesday about Scotland needing more immigrants – because of a shrinking & an ageing population – was based on this thinking.
In reality and for example, Scotland’s economy needs less people, not more.
One of the reasons that Public Sector employment is so high in Scotland (it was expanded massively at the start of this century) is that it doesn’t have the Private Sector jobs, especially in the non-service sector, to support a larger population. Maintaining a high level of unemployment costs a lot in terms of Benefits & administration of same. To grow a country’s population in a sustainable way, you must have wealth creating job vacancies available or, at the very least, creatable in the short term.
A balanced birth rate – it may be necessary at some point to cut CB to one child only – may need careful management from now on.
Dazzy Boy is completely right in wanting to limit child benefit to 2 children. This should be a no brainer given our finances, it should be a UKIP policy.
Too many “experts” like to extrapolate projections such as the need for more immigrants to look after an ageing population. Then of course the immigrants will need more immigrants to look after them, as for sure they wont be leaving, and so it goes on – forever!
Complete nonsense.
It IS UKIP policy.
What always amazes me is that whenever they have a summit to discuss global warming or environmental issues they never seem to mention population control measures and the massive amount of people that are getting pumped into this world, especially in countries that can least afford it. I suppose that wouldn’t be politically correct.
Not quite sure on that Dazzy Boy. They (elites) might not want to talk about ‘population control’ but UN Agenda 21 is tuned to strategic population (by stealth means). They (UN) are not so clever to conceal it but ‘climate change’ (adopted by the left) can then be used to adopt ‘drastic measures’ designed to reduce future populations. Anti-family legislation is already with us (reducing state child allowance), slowly abandoning life extending healthcare (NHS), euthanasia legal, gender specific abortions legal, forced sterilsation and dissuading couples from having children – or making them sterile by using drugs in Water or food. The EU can implement legsilation when population reaches critical mass with immigration, who knows. The end game is to dismantle nation states. Blame it all on Climate Change and limits of food production. The EU has made quotas in all parts of food production and can manipulate the EU market) or close down an entire industry i.e. UK fishing and Agriculture. Climate change is the ‘trojan horse’ to enact emergency powers that Milliband had adopted today in this Manifesto. Inevitably under a next Labour government it would be a heresy to suggest that Climate Change is not based on observable Science but a politically correct agenda designed to limit population, so far a failure here in the UK due to immigration.
labour loves it because it brings them more voters the tories because it keeps wages down, the “liberal, metropolitan elite” dont care because its not their jobs under threat and they could always do with a cheap nanny, its just the rest of us plebs who have to suffer the consequences
Sums it up nicely!