“Which one is he talking about?”, I hear you cry
If you Google ‘a very british disease’ you get ‘privatisation’, ‘dying of the cold’, ‘mad cow disease’, ‘secrecy’, ‘knife crime’ and ‘ageism in the workplace’
However, I wasn’t thinking of any of them. I was thinking about the current national obsession with immigration.
“Look serious, there’s votes in this…”
Nick Robinson and Cecilia Malmstrom had a chat about this very subject the other day at Chatham House.
Nick is the cheery political editor at the BBC (and therefore a bit of a lefty, by definition); Cecilia is currently Commissioner for Home Affairs with the European Commission. Before that she was a Swedish liberal (small ‘l’) politician, so definitely clearly a lefty.
Nick and Cecilia discussed why no-one else in europe seems to think immigration is a big deal,
or at least as big a deal as we think it is.
By ‘we’ I mean the government, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, The Sun and UKIP nutters.
By ‘the government’ I mean mostly Dave and Theresa…
You might recall that Little Will Hague popped up the other day saying he thought Angela Merkel was a good bet to side with the UK on renegotiating assorted bits of assorted EU treaties that the business donors to party coffers don’t like. Hague witters on about Germany recognising the need for reform of key bits and he says “… Germany also has strict benefit rules. Germany doesn’t want its benefit system to be abused”
“Der Cameron ist ein Dumkopf iff he thinks I’m agreeing mit him.”
Reading Nick’s chat with the commissioner, it becomes fairly clear that the rest europe is somewhat baffled by our government’s obsessive stance, she says “…You have a generous benefit system but so do many other countries so I don’t know why this debate is so intense in the UK”. You might remember that we didn’t get that flood of immigrants in January that UKIP and other frothy-mouthed commentators worried about.
As it turned out, Roxana Carare, Romanian Honorary Consul, pointed out Britain is not top of the list for Romanian migrants because of cultural differences. “This is an Anglo-Saxon country and Romania is a Latin country. People are more likely to go to Italy, Spain and other Latin countries.”
More to the point, if you look a little deeper at what Mrs Merkel means when she talks about EU reform, she means something quite different from our posh boys: she said “Europe without borders is one of the big achievements of European unification. All member states and all citizens benefit from this. But in order to keep these freedoms and to retain the support of citizens for this, we need to have the courage to identify wrong developments – and change them.”
Mrs M – Mutti (‘Mum’) to the Germans – is possibly the most powerful Chancellor Germany has had for decades; her coalition government has the strongest following of any since re-unification. That makes her a force to be reckoned with in Germany and therefore in Europe, and she wants her legacy to be major reform of the EU (tory ears prick up)
However her goal “…is to achieve extensive, communal control of national budgets, of public borrowing in the 28 EU capitals and … national plans to boost competitiveness and implement social reforms.”
Not quite what the tories have in mind when they talk about ‘reform’ then. Not at all what the tories have in mind, in fact.
Quite a few worrying things there: a strong coalition government, desire for pro-european reform, a Chancellor with a mandate and a desire to leave a legacy…all things our chattering classes struggle with…
Right, anyway, back to immigration.
The big problem here is that this shouting and screaming about immigration appears to be a figment of the collective, fevered imagination of a few xenophic vote-chasers and/or newspaper salesmen.
There are elements in the UK who are apparently scared stiff we’re going to be overrun with foreigners coming here, taking ‘our’ jobs,
taking council houses meant for british people and claiming benefits meant for british residents.
As Ms Malmstrom says above, there just isn’t any evidence to show this is happening.
And there wasn’t any evidence in 2011 either; in fact “…some 2008 research by Forbes put Britain behind the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg, Finland and Denmark based on comparing the average benefit payment measured by local purchasing power with average income.”
Even the Torygraph had to print this piece called ” UK’s benefits tourism ‘a myth’ says Brussels” (bet that hurt…).
So we have the odd situation where a few tories – step forward Philip Hollobone MP (Dulwich College, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxon, TA, Monday Club), for example – ignore the lack of evidence to support their argument but shout that opposing them shows that the EU is ‘out of touch’.
I’m the product of cheap, state education – comprehensive school, government-funded university, the sort of thing that breeds lefty-ism – so I’m a bit biased when I see a posh dickhead who thinks that something is so simply because he says so, and he knows because he’s had a ‘proper’ education.
Sorry, Phil, old son, but as far as I can see, they’ve got the evidence, you haven’t. That suggests to me that you’re arguing from prejudice rather than empiricism. So if anyone is out of touch, it’s you and your mates.
“Oh look, everyone’s got it wrong, except our Philip”
What really surprises me is that, despite the crushing tide of benefits scroungers from Bulgaria and Romania failing to materialise in January, the rabid tory/UKIP nutters keep banging on about it.
There is no evidence that benefits tourism is a thing, and the claim has been consistently shot down and discredited.
Our coalition can’t even agree among themselves on limiting movement of people – Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary, said the net migration target was “not sensible” because it hinged on factors largely beyond the Government’s control – such as EU migration and Britons leaving or returning to the UK.
Despite this, Lord Snooty and his chums persist in talking about policies to solve a problem that only exists in their imaginations.
I can’t help thinking this is just pissing against the wind, time-wasting until the election, because Dave and his chums can’t really think of anything to do that will really make a difference to the almighty mess that his banker pals made when they screwed the economy…
mrmarjon 