Hopefully those who voted them in will now realise that their ‘betters’ hold them in contempt.
It also shows why Labour has had such an open door policy. In their universe any questioning of immigration = moral pariah.
Question… I thought the UK wasn’t part of the Schengen border control protocols? If so, how are all these immigrants entering the UK?
It is part of the EU however; all EU citizens have the right to work in any EU country.
Lack of Schengen basically just means they need a passport to actually come in. But anyone with EU citizenship is allowed anywhere within EU.
I’m with that, I semi loathe him and can’t wait for Labour to get booted out, but his remarks didn’t bother me at all. Frankly regardless of politics, listening to that interaction, I can see myself saying something damned similar.
Two kinds of “immigrants.”
EU residents / citizens, who have right to work throughout the zone (and K and Ireland have been the least obnoxious of EU zone in putting up barriers to that) and
Immigrants (outside of EU).
Of which many are upset about the second more than the first (if they make the difference.
Also UK has rather more liberal - long-standing tradition - asylum policy, so UK gets lots of illegal immigrants cum ‘asylum seekers’
They speak better English than me.
Care to bring some actual knowledge to the table?
Care to bring any hard data to the table, other than anecdotes? My office mate owns a hotel: the cleaners are all Eastern European and can’t speak English with any level of proficiency. Oh no! Conflicting anecdotes!
I’ve already posted statistics from the New Europeans Report commissioned by the Human Rights Council on how Eastern Europeans employees are overwhelmingly clustered in the lowest paid positions, and on average are willing to earn 12.5% less than their British counterparts (not least because many of them are being exploited by employers):
But, again, whether they speak English perfectly (though I contend that there’s some reason that doctors are being employed as cleaners that you aren’t exactly being forthcoming with), the fact remains that this massive influx of Eastern Europeans, orders of magnitude more than the government predicted, are having precisely the effect that I described in my original post:
That is what is so great about anecdotal evidence, Capt. Ridley’s Shooting Party can’t compete because he’ll never know what that specific guy who had that one girlfriend who saw her buddy do that thing that time.
Care to bring actual evidence to the table?
I should point out: I’m not anti-immigrant. I’m the grandson of an Irish immigrant from Mayo who came to the Lancashire coalfields looking for work down the mines. But we also need a rational immigration policy, where “ghettoes” aren’t formed by concentrating large populations of immigrants into already incredibly poor areas.
The ascension of the new European states to the EU was a complete clusterfuck on the part of the Labour government. They predicted something like on the order of 10,000 new immigrants would enter the UK as a result of the new states joining. In actual fact, 1.5million entered the UK in little over a year. How could there possibly have been any sort of rational discussion of community cohesion, analysis of whether vital services could cope under the strain, how to make sure immigrant populations are evenly spread etc. etc. when these figures were so catastrophically wrong? It was just plain incompetence.
This is a highly contentious statement. E.g see here (my bolding):
It may seem obvious that it’s Anglo-Saxon true-bred Brits who suffer from Polish immigrants coming here and taking their jobs, but lots of things *seem *obvious. Ask yourself this - before your mate hired Poles to clean his hotel, was he employing Brits? Or were the cleaners Nigerian, Portugese, Serbian…?
There was certainly an unprecedented wave of immigration in the last decade, and the impact on services has been significant. But the idea that this has driven down wages for Brits isn’t backed up by the evidence.
Two other points to consider on the economic impact of immigration:
-
If immigrants are earning 12.5% less than the average worker in the same job, that labour cost saving counts as a reduction in inflation. Which is generally a good thing. If food prices had risen in line with indigenous Brits wages over the past decade, for example, then we’d all be poorer by virtue of spending more of our income just on eating. The fact that they haven’t risen so fast means that we get to both buy food and go down the pub in the evening - so getting more for our money and increasing the value of the local economy.
-
If all these cheap Poles had stayed in Poland, how many jobs would have followed them there? Capital is a lot easier to transfer across borders than labour is. And while there are some jobs (e.g. construction) that are location specific, there are more that aren’t.
Of course this just what Gordon Brown promised at the Labour Party Conference in 2007!
Part of the reason this gained traction with the UK media is that it’s the first time the general public have had a chance to see what the reporters have known for years… i.e that Gordon Brown is utterly two-faced and a real sh*t in private.
So on that basis this gaffe played against an established stereotype of Brown’s. Cameron needs to watch for any similar remarks around social class, as it would fit the established image of him as a toff.
Brown made things worse by offering a pretty disingenuous apology on Radio 2 afterwards, and the image of him with his head in his hands as the call was played back is a powerful one.
FWIW as soon as she said “what about all these immigrants” I knew it would turn into a standard Daily Mail “coming over here, taking our jobs and living on benefits” rant, so I can understand why Brown thought she was bigotted.
Unfortunately once those kind of views gain enough support across a population they move from being bigotted to “what everyone is thinking”, as though that makes it OK.
From the April 2008 House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs report “The Economic Impact of Immigration”. Your report is from 2005. In particular, the report you linked to is not an empirical analysis of what has happened to wages since the ascension of the new European states, rather it’s a mathematical model attempting to resolve a seeming paradox between two other mathematical models.
Spare me.
Is Prof. Stephen Nickell then mistaken in stating that home care staff and cleaners (among others) were adversely affected by this recent wave of immigration? The report above makes it clear that at least two prominent economists disagree with you. On what basis do you state that there is no evidence? In particular, point 113 of the above report, in bold typeface states outright:
My bolding.
Really? You can tell all that just from this brief snippet, or said brief snippet has just confirmed it for you?
I’m confused as to why it is bigoted to say that people who live and were born in a country should have first crack at any jobs inside that country? That is different than if you’re saying that the ‘darkies’ should just stay home, right?
IMO, the real damage is the way it reinforces the image that big shots put on happy smiley faces in public, but privately hold the Teeming Millions in utter contempt. The “why did that idiot staffer set up that meeting” part is perhaps worse than the “bigoted woman” part.
The brief snippet confirmed what seasoned political journalists already knew.
e.g. Nick Robinson at the BBC:
“For those of us that have known Gordon Brown for many years, what we have just seen is no huge surprise I have to say.”
Gordon’s foul temper and appaling people skills are very well known in Whitehall (search google for “flying nokias” for more).
Didn’t Brown also put his head in his hands on camera, when he heard that his remarks had been picked up?
Yes, it’s different but it’s often very hard to tell the difference between those people who seek a nuanced discussion around the impact of migration on a nation’s delicate socio-economic mix, and small-minded bigots who don’t like anyone different and doggedly repeat lies from the Daily Mail.
Mrs Duffy may in the former camp, but it didn’t sound that way to me when I first heard the interview. Quite prepared to accept she has genuine concerns, but I can see why statements like “where are all these immigrants flocking from” immediately trigger the “racist tosser” reaction in people.
I think this episode brings up a question:
If the members of one side of the immigration debate (both in the UK and the US) start any debate with the assumption that the other side is bigoted, can there be really meaningful debate?
I think the chances for reaching mutually agreeable compromises is significantly reduced, and this is why “status quo” seems to end up being the result more often than not.