One achievement of which I am very proud was my part in ensuring that the UK did not place restrictions on the right to free movement of the first EU Eastern European accession wave. The arrival of so many Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Latvians etc in the UK has been a brilliant social and cultural development and provided some support for an economy wrecked by the reckless greed of bankers.
There can be no more stark illustration of the tiny political space occupied by the major political parties and portrayed by the mainstream media as the only “serious” political opinion, than New Labour’s shrill contention that the bankers of RBS/Natwest should only be allowed 100% of salary as a bonus and not 200%. Why not about 5% like other civil servants, which is what they are.
To return to the subject, free movement of peoples is a great thing. I do not want governments to tell people where they can and cannot go. It is wonderful that I can wake up tomorrow and decide to settle in Trieste or Gorzow Wielkopolski, without permission from anybody. Don’t take it for granted, think about it – isn’t it wonderful?
My role? I was First Secretary Political and Economic in the British Embassy in Warsaw when the question of our attitude to free movement on accession was decided, and I produced a paper on the subject. I researched it quite assiduously, including a meeting with the five Romany Kings of Poland in the castle at Oswiecim – Auschwitz. My conclusion was that there would be no mass migration, but many young Polish people might typically come for a few years to work and earn money to start a home back in Poland. My paper was influential and I was much congratulated. Incidentally, I very much underestimated how many Polish people would come, but I am unrepentant – in fact extremely happy about it.
When I first achieved serious political consciousness, in my teen years, I should have been horrified if you had told me that in my lifetime the government would defend the receipt of intelligence from torture and indefinite detention without trial, and much educated opinion would agree. I would not have believed the government would pay for poster vans going round with signs telling immigrants to go home. And I would not have believed that some poor Romanian chap arriving in the UK would have been hounded by reporters- to general approbation – because of his ethnicity.
The fundamental worries about Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants do have one rational basis. More than any other EU states, Romania and Bulgaria were admitted despite the fact that they blatantly did not meet the acquis communitaire across the full range of economic and governance measures. The decision to pretend they did was fundamentally dishonest, and that will always have future ill-effects. Romania and Bulgaria are less developed, worse governed and therefore more prone to mass economic emigration.
While I deprecate the dishonesty of pretending they met the acquis, however I did and do support their membership of the EU. It was the right strategic move. An approach that said, “you do not meet the acquis, but we will admit you to membership, now let’s work out the consequences” would have had better success. The EU’s great mistake at present is not offering a fast track to very early membership to Ukraine on a similar basis.
In a couple of decades Bulgaria and Romania will have caught up. I expect that, because of the difficulties of the societies from which they come in terms of crime and governance, it is not unlikely that there will be a larger proportion of social problems from these new immigrants than from other recent Eastern European immigration, and doubtless we will see these trumpeted in the racist press. But in the long run, it is another great addition to our country and increase to our own freedoms. I must go look at the countryside of Eastern Romania.
Summerhead
very interesting comment … links, please …
Can anyone name any EU countries other than the UK which provide translations (into several languages, not all of which are EU languages) of literature explaining how to claim state benefits?
Idem for leaflets issued by the NHS.
And idem for any other business connected with the state.
None of you will like, what I am about to write, and you probably won’t believe me, and that’s O.K..Just in case you are wondering one of my friends is an ex-soldier – and he also has the T-Shirt to prove it..and he’s just done a sponsored thing, you know the kind of thing that ex-soldiers do, and he has all his arms and legs, and is delighted, that he has come back from the brink, and he has met us lot – just a bunch of friends who go and see live bands together in our local pubs…
When it happened, I knew nothing about it. I don’t watch TV…but then I read the news about Woolwich – and I literally threw up – and I haven’t done that in years…
I thought they wouldn’t dare do that again…Of course at this stage of convulsion – I was just reading words on a screen – I had seen no photography, and nothing on TV…
So the next day..I got my head together – and because I am retired and have nothing much better to do…I examined all the detailed photographic evidence as best as I could over the next few days and weeks
I read Chris Spivey – I saw 108morris108 videos on youtube…
And I didn’t say a word…
Some of my friends -were writing -what exactly you might expect them to write on Facebook. I didn’t write a word in reply…
I just told one friend of mine – look at this…but went into no more detail…
I am not a Professional photographer…but when I was 15, I was doing my own colour printing – using a Russian Zenith enlarger – and Ferrania Colour Film…I didn’t just do Black & White..I did Colour Too…
I also know how to use search engines – and found what the locals in Woolwich wrote about it…
Now you can believe what you like.
They said you can’t write that..
What about Langley Estate – and Bury?
Give me a Break…
Just look at the evidence…
Read the analysis of the evidence…
Use Your Own Eyes…
And yet they still got away with it.
Too dangerous to touch.
Don’t say a word
Woolwich was Faked – Very Poorly – an Amateur Production…
Listen to the sound recorded on the bus – and what is being said…
Oh but no, no one goes to that level of investigation and analysis do they?
So what was the point of it all???
And Boston too.
Are all you TV zombies – believing everything you are fed…???
These people do this stuff for real too.
They kill, and they assassinate.
This is the American version
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr114.html
Tony
‘Incidentally, I very much underestimated how many Polish people would come, but I am unrepentant – in fact extremely happy about it.’
Commendable honesty there Craig- and good to see you posting regularly again.
As a homeowner who requires the occasional services of builders and plumbers, and an occasional visitor to bars and restaurants who appreciates decent customer service,I ‘m also personally ‘happy’ about high Polish immigration over the last decade. However if I worked in construction, catering, or any other economic sector benefitting from this extra supply of inexpensive labour, I ‘d be less pleased.
‘In a couple of decades Bulgaria and Romania will have caught up’. Err…given the downward trajectory in wages and salaries in the UK at the moment, some future convergence in UK and Bulgarian/Romanian living standards is certainly on the cards, but more via the continued erosion of living standards here- for all but the extractive elites.
Techno @7.56- Two of your points are spot-on, but you’re wrong to say the ‘high’ level of UK benefits is a complicating factor in free movement across the EU. Rather, the UK benefits system , unlike most of our neighbours,peculiarly has an array of benefits that are ‘non contributory'( pension credit, Housing Benefit etc). Hence the panic over large Roma families from Bulgaria & Romania possibly arriving in significant numbers, to which Craig alludes.
Rasvan,
You said:-
“” Romania and Bulgaria are less developed, worse governed and therefore more prone to mass economic emigration”
The news that Romanians couldn’t care less about coming to the UK still didn’t reach you.
Maintaining convictions in striking contrast to the reality, how they call this symptom ? ”
I honestly do not know what the true figures reflect relative to migratory patterns to the UK from Romania and Bulgaria.
I can say, that after some 300 years of unyielding exploitation of the Caribbean by Britain ( pre and post slave emancipation) it was mainly in the post-World War 11 period that persons from the Caribbean were invited to Britain, notably by then Minister Enoch Powell, and thus a sizeable minority of Caribbean descendants are to be found living as Brits today.
The contemporary reality, even in the British colony of the Turks and Caicos Islands, where I live and work, is that primarily for higher education, but for some considerable time the preferred migratory choices, for economic reasons, from the Caribbean, have been to the US and Canada.
P.S. Nice to have you back Craig.
Daniel
The money isn’t a moral issue. Craig was commandered to work for a Thatcher globalist dogma for which we have to pay, because war is more expensive. War is reserved for countries that need to be colonised or neutralised for the benefit of foreign exploitation, like Syria and South Sudan.
I wish the BBC would stop repeating the lies about Northern Ireland that its people want to open up investigations about murdered loved ones, when every body in the whole world know that the UK did the murders to create hatred and ethnic tension. Even in Syria when you contemplate how many tourists visit Southern Turkey, Cameron is well able to bus in mercenaries from the UK to carry out sectarian killings in Syria. We are not supposed to distrust our governments but we should start to believe that whatever they are capable of in terms of treachery, they will be doing , and well beyond.
As a [voluntary, world wandering] migrant myself, I wonder, do those who open the gates, live near them?
Craig O/T Did you know the cheery Ghanaian Komla Dumor who was a presenter on the World Service. He has sadly died following a heart attack aged 41. He had a big smile.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25796151
Meanwhile the chief actors are gathering in Davos 22-25 January.
Same old. Same old.
75 pages of the names of the 1%. Each page contains approx.30 names.
The list includes Cameron, Osborne and Blair plus Netanyahu for good measure.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/01/16/world-economic-forum-meeting-key-participants/4516249/
MARY – PLEASE MAKE AN EFFORT TO KEEP ON TOPIC – EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING SO and there have been a lot of very good contributions so far!!
Thanks for the great article, Craig, and the seasonally adjusted list of village idiots from all over the world, Mary, hell bent on scraping more profits from meagre families, hell bent on intending to undercut local labour with immigrant low wage slavery and up for more war and mischief to accomplish their moneyraking goals.
I wish god is huge, if there is one, so huge that he could piss down the piste leaving a yellow streak for any alien to see, running straight into the Davos conference centre, drowning the lot of these money bags, lay them out to freeze and keep them in perpetum for all to see, yellow frozen out and pickled in piss.
me, I’m an immigrant too.
But then so are many who scream blue murder today in this nation of immigrants. UKIP/Tory hypocrits who forever orientate themselves and take note and copy the largest immigrant country and call it your own policy, feckless, barely managing and not taking heed of better, historically grounded and tried european systems/policies.
sod the lot and vote for daft Rupert Read instead?
Were have all the Independents gone?
Read this morning that Miliband has bettered Cameron in a game of political one-up man-ship. He wants people claiming benefits to do Maths tests on top of their English proficiency tests. Brilliant !!!
We know who it is aimed at, but this will bite them in the arse. Labour especially has watered our education system down so badly that we are seeing 16 year olds leaving school without the basics. Are they now to be penalised financially because our Govt is failing them? And as for the cheats, they shall always cheat ! There is always someone around to help fill out a form or take the test for you.
Yes, lets divide society further. It is just more proof that both parties are clueless when it comes to the results of their policies of the past, again, Labour especially.
The grand design is a United States of Europe with an unelected elite dictating from Brussels what’s good for us. I’d far rather keep the old EEC.
I’m living in Austria at the moment,and HC Strache is walking it. They have after 3 months deliberation managed to keep him out with yet another Grand Coalition.It’s grand allright. Its also the reason the far right keep getting the majority of votes. People are tired of being signed up to things that they don’t want, which is what the left & right parties in all European countries seem to do.So come the next election, he’ll probably increase his vote to over 50% and manage to keep a grand coalition from forming.
Shades of the 30’s ?? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see where things are going, but you do need to be one now in the UK to get benefits
We are always hearing about immigrants helping our country economically. There is no attempt by politicians to help this country economically. All that exists is an agenda to scrap the UK in favour of the interests of a global elite that wants to trade globally.
You’d have thought that we have a skills shortage – so why are all my construction trades qualifications and experience being rendered invalid by new QVF qualifications. Maybe because there are no construction jobs to fill, no building programme, no Green plan, no plan even to keep the lights on – only a plan for politicians to survive by borrowing until the next election in order to receive their bonus/payback in the political gravy train.
The construction industry is a combination of old-fashioned, Old Labour, jobs for the boys on the one side and highly bent, highly financially mortgaged city financiers, plus a lot of cheap immigrant labour. The rules churned out by the old beer and sandwich boys become stiffer and more expensive to deploy, and the costs have to support multiple layers of virtual companies with their financial hierarchy of insurance and due diligence self-protection. Printed money pays for the eager minions.
I am sure there are great opportunities among the fat middle classes for industrious and conscientious construction workers, but here where I live in Muslim Birmingham nobody wants to pay for work being done properly. The Local council advises that they cannot police standards and that employers of bodgers and cowboys will fail to sell or rent out their properties one day. No. The properties remain faulty for years, until someone can be found to sign off the bodges as safe for office purposes. By the time the installations have burned down premises, bodger has scarpered and owner has long ago upgraded to another investment.
I wish all immigrants well if they can make a living on the low fruit ofthis process. But by the time they are defending the reputation of their companies, they too will be losing custom to the next wave of flybenights whose names, addresses, and company details are untraceable.
A landlord who buys a cheap property to rent out is only interested in keeping the property going long enough to pay for their ultimate ambition, be that a car or dream house, or shop or business. There just does not exist the idea of investing in quality. There is a vast chasm between the government regulations and what is done in practise. The vast sums of money spent on surveillance are not used to implement laws, they are used by government to put leverage on people they want to use to circumvent the law.
In short, espionage is used firstly for tracking criminals and secondly for manipulating the progress of Islam in this country. There are no terrorists so they have to manufacture incidents to justify the cost universal espionage. They use the spying system to identify good Muslms, whose chances they can block by setting naughty Muslims against them, and to raise the opportunities of the bad Muslims, in order to disgust the English population with their bad behaviour.
Good Muslims, behaving justly and commanding the love and respect of UK citizens are a nightmare for the ancient sect of Druids called the Church of England. There are enough dodgy Muslims around to persuade the good hearts of the English people to bin Islam forever. Immigration is a tool for manipulating the sensibilities of ordinary people as well as being a tool for creating a global trading empire.
HabbabKuk – LOL
My 2 penneth – it’s not about money it’s about resources. We don’t have the resources to support an ever-expanding population – I won’t bore you with a list of our failing infrastructure. That said, I can’t blame anyone wanting to move to better themselves so there lies the connundrum for me personally.
‘But then so are many who scream blue murder today in this nation of immigrants.’
ahhh the old, globalist ‘nation of immigrants’ trope. Of course historically Britain has been a nation of emigrants, not immigrants. At UN summits on migration in the 50s the UK was designated in the ’emigrant’ camp, as anyone with an iota of histrical knowledge is aware. Fifty thousand Huguenots admitted across the whole British Isles (including Ireland) after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and less than 200,000 Ashkenazim admitted during the pogroms of the late nineteenth centure do not a ‘nation of immigrants’ make.
I’m sorry but this is probably the biggest load of bollocks I have ever read. It’s good to know that as a policy wonk touring the castles of Poland, you were, and apparently still are, so utterly divorced from the realities of mass-immigration for ordinary folk.
“The arrival of so many Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Latvians etc in the UK has been a brilliant social and cultural development”.
Yea, right. How wonderfully enriched we all feel. In my local town it has resulted in a massive increase in crime and the undercutting of the British worker by people prepared to live 10 or more to a house. You can get a Polish decorator there who will do a 12 hour day for £60. It is simply not possible for a British worker with a mortgage and kids to compete. But don’t worry. We can now enjoy Latvian folk music at the Arts Centre.
“I would not have believed the government would pay for poster vans going round with signs telling immigrants to go home”
This is patently false. The posters told illegal immigrants to go home. It was a cheap political stunt by the Conservatives to give the impression that they actually care about doing anything about it when in truth none of the three parties do. They would have had no effect, very few people would have seen them, and many of those that did would be unable to read them.
“it is not unlikely that there will be a larger proportion of social problems from these new immigrants than from other recent Eastern European immigration, and doubtless we will see these trumpeted in the racist press.”
Christ Alive! It’s you who’s partly responsible for it but you are so alienated from the consequences of your highly regarded academic papers that all that bothers you is the potential reaction from the “racist press”, whatever that is.
“I must go and look at the countryside of Eastern Romania”
How (ahem) bourgeois is this? You go off butterflying in the Carpathians and sing the praises of being able to settle in Trieste while the ordinary worker has to bear the disastrous consequences of your desire to rub everyone’s noses in diversity!
“In my local town it has resulted in a massive increase in crime”
And would you share which town that is so we can check the actual statistics – Crime has been reducing in most of the UK in recent years. It has reduced in counties like Lincolnshire where there has been a large increase in immigrant population
http://www.lincolnshire-pcc.gov.uk/News-and-Events/News-Archive/2013/Lincolnshire-Police-Goes-From-Strength-To-Strength.aspx
I wouldn’t deny that immigration causes strains, but it also solves many problems and does enrich our society (we could just give the entire country back to the Celts) so there is no need for the exaggeration employed by the BNP/UKIP/Tories/Daily Mail which 9 times out of 10 is based on lies rather than facts. It is the oldest trick in the book to divert attention away from dealing with real economic problems by playing the race card.
“Fifty thousand Huguenots admitted across the whole British Isles (including Ireland) after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and less than 200,000 Ashkenazim admitted during the pogroms of the late nineteenth centure do not a ‘nation of immigrants’ make.”
No lets just look at all those who arrived after the Celts and the language we use. You might get your thrills by painting youself with Woad and speaking an ancient version of Welsh – most of us don’t.
Ref Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!
20 Jan, 2014 – 8:51 am
MARY – PLEASE MAKE AN EFFORT TO KEEP ON TOPIC – EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING SO and there have been a lot of very good contributions so far!!
Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!
18 Jan, 2014 – 5:05 pm
O/T, as Mary is wont to say, but never mind.
The BBC informs us that Lord McAlpine has died at his home in Italy.
As the dead cannot sue, I do hope that this event will not embolden some of the Eminences to repeat the scurrilous accusations they made on this blog about McAlpine some months ago – accusations which were shown to be unfounded.
I do also hope that there will be now gloating on here, nor comments of the sort “hope he burns in hell”.
Thank you kindly!
~~~~~
On the Obama NSA thread!
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/01/signifying-nothing/#comment-438152
Get lost.
@Daniel Rich
“I wonder, do those who open the gates, live near them?”
What exactly are you inferring? Don’t want to upset your right wing friends for whom being anti-immigration and against the different is something of a matter of faith?
Mary
So Habba is now your role model? He has just as much right to make off topic posts as you do.
You can get off my back too ESLO. Your best mate is being hypocritical.
What does ESLO stand for btw? Or are you one and the same as Habbabkuk as someone suggested two threads back?
“Exposing Shitty Little Orthodoxies” from Orwell. I very much doubt Habba shares my stance on immigration – see above.
ESLO and Resident Dissident; do try asking Habbabkuk some questions on this thread. I expect he’ll prove evasive. He’s racist.
Clark
If I see racism then I tend to respond when I see it (see my posts above) – I haven’t seen it from Habba in the past. Concern about levels of immigration is not the same thing as being a racist.
ESLO, Mary obviously commented to alert Craig to the death of someone he may have known due to his connection with Ghana, whereas Habbabkuk clearly attempted to derail the previous thread. I know you dislike Mary’s comments, but these actions are not remotely equivalent, and Habbabkuk is indeed hypocritical. Repeatedly. But what can you expect from a nasty authoritarian racist who tries to disrupt discussion? Don’t be his ally; he’s using you.
ESLO, I may have oversimplified. I suspect Habbabkuk is one of those unpleasant people who like to exaggerate fears of immigration for other political ends.
I’ll find Habbabkuk’s racist joke and link to it.
Nevermind Rennard has been ‘suspended’.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25804724
Clegg is in a pickle.
This morning this exchange took place on Radio 4 Today between him and Justin Webb at around 8.15am
Webbe asked whether Clegg would continue to work with Rennard if he apologised, and reminded him that when Jenny Tonge “said something about Israel that you didn’t want her to say” he sacked her. He replied that Jenny had said something that “deeply, deeply upset many Jewish people in this country”.
A friend wrote to Webb
Dear Justin,
I liked your questioning of Nick Clegg. Glad you asked him about Baroness Tonge. Pity you couldn’t have gone the extra inch and asked: So, is “deeply, deeply upsetting Jewish people” the only criterion for getting sacked from the Lib Dem party?
🙂
ESLO, racism and sock-puppetry combined, from Habbabkuk.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/12/palestine/comment-page-2/#comment-384619