Christie Davies Letter from London: Immigration is Theft
Britain is a very small island, a tiny off-shore fragment. England taken alone has a population of over fifty million crammed into a land area about twice the size of Tasmania. Due to immigration England now has the highest population density in Europe and the fifth-highest in the world. The last thing such a country, one that was once a major source of emigration, needs is more people. Yet it is experiencing very high levels of immigration due to the stupidity and wilfulness of its political rulers, who are happy to ignore the resentment felt by the ordinary citizen at this influx and some of whom, like Gordon Brown when he was prime minister, even condemn these ordinary voters as “racist”.
Between 1995 and 2014 an extra four million foreign-born people settled in the United Kingdom. In any one year as many as half a million new long-term immigrants arrive. England now has 419 people per square kilometre, which is up from 379 in 2001. England has overtaken the Netherlands in population density and it is England, not Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, where the immigrants are settling. It is projected that the density of population will rise to 460 people per square kilometre by 2030. The prospect is intolerable.
The result of this mass immigration has been a marked but deliberately concealed fall in the standard of living of the indigenous population and a large rise in inequality. The lying politicians, notably Tony Blair, have boasted about the rise in total national income due to the extra labour the migrants have provided, but most of this increase has gone in wages and welfare payments and services to the migrants themselves. Very little of it has ended up in the pockets of the indigenous population and that little has been completely offset by a rapid and substantial rise in house prices, as more people are crammed into a fixed space. Rents and mortgage payments have rocketed and these are of course a very large part of the expenditure of British citizens and particularly the poorer ones. Not only can the building industry not provide new dwellings fast enough, but as it tries to do so it gobbles up our unspoilt countryside. Britain is being concreted over and is ceasing to be a green and pleasant land. Travel has become impossible, with clogged roads and crowded trains. Our land has been stolen from us. Immigration is theft.
The Left-liberal proponents of an open-door policy, the ones who have imposed this hell on an unwilling people, are the same ideologues who whine about rising inequality. Yet immigration is a key cause of rising inequality. If there is an influx of relatively unskilled migrants, it is those among the indigenous population without skills or capital who are bound to lose out. The leftists were recently excited about Thomas Piketty’s best-selling and utterly misguided book Capital, which set out in an over-simple algebraic formula why we were getting more unequal. However, by capital Piketty meant wealth and a large part of that wealth consists of land and housing. It is the value of these that has risen enormously. When house prices rise there is a transfer of wealth in favour of those who own one from those who do not. Those who lose out are the ones struggling to purchase or rent one. My own modest house is worth ten times what I paid for it, far more than the rate of inflation. Today I could not afford to buy it. The situation is made worse by affluent foreigners buying up the better-quality housing purely as a speculative investment.
The very poorest people, those who live in tiny terraced houses or municipally owned flats, have been displaced by immigrants, usually for bureaucratic leftist reasons but at times involving corruption. The Cockneys of the East End of London have largely been forced to leave and their tight-knit communities have been erased. It is ethnic cleansing by another name. The only people who have benefited from immigration have been the very rich, who seek underpaid foreign flunkeys, and our more inefficient managers, who bleat that they cannot fill their jobs with indigenous labour. What they mean is that they do not pay their employees enough by British standards but that these meagre wages look good to immigrants from poor countries. Such managers are too lazy and unimaginative to make do with fewer employees by reorganisation or mechanisation including sophisticated computing.
At the moment unemployment seems low, but this is because the figures have been rigged to exclude those who have retired early or are on disability benefit or are Muslim women kept permanently out of the labour force by their brutal controlling husbands. When unemployment rises, as it will at the next downturn, we will be left with a large pool of discontented unemployed foreigners. This has already happened in Lancashire and Yorkshire where the textile industries imported large numbers of Pakistanis as cheap labour in the 1940s and 1950s and in the furniture industry which brought in village carpenters from Pakistan. These industries inevitably collapsed, because it is cheaper to produce these simple items in a poor country or indeed a more efficient one. The collapse has left behind centres of major discontent with unemployment rates of 25 per cent among the immigrant Pakistani population.
In the 1960s when the British population was rising due to a high birth-rate among the indigenous population, the views of scholars such as W.M.S. Russell and Jack Parsons, who pointed out the problems of overcrowding in Britain, were highly fashionable. Now their work is never mentioned because people fear being called “racist”, since the cause of the overcrowding is obviously immigration. In the intervening years, when the indigenous birth-rate fell and immigration was restricted, the rate of rise in the population was much lower and a large part of the rise was due to people living longer.
I do not blame the immigrants for wanting to come to a country that is far better in all respects than the wretched ones into which they were born. In their position I would try to do the same. The real villain is Tony Blair, Britain’s worst twentieth-century prime minister. Blair made three blunders in regard to immigration out of a mixture of contempt for his own people, a compulsive wish to prance on the world stage and look good, and a complete lack of foresight. When the East European countries emerged from the long night of Soviet socialism and went on to enter the European Union in 2004, they were entering an entity one of whose central principles was the free movement of labour. However, most of the existing EU countries imposed severe restrictions on migration from the East, but Britain under Blair did not and two million immigrants arrived. Blair always proclaimed that he was the apostle of modernity and yet this influx he promoted has trapped Britain into being a low-productivity economy where there is no incentive to modernise through labour-saving machinery, including computing, or through better organised services.
The East Europeans do not in themselves constitute a problem. Their children will learn English and their grandchildren will be loyal and productive British citizens who have embraced British traditions and culture. This is what happened with those who arrived here from Eastern Europe as displaced persons after the Second World War. Their descendants are typical British people whose origins are revealed only because they have names that no one else can pronounce, rather like my own people, the Welsh. When these East Europeans arrived, the main opposition to them came from leftists under the influence of the Soviet Union. These leftists campaigned to have them forcibly deported to their countries of origin in communist Eastern Europe where they would have faced persecution and even death. Those who were allowed to stay were not allowed to choose their employment freely but were drafted into such industries as the government chose where working conditions were unpleasant. It has been shown that their long-term health suffered from the experience.
When I lived in Leeds in the early 1970s the local leftists still disliked and rejected them. I remember a Soviet orchestra coming to the town on tour. The leftists all flocked to buy tickets for it out of loyalty to the expanding Soviet empire. By contrast Ukrainian refugees turned out to protest angrily against Soviet oppression. Many of them had been the victims of Operation Vistula, organised in 1947 by the Polish communist government, which drove the Ukrainian minority out of their homes in south-eastern Poland. When I worked in the region in the 1990s and went walking in the countryside, every few miles my map would record “former Ukrainian church” or “former Ukrainian village” to indicate that there had once been a flourishing settlement there. Yet in Leeds the left elite, queuing up for their Soviet violinists, looked down on these men and women who had lost their homes and often their families and sneered “Banderists” at them, the Soviet term for those who had struggled for Ukrainian independence from Russia. By a strange chance one of the local progressives had been one of the communist organisers of the Operation Vistula expulsions, a Polish hireling of the Soviets who had to leave for Britain when the party line changed; he now lived locally and only much later was his nasty past revealed.
Blair also instructed his officials to loosen considerably the rules regarding the checking of those from outside Europe claiming asylum. Many of the claimants were fakes and they were deliberately allowed to slip through the net so as to avoid the publicity attending an expulsion.
Worst of all, Blair abolished the “primary purpose rule”. Any British citizen who has married a foreigner is entitled to bring their spouse into the country. It would be inhumane to separate a husband and wife tied together by bonds of affection and trust. Where the problem arises is when a marriage is arranged or even forced, often in pursuit of some sordid material pay-off, and no such ties exist. Many of these marriages were simply a trick to evade the immigration rules, and the spouse was effectively being treated not as a human being but as a commodity, and it was perfectly proper to block their entry into the country by means of the primary purpose rule. Under pressure from British Muslim activists, for many of whom a marriage was a way of obtaining a British passport, Tony Blair abolished the rule, saying it was discriminatory. Some Muslims had another reason for seeking an absence of restrictions on imported spouses. They wanted to use marriage as a means of compelling those of their children who were showing signs of personal independence and assimilation, to marry unreconstructed, uneducated husbands and wives from their original country. The parents wanted spouses who would bring their wayward offspring back into line and away from the dangers of British freedom.
In approving all these changes Blair should have known that they would destroy Britain. Indeed, for all I know that might have been his purpose. He was, after all, the man who began the dismemberment of the United Kingdom, who subordinated our interests to the EU, denied tradition and fostered multiculturalism. Curse you, curse you, curse you, Mr Blair!
Leftists welcome immigrants, whom they perceive as lacking the ties that hold the British people together in a sense of a common history and culture. The leftists wish to destroy these forms of solidarity, so that they can replace them with their own ideological framework of imposed equality. That is what the weasel Blair meant by modernity, not what the rest of us understand by the word. The even more extreme elements among the Left hate Britain and its history, and now that they recognise their failure to mobilise our patriotic proletariat to this end would like to use the immigrants as a new means of cultural destruction. Some have also cynically calculated that the new arrivals are more likely to be hungry for benefits and more likely to vote Labour.
Now overshadowing everything else is the sudden arrival in Europe of hundreds of thousands of Muslim Arabs. Many of them are Syrians, who had been living in refugee camps in Turkey. Others have used the refugee crisis as a way of sneaking in from Algeria and Morocco and even Iran. This flood of Muslims has been welcomed in by the controllers of the European Union who are answerable to no one and by the German government, much against the wishes of the German electorate. The European Union now wants to share the Muslims out among its various member states, but several countries, notably Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, have wisely refused to accept any. The Central European countries know full well that the Muslims will stubbornly refuse to integrate and also that they have a complete lack of respect for the rights of women and in consequence have a predilection for sex crimes. They know the Muslims will cause permanent and insoluble problems.
As usual, there have been screams of racism. In response the Czech president, Milos Zeman, has wryly pointed out that the Vietnamese, who differ considerably in racial appearance from the Czechs, far more so than any Syrian, have successfully integrated into Czech society; Zeman’s point is that objectively the problem lies on the side of the Muslims.
It is just a question of time before many of these new Muslim arrivals in Europe seek to move to Britain, which already has a substantial Muslim population that refuses to integrate. Immigration is stealing our land but Islam threatens to steal our soul. The question that now faces Britain is whether it will be supine like Sweden or Germany and let these new Muslims flood in, or whether our political leaders will hold steadfast against it, like the Czech Republic or Australia. Australia’s tough line on immigration including the turning back of boats and building detention centres outside the country is exactly what Britain needs. Well done, Australia, you have shown us what is possible.
Christie Davies is the author of The Strange Death of Moral Britain. He has been a visiting scholar at several Indian universities and has taught at Krosno College in Poland.
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