Shutting up shop...

I’m still not ready yet to pass judgement on Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to the leadership of the Labour Party. Plenty of others are doing a great job of that, so I’ll keep my powder dry until I see the whites of his eyes. Oops, I said whites... like a great big nasty racist. Right now I’m rather more engaged by seeing the strife which is rife through much of Europe. Oh yes, we’re back on the migrant crisis, but actually it’s the bizarre logic behind Angela Merkel’s throwing open – and then hastily re-closing – Germany’s borders to one and all that’s got me thinking... again.

Here’s the apparent rationale behind the come one, come all policy: Germany has an ageing population; its indigenous birth rate, in common with many full developed countries, is only at replacement level or just below, so as people live longer, the average age increases and with it the cost of providing health care, pensions, etc. falls on a proportionately smaller percentage of the population. Accepting without challenge that an economy must only ever grow and can never be allowed to shrink or stabilise, the argument is that they need more economic activity in the younger half of the population.

And somehow that is going to be achieved by importing Eritrean goatherds is it? Or Somali stick-sharpeners, Ethiopian khat-heads, Sudanese soap-dodgers or any of a host of others in the brown-rainbow diaspora? This is a very special kind of diversity, where everybody looks and sounds the same, because nobody can tell who is Syrian and who isn’t any more. This intelligence is from the migrants themselves.

But forget the casual racism there and focus on the economic argument. If you want to boost your economy you first look to train up your own; you know where you are with your own. Or at least you should because, brought up in the family firm, as it were, UK Plc, they ought to already know what is expected of them. But, in the short term yes, you may need to bring in skilled, fully-trained outsiders. It’s a win-win. They take up the slack, you pay over the odds for a while and in the meantime everybody gets to experience a little extra in their lives. Cooperation, genuine cross-cultural enrichment, possibly even lifelong friendships. And then we hand over the reins to the new generation and everybody lives, happy ever after.

Except something has gone horribly wrong. Necessary, as-required, skilled immigration has become, in the minds of the politicos, synonymous with opening the doors to anybody regardless of their talents. And this new underclass, if not going straight into the black economy, is seized upon by mass employers of menial labour. We are still crying out for and need to look further afield for the talent but we are denying entry into base-level work for our own underclass, which we have put out to early grass, retired straight after ineffective schooling, ruminant remnants, grazing the welfare system for survival.

Fortress Europe - it's the only answer

Spin boys, spin. Tell ‘em the immigrants pay into the national pot, even if the tax credits they receive exceeds the tax they pay. Even if the combined VAT on all their outgoings is still below the cost of housing them, educating their children and keeping the NHS afloat. Spin and spin again that immigration is not only good, it is essential to support the lazy indigenous racists. And totally ignore the fact that those who actually do pay the bulk of the tax, those who actually do support the system are working longer hours into older age to support the broods of children born to those migrants, muslims to a man, who are here in the service of another calling altogether. Wake up, Europe. It’s time.

Coming Clubbing?

Remember singing “If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club.” Or, if you prefer, “I’m in with the in crowd”. It doesn’t matter whether or not Groucho Marx said “I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” we all really want to belong to something. Whether it’s a family, a church, a cult, an exclusive private members organisation, the jet set, the golf club, even just comfortably fitting into an age group - the justified and ancient – being part of something seems to be a fundamental human desire. Even the Sydney siege-artist appeared to want to be part of something, albeit a murderous, barbarous something which would see the rest of us dead. My club’s better than your club, perhaps?

Clubs have rules and generally you have to abide by them to become a member and continue to abide by them to remain a member. Most people have no problem with this. The more desirable a club, the more stringently it can vet its applicants and the greater the rewards for those who make the grade. As your club’s success becomes visible and unless you actively enforce uniformity, diversity will ensue. Successful companies attract diverse workforces from the cream of the world’s talent; mistaking diversity for the cause of their success is just a trap the left willingly fall for. Over and over again.

They do a lot of that, the left, conflating, concatenating and coming to crap conclusions. And so yesterday, just after the leaking of the ‘don’t talk about immigration’ strategy, Ed Miliband launched his ‘let’s talk about immigration’ pledge. It seems Ed may not even be a part of the inner circle of the club he was elected to lead. And as for his latest offering, criminalising employers for… what, exactly? The Labour spokesthing was crucified by John Humphrys on the Today programme, unable to answer whether a prosecution could be brought for pay discrimination against an immigrant worker paid above the minimum wage. Fag packet politics again, Labour? Come on; you must have one coherent policy at least?

The sudden rush to recognise uncontrolled mass immigration as an issue after years of denial, of trying to paint it pretty, after years of denouncing as racist anybody who dared point out the obvious is pitiful. How about this for a policy: People are dying – quite literally – trying to get into our little exclusive island club; we must be doing something right. So, why can’t we control our membership? This just doesn’t seem like such a tricky principle to grasp; we have something people want, but not enough of it to go around. It strikes me that raising the bar to entry is a no-brainer; funnily enough it seems exactly that amount of brain has been exercised in debating the issue to date.

New club memberships available!

And if the EU will not allow us to do just that, doesn’t that tell us everything we need to know about the subjugation of our sovereignty to unelected foreign rule? Why should we give a fig about staying in the EU club when it is quite clearly Europe’s citizens who appear to be queueing up to join ours? I don’t know how much chocolate you prefer, but making that decision for you without your consent would surely be taking the biscuit? 

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!”