ThunderDragon Blog

In pretty much this fact only:

A cap on immigration is not the answer

Of course not. We need a free market, where all are able to come and go pretty much as they please, but without the right to claim any benefits. A free labour maket, unmolested by unions and protected interest groups demanding protection at the expense of the rest of society.

It’s interesting that a socialist is proposing a free market. Well, I suppose there must be a first time for everything.

Where she is wrong is in referring to the BNP and immigration caps as “rightwing”. They’re not. They’re far left-wing - beyond even Abbott herself.

It’s control that gives them away.

It is obvious that one area can only hold so many people, but this is an impossible thing to keep to:

This Government isn’t going to allow the population to go up to 70 million.

And how, precisely, could they stop it? Are they going to adopt a Chinese-esque breeding-prevention programme? Or is it going to be on a one-death, one conception basis?

If have other major problems with the rest of Phil Woolas’ plans as well - such as the idea that we don’t need immigrants to keep the economy going and to fill jobs. Since there are plenty of joibs that British people won’t take.

As I have said before, benefits are the cause of immigration. British people seem to prefer to sign on the dole than take a low-paid or manual labour job. So immigrants come in to take the comparatively highly-paid jobs, and do them with far more willingness than any “native”.

The only way to actually prevent immigration is for british people to take these jobs. And the only way they’re going to do so is if benefits were cut to make it a less attractive way of life, so they took a job instead of living off of the State, paid for by my taxes.

The governments new[ly reannounced] citizenship tests appear to be expecting immigrants to do more this country than is ever expected of “native” Britons.

So they have to do more than just work and pay taxes - which is itself something that way too many Britons are too lazy to do - but they also have to contribute extra towards public services through an extra levy on their visa, expected to raise a minuscule [in the scheme of public services] £15 million a year. Rather short of the £250 million needed by councils to prevent the need for council tax rises, wouldn’t you say?

But not only that, now migrants are to be expected to do charity work and the like in order to show that they are “active” citizens and earn the right to be a subject of the Queen. We don’t expect any “native” Britons to do this, so why should an immigrant’s citizenship be reliant on doing it?

I don’t think that it is all bad though. The idea that citizenship should be have to be earned is a good one, but this is hardly a new revelation. And the same goes for the requirement to speak English. Nothing new, trotted out again by a different Home Secretary and with a few slight differences to go with it.

Basically, this is a gimmick. None of it will cover citizens of other EU countries, and so is basically meaningless in reality.

I’m not exactly thrilled by the Conservatives suggestion of “a limit on the level of immigration” either. Rather, immigration is good for us, and fuelled by economic expansion and the sheer laziness of too many “native” Britons. Benefits: the cause of immigration.

Why are immigrants still flooding into Britain and getting jobs despite rising unemployment amongst unskilled Brits? Because unemployment benefits are too high, and act as a disincentive for actually getting paid work. The report from Migrationwatch shows that:

• A family with two children is just £30 a week better off working on the minimum wage than not working.
• A single person under 25 on the minimum wage of £193 per week is only £10 a day better off than a non-working person.
• A family with two children and one working member receives £79.50 a week of Working Tax Credit. However, after means testing he keeps only £6.77.
• Working families with children and one working member on the minimum wage are slightly worse off than the same family receiving the maximum Incapacity Benefit.
• A single person on the minimum wage would be £3 a week better off than a single person on the highest level of Incapacity Benefit.

No wonder they don’t bother to get a job when it makes bugger all difference to their income, but takes a lot of time and effort! That’s why they are just lazy - because be hard working isn’t worth their while! What kind of society is being fostered by this? A fat, lazy, unproductive one - that’s what.

What we need to do to cut immigration and to produce great benefits for Britain - such as huge savings on the social security budget, an increase in GDP per head, less pressure on our infrastructure, less downward pressure on low wages, and a reduction in the non working underclass - is very simple: Cut unemployment benefits. Make it worth their while to get off their arse and get a job, otherwise they just won’t bother.

What this Labour government has done over the past decade is foster a society in which living on the dole is both possible and nigh-on acceptable. Unemployment benefit should exist simply to tide them over between jobs, not as a substitute for a job in itself.

I would far rather than working immigrants than lazy-arse Britons in this country.

Yes, he is.

The government has said that it is banning unskilled workers from non-EU countries for the “foreseeable future”. This is just pointless and probably illegal under some EU law. It is pointless because there are hundreds of thousands of unskilled migrants in Eastern Europe which are inside the EU who will immigrate, and it is them who are said to be causing the problems.

Frankly, I have no problem with immigrants, wherever they come from, if they come to work and are willing to integrate - my problem is with lazy-arse Britons who don’t bother getting a job because they can live off the State. I just can’t see how so many just can’t get jobs - since they are supposed to be “Job Seekers” - and yet so many unskilled immigrants can.

So long as they come and work and try to integrate, why can anyone object? If we have jobs that need filling, they need filling. if Britons are too lazy/unwilling to the job, then give it to someone who will. And instead anyone talking about how much they are taking out of us in services, talk about how much the Britons who could be doing the job if they could be bothered are taking out - far more, since they are also claiming benefits.

This ban is pointless as it is mostly unskilled migrants from inside the EU who are coming here - and this ban won’t stop them. All it is aimed to do is make the government look tough while they are being soft.

Sources: BBC, The Guardian

Not just 5,000, but 10,000 illegal immigrants are employed in the security industry. Double the number suggested before. So the Home Office is twice as abysmal as I thought.

It’s just not good enough.

Especially not when they knew about this issue back in July!

The Home Office isn’t fit for purpose, and it is seeming increasingly likely that neither is the Home Secretary.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, put spin before the safety of the public. Despite knowing about illegal immigrants being employed by the Home Office - as security staff, of all things - in July she did nothing. Well, nothing to protect us anyway. She was far too busy spinning to save herself. In August, a Home Office memo read:

So she knew, but did nothing about it.

How can they possibly justify knowing about it in July, yet doing nothing about it until November - five months later?

Can the first female Home Secretary survive much longer, or will David Davis claim yet another Home Secretary scalp for his collection?

The BBC reports that:

Let’s read that again:

Bloody hell! If the Home Office is so bad at screening it’s own security staff as to end up employing people who shouldn’t even be in the country, how on earth can we trust them to screen out terrorists and other undesirables?

They don’t even know how many immigrants there are in this country, for crying out loud! So what the hell are they for?

The Home Office says that companies are responsible for ensuring that their staff were legal to work. Except, obviously, themselves. If the Home Office of all people can’t screen their own personnel, what chance have other companies? Unless, of course, the Home Office is just incompetent, and still absolutely not “fit for purpose”.

Source: BBC
Image: Theo Spark

I agree with Simon Heffer:

Far more so than with Daniel Finkelstein:

Whilst what Powell said in his speech was inflammatory, it was not racist. Every single quote that critics drag from his speech - such as “charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies” or “[i]n this country in fifteen or twenty years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” - were not his own words, but those of the people who spoke to him. Maybe he could or should have made the point that these were, as Danny Finkelstein says “unpleasant or unacceptable”, but Powell was the sort of man who would assume that others would understand that point without prompting.

Also, he never actually said “as I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” But instead he said the phrase in Latin, but wrote it in the transcript, a choice of which he later said:

If he had, it is quite likely that the speech never would have generated such a resonance.

Was Powell racist? No, he wasn’t. I wrote my entire undergraduate dissertation on that subject, which you can read here. My conclusion, after a year of study, is this:

The reason that it has been claimed that Enoch Powell was racist is because he spoke on the issues of race and immigration, and was opposed to the continued entry of immigrants into Britain, and the voluntary repatriation of those who failed to integrate into British society. But Powell was not opposed to immigrants because of the colour of their skin, their racial origins, or their nationality. But what he was concerned about – and what motivated his articles and speeches on the issue – was whether or not they were, or could become, a part of the British nation through integration.