History demonstrates the evils that arise from whipping up popular xenophobic nationalism. After the Tories trumpeted that companies will have to declare how many foreigners they employ, that foreign doctors will be phased out of the NHS, that taxi drivers will have to prove their immigration status, that fewer foreigners will be allowed to study at British universities and that landlords will have to check the papers of their foreign tenants, we will now be told by Theresa May that to oppose this surge of fascism is elitism. I call it fascist after careful consideration; I don’t know what else to call it. Immigrants to Britain are going to be hauled up to produce documents at numerous moments of daily life to prove their right to be here. They will not yet need to be identified by yellow stars, but anybody who does not see the direction of travel is a fool.
The ability of politicians and media to whip up popular racism is well demonstrated historical fact. I am simply appalled by the catalogue I have outlined above. It is astonishing to me that popular opinion, particularly in England, has been conditioned to the point where outright racism has become the accepted everyday level of political discourse. And it is not just the Tories. Blairites are using populist anti-immigrant rhetoric as their most potent attack on Corbyn. Rachel Reeves made a speech last week that channelled Enoch Powell in predicting violent reaction to immigrants, and in some ways was worse than Powell’s classical allusion. But while Powell’s anti-immigrant rant ended his chances of becoming Prime Minister in a more decent age, Reeves is firmly in today’s UK establishment mainstream.
The argument that immigration is impacting the living standards of ordinary working people is a demonstrable falsehood. If mass immigration made a country’s people poorer, then Germany and the USA would have the lowest living standards for ordinary citizens in the world. An economy is not a thing of fixed size with a set number of jobs. If it were not for immigration, there would have been no economic growth in the UK at all since the millennium.
The march of Tory militarism continues apace. Today we will have a further glorying in the creation of weapons of mass destruction, while yesterday scarcely a hair was turned at the announcement of the reintroduction of military cadet forces in our state schools, to instil militarism and xenophobic patriotism into children. The attempt to elide patriotism, militarism, monarchism and the interests of the corporate elite would be laughable were it not successful.
There is no doubt that the racist mood in England is real, and there is no doubt that it is racist. I have never accepted the argument that to oppose immigration is not racist, and consider myself entirely vindicated by current events. The argument that to oppose immigration is not racist is precisely the same as the argument that holocaust denial is not anti-semitic – you can make out a theoretical case that it isn’t, but in practice it works as an extremely good indicator.
It is ironic that May accuses the opponents of popular chauvinism as elitist. The Tory Conference has had two key themes – one is xenophobic nationalism, and the other is educational elitism. The grammar school policy is being driven through, along with the school military cadets – what kind of crazed government is this? But the significance on the attack on the university sector should not be missed. Overseas students are a vital source of revenue and all are already seeing a drop in interest as nobody wants to live in a country where they will be the subject of patent racist hostility, while EU students cannot know where they will stand on fee structures by the end of their course. However the announcement that “new” universities will be treated differently in terms of numbers of overseas students allowed is a major departure that will inevitably spread into other areas; a de facto return to polytechnic status is in the offing.
The new Tory self-confidence was evidenced also in attitudes to Scotland. Theresa May could not have been more explicit that Scotland is but a part of the UK, that the UK voted for Brexit, that Westminster will handle Brexit negotiations and she really does not care what the Scots think. There very plainly is no process, or any intention of any process, that could result in Scotland maintaining a more integrated relationship with the EU while within the United Kingdom. That idea was always fantastical anyway, as it would be an impossibility to accommodate such an arrangement within EU treaties, as I have previously explained. But the gradualists in the SNP have sought to pretend that such a process is happening of which we need to see the outcome before an Independence referendum.
What Theresa May has done this week is publically to rend Nicola Sturgeon’s tabard, and make absolutely plain that Brexit will be organised, negotiated and decided by the UK government and parliament alone. The Scottish parliament will have associated legislative changes, even on devolved matters, imposed on it from above. Scotland’s response to this has so far been alarmingly supine.
I support Scottish Independence passionately because I have an urgent desire to get away from the control of these appalling Tories. I want to live in a society where I can dissent from populist racism without being condemned by the government as a liberal elitist. I also firmly believe that the shock of the break up of the UK is the dislocation required to break the grip of the Tories and UKIP on the psyche of so much of the public in England. It can provide the revolutionary moment for change that Corbyn and those like him can exploit. Scottish independence is the best hope for the rest of the UK too.
I didn’t know about the army cadets in schools, so Googled it. The Guardian had the story along with a picture of Michael Fallon in a school surrounded by school children dressed up as soldiers. It’s grotesque.
You never played soldiers when you were a kid, King? Though I admit Fallon’s a bit grotesque…
I did indeed, and I played cowboys and Indians too. But I’d draw the line at the school dressing us up as cowboys and Indians.
It’s just the Hitler Youth. But you can’t say that cos look, he’s got a bunch of ethnic minority students to pose with him. See, how can that be a fascist move? Ugh
Is it though? Or is it a bunch of toothless rhetorical hogwash designed to placate the decrepit thickos like Baal whilst they figure out how the hell they are to explain to the brexitiers that they’ve spoken to Goldman Sachs, Chase etc and Brexit won’t be happening in any kind of meaningful way?
Now look what you’ve made me do, globalist tools Cunliffe and Rug. You’ve made me agree with Anon!
Incidentally, if you hasve any substantive arguments rather than simple abuse, I’d be very glad to see them.
reintroduction of military cadet forces in our state schools, to instil militarism and xenophobic patriotism into children. The attempt to elide patriotism, militarism, monarchism and the interests of the corporate elite would be laughable were it not successful.
Exactly, Defense secretary Michael Fallon wants to ‘instill British values’ in schools – get it! -British values, in other words ‘humanitarian’ regime change by force; British values to wit disseminating lies and propaganda to the populace via the BBC; British values viz murdering children, slaughtering households and ejaculating families through fear in far off lands, that is the rub and of course surreptitiously steering youngsters into military services bereft of volunteers.
Gettit?!
I overslept this morning and had a shit trip to work behind drivers who had not even then woken up. Consequently I am firmly in contentious mode. At age 9 I’d have killed (!) for a uniform to go with the toy pistol. But at 14 or so when I joined my (boarding) school’s ATC squadron, I did it purely to escape Sunday morning compulsory church. I then found it offered free breaks on RAF stations – where the food was very much better than the school’s – glider flying, night exercises, and an annual party where cigarettes were freely available to all. IOW, it was fun. Even drill was entertaining in its way. Do the Woodcraft Folk do as much? I doubt it. Strangely, my fellow cadets were not the unquestioning play-up-and-play-the game types you might expect. Those joined the Scouts, an organisation for which we had utter contempt, not least because none of them had ever fired a .303 (or, on one memorable occasion, a Bren…it was long ago). Individual abilities were recognised and even sought for. This within the very clear and easily-accepted disciplinary framework of the parent Force.
I am all for giving kids the opportunity to expand their horizons, and the cadets certainly did that. Also, given that most state school teachers are spending much of their class time in keeping order, a bit of institutional discipline is badly needed. So I’m not going to be PC on this one. Ever.
We never engaged in any flag-waving or jingoism as Craig likes to call it. We just had a bloody good time learning survival skills and blowing stuff up. Rock-climbing, target practice – we even did a parachute jump. I was taught how to survive for days with just a knife and a piece of wire.
It was either that or visiting the old dears at the local care home. No brainer.
Ba’al Zevul I too was in the ATC from 13-14 to 19-20 ish, and became a glider pilot at 16.
Yes we fired live 202’s 303’s and sometimes Bren guns.
boxing, motorcycle maintenance, canoe building, radio building and FREE yearly weeks on live RAF stations.
Once I was the only boy in a Shackleton, flying from Farnborough to the Scilly Isles, very noisey.
Of course we were wanted to join the RAF, we had a lot of fun, never actually knew of anyone who joined the RAF,
from our lot. We flew in all sorts of aircraft, never a helicopter and they would not let us do parachuting, bastards.
Agree with Anon. The Goddess Jingo was not worshipped. Once again, the Scouts seemed to have the monopoly on that, though they may have changed now: Baden-Powell was still very much the daddy for them. And a contempt for ‘flag-flapping’ was even the case for Kipling’s impromptu army cadet force, probably based on reality, in “Stalky and Co”…the complete chapter is here:
http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/grol/kipling/stalky07.htm
The phrase “Jelly-bellied flag-flapper” stands out.
In my day you could opt to do Community Service instead. But the Army was much more fun.
I’ve no doubt some of the posters here had a great time at school in the ATC and similar groups, but that is the point. You take kids who are at an impressionable age and teach them the army is cool, all camping and having fun and stuff. It’s a long long way from the reality of what the army does. If you got the kids to kick down front doors, put hoods on other kids and force them to stand in stress positions for many hours and scream at them, it would be more honest.
That’s exactly the point, KingOfWelshNoir. Quite apart from the illegal hegemonic wars based on fabricated premises.
Anon describes having a lot of fun but where did it lead him? What is he doing now? A mercenary working as a troll for the intelligence services to undermine free speech and democracy. His ethical values have evidently been totally destroyed.
The fun described by Anon is just the bribery that corrupts, deliberately calculated to corrupt young impressionable minds and to pervert their sense of values to support the morally corrupt elite. How can these young children understand that they are being deliberately conditioned by these “fun” experiences to develop attitudes of mind conforming to the military agenda? Is it any wonder that he ends up as a mercenary troll working for the military intelligence services to disrupt free speech at the taxpayers’ expense?
Not long ago I read an interesting article by an American Jew, who described free holidays in Israel supported by some Israeli political or lobby organisation. He was asking why the young adults (or teenagers?) were very strongly encouraged by the organisers to have permissive sexual relations with each other during the holidays. It was all part of an elaborate process of manipulation designed to condition youngsters to associate “fun” and positive values with Israel, and recruit them as assets to support Israeli interests in the USA. Military cadets in schools are essentially much the same thing (even though any foreign influence is not direct in this case). They are specifically calculated to corrupt and degenerate in a way conforming with those responsible for the corrupting.
Well, we know what that meeting with Murdoch was all about now, don’t we?
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
Sorry, but I want to live in a society where I can acknowledge that this is a small, overcrowded country, short on infrastructure, with a huge pool of unemployed or underemployed, subservient to the will and economic power of foreign commercial and political entities with no concern for my interests, whose cultural norms are in constant flux, and whose values, as you correctly point out while taking a swipe at Powell, have been in continuous decline since WW2….and to be able to point out on the basis of all that, that mass immigration is a thoroughly lousy idea, without being howled at by comfortable liberalisers and globalist-fascists alike for being a racist.
I’m not sure our positions are compatible, but Scottish independence might solve the dilemma…
Have you thought of becoming Saudi Arabian Ba’al? once you get over a couple of relatively small differences regarding attire and customs you’ll find your views will be much better catered for there than they ever will be here.
No, I thought I made it clear I wanted to live in a small, overcrowded country (etc). But without being abused by the selfrighteous for objecting to it getting any worse. Clear? No, probably not. Point being, if someone objects to me using the N word (and I don’t, except for the purposes of discussion, they might with advantage contemplate their use of the R word. Both are abusive, and both are aimed at groups other than the user. I am beginning to regard them as exactly equivalent, in fact.
Except for the fact that RACISTS have never suffered the way that black people have. As far as I’m aware no racists have ever been sold into slavery or been subjected to second class citizen status across the generations, beaten or killed simply for something beyond their control, and so therefore the connotation that word has with the N word is not at all the same thing. People have a choice to be racist. The colour of your skin is not a choice you can make.
Are you and Shatner the same poster? You seem to go round in pairs.
Have you ever been sold into slavery? Is it a particular concern of yours, and can you make it unhappen? Or do we all have to go around for eternity feeling guilty about what was done to people who are now dead by people who are now dead? Is slavery unique to people of colour? In what way was the condition of the Manchester cotton workers in the 19th century, on brutal hours, in unsafe conditions and on starvation wages, whose retirement consisted of being chucked into the workhouse when no more work could be got out of them – was that so different to that of a plantation slave – who at least had to be fed and found shelter? As to what you describe as second-class citizenship, examples abound of this occurring in very different (“white”) contexts. Catholics under Elizabeth, and Protestants under Mary, to name but two. What you would like to describe as racism is integral to human (and indeed chimpanzee) behaviour.
You correctly (neglecting tanning parlours – amazing how many whites want to be brown) state that the colour of your skin is not a personal choice. Is the charge of racism restricted only to people who disparage or in some other way offend the sensibilities of persons of colour? It is not. Craig, above, makes no distinction: he has ” never accepted the argument that to oppose immigration is not racist…”
Last I heard a lot of white people have been granted freedom of movement by the EU, many of them of similar ancestry to my own, in racial terms. And criticism of their presence here is also racist, eh?
Finally, the term ‘racist’ is too often employed as simple abuse, and as a conversation-stopper. Very much like ‘antisemite’. It hopes to shut down debate. I am very happy to continue debate, on the other hand.
The first slaves shipped to the Americas were Irish and Scots. To obfuscate the fact ,they were classed as identured servants.
@Cunliffe – never been to Ireland, then? Or I guess we can all just make stuff up as fact!
Bahrain?
“No, I thought I made it clear I wanted to live in a small, overcrowded country”
Well then stop your whining about the traffic on the way to work. You wanted overcrowded.. 🙂
Good point, for once.
However, once all the immigrants have buggered off, there’ll be more room, won’t there?
🙂
Oh, and don’t get me started on cyclists.
Cyclists, especially the ones with crash helmets and Lycra shorts…
Baal,
What’s actually happened here is that you have a hormone deficiency that’s mad you irritable and intolerant, go to your doc get some testosterone boosters, – and you’ll look back at this with embarrassment
Thank you for the advice, which is obviously based on personal experience. Now fuck off, troll.
Ba’al I don’t care what you say in your War and Peace lengthy retorts – though as an ancestor of a long line of Manchester mill workers I completely agree that slavery by another name has always existed – but you’re ‘debate’ is moving away from the central point which is that to suggest calling someone a racist is on a par with calling someone of colour the N word is frankly ridiculous and ignorant of the negative history and loaded currency that term has. That’s the nonsense I am calling you out on. And no I am not Shatner, nor do I know him or her.
I’m not a troll Ba’al. Im worse. I’m a socialist. A real one, I don’t believe in borders and nation states, I believe the an hope of a future for our species lies in amity not contempt. I think your attitude condemns younger generations to a crappy existence,one where they don’t enjoy any of the freedoms you did.
I think the ukip generation have been extremely selfish and I think they will see absolutely no change to their country that they’d like, and their grandchildren will have a very poor existence.
Shatnersrug: As a socialist, you might want to consider that the economic migrants who come here have conditions very much worse than our own, on the whole. That makes them more readily exploited by the capitalist class, which in turn makes them resented by the working poor for “taking our jobs”.
The only beneficiary of much of this immigration is the exploiters who want cheap, disposable labour and no responsibilities to their workers.
Ba’al, me to. It’s not fascism to want to protect your culture from globalist neocons and European centralists from swamping by excessive density of human population. If the Scots want to do their own thing I’m sure they will when they’ve made up their minds if only on a 52% majority. While I respect many of your views Craig, this one shows that no one is the fount of all wisdom. A good chunk of the English electorate is waiting for someone who represents their views. No good fit at the moment but ultimately we may have to take the rough with the smooth.
Craig’s piece is mostly crap.
The people of the United Kingdom, just had a referendum, the majority voted to leave the European Union.
BREXIT MEANS BREXIT
Yes, but what does Brexit mean? No one has the foggiest.
I’d be a lot happier regarding the racist UKIP imploding as it is now, if the government of the day hadn’t out UKIPPED the UKIPPERS. Just have to hope May calls an early election and Corbyn sweeps to power, because the prospect we currently have doesn’t bear thinking about.
“Corbyn sweeps to power” lol
Anon, living in a quasi facist junta is plenty to ‘lol’ about too isn’t it? Perhaps if you have the misfortune to be seriously ill enough to require an operation in the NHS, you’ll be ‘lolling’ at the thought that this government has kicked all the talented, skilled surgeons who would have been able to help you out of the door simply because of their nationality/skin colour.
Saint Theresa is going to have 1,500 extra British doctors trained in Britain each and every year.
British Nationalism is a bad thing.
Scottish Nationalism is a bad thing as well.
Would be nice if the people of Europe, of the world, could embrace each other as one but that won’t happen while Scots are being taught to hate the English. It would be nice if the British and Scottish governments could work together for the benefit of all but that isn’t going to happen while the SNP do their best to throw a spanner in the works and strive to destroy the unity the majority of people in Scotland voted for.
Nationalism bad. Not “their Nationalism bad our Nationalism good”.
Without nationalism, you’d have written that in German. If you’d been allowed to.
You mean ‘without’ Russian ‘nationalism you’d have written that in German’.
I intentionally didn’t specify anyone. But it took the Russians a little while to get to the Oder-Neisse line, and without a little of our own, and the US’s, nationalism, and bearing in mind that the Russians might not have wanted to push on to the coast and beyond. I’ll settle for a joint effort: countries internally unified by an appeal to nationalism fighting for interests which just happened to coincide.
Scots are being “taught to hate the English”??? When did this start? – and by whom are they being taught this? You are talking cobblers!!
I have to agree with you Fred. Nationalism bad. Not “their Nationalism bad our Nationalism good”. Nationalists always progress to beating the war drums while proclaiming their own “exceptionalism”.
“that to oppose immigration is not racist, and consider myself entirely vindicated by current events. The argument that to oppose immigration is not racist is precisely the same as the argument that holocaust denial is not anti-semitic – you can make out a theoretical case that it isn’t, but in practice it works as an extremely good indicator.”
Wrong and wrong again.
“we will now be told by Theresa May that to oppose this surge of fascism is elitism.”
Proof, if any were needed, that the use of the term Fascism has been so watered down, as to be rendered useless.
“Immigrants to Britain are going to be hauled up to produce documents at numerous moments of daily life to prove their right to be here. They will not yet need to be identified by yellow stars, but anybody who does not see the direction of travel is a fool.”
Then I am a fool. To compare a powerful nation state, with an embittered and defeated population (Germany after Versailles) and a coherent ideology (Nazism. please not in no way do I excuse it) with a rag bag of Dad’s army misfits limiting immigration, is not the road to Nuremberg…
Mr Murray, I’m afraid you cheapen the dark chapters of the past with this comparison to Nazism. Britain has shifted to the right, no question, but there is nothing wrong with a right-wing in a democracy such as ours.
“The ability of politicians and media to whip up popular racism is well demonstrated historical fact. I am simply appalled by the catalogue I have outlined above. It is astonishing to me that popular opinion, particularly in England, has been conditioned to the point where outright racism has become the accepted everyday level of political discourse.”
Support for all the major parties has been dropping for years. None of the above is Britain’s fastest growing party. 48% of people voted to stay in the EU. Please do not condemn large swathes of the population with sweeping generalisations.
“oday we will have a further glorying in the creation of weapons of mass destruction, ”
We have nuclear weapons, because Atlee’s socialist Labour party gave us them. The blame for this does not lie squarely at the Tory door.
“The new Tory self-confidence was evidenced also in attitudes to Scotland. Theresa May could not have been more explicit that Scotland is but a part of the UK, that the UK voted for Brexit, that Westminster will handle Brexit negotiations and she really does not care what the Scots think. There very plainly is no process, or any intention of any process, that could result in Scotland maintaining a more integrated relationship with the EU while within the United Kingdom. That idea was always fantastical anyway, as it would be an impossibility to accommodate such an arrangement within EU treaties, as I have previously explained. But the gradualists in the SNP have sought to pretend that such a process is happening of which we need to see the outcome before an Independence referendum.
What Theresa May has done this week is publically to rend Nicola Sturgeon’s tabard, and make absolutely plain that Brexit will be organised, negotiated and decided by the UK government and parliament alone. The Scottish parliament will have associated legislative changes, even on devolved matters, imposed on it from above. Scotland’s response to this has so far been alarmingly supine.”
On this, we are in complete agreement.
“I support Scottish Independence passionately because I have an urgent desire to get away from the control of these appalling Tories.”
And if an independent Scotland elects a Tory government?
If an independent Scotland elects a Tory government – or even if a non Independent Scotland ever votes majority Tory – I shall do the naked walk of shame down the entire length of the Royal Mile. Fortunately for everybody, not going to happen.
Pssst, Craig, don’t you remember? you did that last Hogmanay 😉
Craig, I will join you…….about as much chance of a Tory government in Scotland for the foreseeable future as I have of playing centre forward for Scotland…..My cocaine? Have you been paying ANY attention to the Tories fortunes in Scotland in the last 40 years?
The point of Scottish independence is to allow US to choose which government we want, be they left wing, be they right wing.
If people are only campaigning for a permanent, left-wing ,indy Scotland, then quite frankly, the independence movement is not worth the name.
Maybe not for you, but for those of us who are embarrassed to admit to our European friends to being British and Tory-led, Scottish independence is a goal worth striving for. I want to live my remains years in a country that isn’t led by lunatics, and I’m relatively safe in saying that we Scots “got” the Tories decades ago.
I”ll do the same if Scotland gets independence.
“Theresa May could not have been more explicit that Scotland is but a part of the UK, that the UK voted for Brexit, that Westminster will handle Brexit negotiations and she really does not care what the Scots think”
She does have a point. I thought the plan was for Scotland to leave the UK and join the EU. It’s all gone a bit quiet on that front. Problems?
at present, any article in any Scottish newspaper that mentions Scottish nationalism &/or SNP, is seemingly overwhelmed by an army of fulminating commenteers, many of them malicious fake ones. That ‘presumed’ state interference is sailing quite close to Himmlervian fascism. . .
To lighten the mood, how about an opinion poll that was just carried out in the North Korean socialist paradise ?
‘Hilarious’ autocorrect, the army of underpaid immigrant slaves here typed piie.com ( peterson institute for international economics ) but the outgoing QA department changed the url to pixie.com, which thankfully didn’t link anywhere bad
Full link https://piie.com/blogs/north-korea-witness-transformation/poll-conducted-inside-north-korea
“Problems?”
Yes! The rats overran Nicola’s office.If she can’t even handle a domestic rodent problem how is she going to handle the ones in the EU offices?
Craig has written that ANY concern about mass-immigration is racist. He is an extremist. A middle-class, liberal elitist who is safely cocooned from the negative impact of mass-immigration on jobs, welfare, public services and community cohesion.
None of us is opposed to immigration. A great many of us are opposed to the equivalent of a city the size of Bristol being dumped on us every single year against our wishes.
These latest soundbites are there to make the Tories sound tough on immigration. They wil be forgotten tomorrow. The reality is that Mrs May, as Home Secretary, presided over the greatest numbers of immigrants admitted into this country in its history. The numbers won’t come down significantly under a Tory government.
Immigration is almost always a “bad thing.” People do not leave their homes in large numbers and flee abroad for the fun of it. Nor, except in the most desperate circumstances, do they do so for mere economic reasons.
And, lest we forget, all mass movements of immigration have the, well anticipated, effect of displacing aboriginal communities.
The mass movement of enslaved Africans to America was part of a plan to dispossess the American native communities. So was the, later, movement of masses of European peasants. So was the mass migration of “indentured” Asians- ‘coolies’- to Africa, the Pacific islands and the Caribbean.
Migration in Imperialist societies is militarised- the migrants conscripts in campaigns against the indigenous people.
Take the case of Palestine, for example. Is it racist of Palestinians to wish to control immigration?
The problem with the sort of discussions allowed in political society on this subject is that they studiously avoid the herd of elephants browsing on the carpet- the economic purpose of imperialism, which is to plunder and disadvantage peripheral countries; the wars, sponsored by imperialists, driving millions to run away for safety; the use of migration, within the EU, for example, to weaken indigenous working class movements, on the one hand by flooding the labour market, while, on the other hand, bleeding off workers ready to revolt against neo-liberal shock therapies by urging them to go west for work- and concentrate on the minutiae.
Should Rachel Reeves not be told that if she insists on donating Britain’s military to bomb Syria and Libya the inevitable-and wholly reasonable result will be that millions will want to come to Britain to seek refuge from British aggression? Does Rachel not read the papers?
It is all very well to argue that we should not hurt immigrant feelings by suggesting that they not settle here, but most would be quite happy, if we were to stop looting their resources and killing them by the million, to put off their visits to the underside of British society, the bad accommodation, the low wages, the racist sneers, the need to defer to the ruling class and its agents, until they wanted to take a vacation.
It is quite possible to have reasonable discussions of this matter without reducing it to a question of race. The key, very simply, is to insist on dealing with the cause of the problems. To act in order to put an end to the enormous energies forcing migration and to insist that the warmongers be held responsible not only for the dead but the desperate masses the put in flight.
And we can begin with Yemen where a mass migration is about to take place for the very simple reason that our ruling class is making money by assisting Saudi Arabia in the demolition of Yemeni cities, the dismantling of Yemen’s fragile subsistence economy and the sponsorship of mass famines. It is not just that these victims will move- and who will dare claim that they should not?- but that their moving will set dominoes falling, pushing more towards Europe.
They don’t want to come here. The conditions are not welcoming. Those who don’r want them ought to begin by telling the government and its zombie Blairite shadow, that part of the price of imperialist adventure is desperate migrants.
Well said Bevin!!
And in the meantime, refugees in Europe ought to be allocated to different countries in direct proportion to: (a) their arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Qatar et al, (b) number of bombs dropped on the Middle East or similar military enterprises in the Middle East especially Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, (c) participation in the oil industry, (d) support for sanctions, and (e) sponsorship of media disinformation.
Britain wouldn’t score well on such a policy for the simple reason that Britain carries a supercharged moral responsibility for the causes of the immigration. Some of the East European and Baltic states who are complaining vociferously about refugee quotas might fare OK on (b) to (e), but some of them might come acropper on (a).
“Theresa May could not have been more explicit that Scotland is but a part of the UK, that the UK voted for Brexit, that Westminster will handle Brexit negotiations and she really does not care what the Scots think.”
Why should she? Scotland voted decisively to remain a part of the UK and the EU referendum was a UK-wide decision.
You are but a part of the UK, with a population smaller than that of Yorkshire.
Yorkshire did not sign the Treaty of Union. Scotland did as an independent Kingdom and country. A major signatory in the Treaty of Union. The UK is not a country, it is a union of countries. Theresa May is a dunce as are many in relation to this fact of history. Scotland and England were equal partners in the Treaty. Please read it.
“I support Scottish Independence passionately because I have an urgent desire to get away from the control of these appalling Tories.”
Don’t worry, Craig. Most of the Corbynistas here are certain that Jeremy will walk the next election. ?
Fascist is the correct word in my opinion. Corporate fascism or neo fascism has gripped the western world through Neoliberal and Globalist policies over the last 30-40 years and is leading us down the same path as former fascist regimes did. It looks like once again Russia is the main enemy… and bulwark?
All the evidence was there for the sort of government May would lead… she installed the de facto surveillance state after all.
These are very worrying times indeed.
Now that is an interesting post. Do you imagine for one second that promoting mass fluxes of labour across the world is against the interests of the globalisers? That dissolving national identities makes it in some way harder for the corporate financial to extend its tentacles into every aspect of everyone’s existence and extract profits for the privileged minority? By all means, decry nationalism, but you can’t deplore globalism in the same post. Please make up your mind.
Still, I see you’re a Russophile, so contradicting yourself probably isn’t a problem.
Where did I decry Nationalism? Nor am I a Russophile or Russophobe… I just don’t hate Russia because it’s Russia and can see where events are leading. USSR was a major bulwark to Nazi fascism in WW11 and is once again at the sharp end. Corporate fascism has every wish to “extend its tentacles into every aspect of everyone’s existence and extract profits for the privileged minority”. The Fascism I am thinking of is an elite corporate fascism that is encouraging racist and sectarian divides among other things for it’s own ends of control and profit.
Apologies if I was mistaken. It was Craig who characterised ‘popular xenophobic nationalism’ as fascism and you didn’t. But you began ‘Fascism is the correct word in my opinion’ and I assumed you were agreeing with Craig’s take.
Re. Russia, if you don’t think corporatism is as powerful a force in Russia – albeit with a more Russian face – as it is anywhere in the West, you might care to take a look at any tax-haven, including the dump for dirty money that is the City of London, and wonder at the number of Russian names you can find there. It’s not a bulwark against anything except NATO, and Peter Mandelson advises several of its *eminent* businessmen.
I can see how your thinking went. I purposely didn’t quote Craig for that reason but I should have been clearer.
I am sure corporatism is in Russia but don’t know enough about Russia to comment how it works. It appears Putin has reduced the external plundering that went on in the Yeltsin years, who is benefitting apart from him /elites and seemingly the Russian citizens with improved life expectancy etc. I couldn’t say. How interconnected Russian corporatism is to Global corporatism I don’t know. I suspect interests of Russia or Russian corporatism and the major western based Global Corporatism are on a collision course though…
“Corporate fascism has every wish to “extend its tentacles into every aspect of everyone’s existence and extract profits for the privileged minority”.
IG Farben for example, case in point! IG Farben was taken over lock stock and barrel by the Allies especially the US after WWII, and is now King of the World. See Bayer-Monsanto, for example, which has its roots in numerous members of the IG Farben consortium.
“she installed the de facto surveillance state after all.”
Were you asleep when Big Brother Blunkett was installing it?
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lawf0081/blunkett/
“When charged with out-Torying the Tories at the Home Office, Blunkett always answered in hurt tones that his policies were driven by a traditional Labour party passion for social cohesion. What he failed to grasp is that home secretaries are not mainly to be judged by their ends but by their means. And his means – authoritarian, intolerant, judgmental, and often enough unlawful – were more grotesque than anything that Michael Howard ever dreamed up in the worst years of Tory repression. In fact they were as grotesque as anything dreamed up by notorious Tory Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth during the ‘black reaction’ period of 1812-1821. The worst examples: internment without trial and without notification of charge; ‘anti-social behaviour orders’ targeted on the undeserving poor in the name of the deserving poor (always nice to be able to look down on somebody); increasingly frantic attempts, in the face of sturdy judicial opposition, to reduce asylum-seekers to destitution; the death by a thousand cuts of the presumption of innocence and trial by jury; and (still on the cards) identity cards for everyone.”
Like many aspects of the Neo Liberal/Globalist project it has been a New Labour and Conservative joint effort.
I always said of Blunkett that after he gained power he adopted policies and spoke similar to an earlier regime which, had they been in power when he was born, due to his being born blind they would not have let him live. How could he not realize that?
My sense of what is happening is that May is being dragged rightwards. Not sure how much resistance there is. However the Tories are making an utter arse shaped mess of the process. I am a little surprised because a hard brexit is certainly the worst of all worlds i.e. ultimately the same result, but just much faster and much more painful with a hard Brexit.
I get the sense that England is shrinking in many ways, very fast, and making the assumption that all regions will be happy about that.
Trouble is truly afoot-and even moreso when actual Brexit starts to kick in as opposed to the phoney Brexit at the moment . I cannot see how the right wing of the Tory party can continue to have such a defining role in policy , especially when Liam Fox’s( et al ) delusions are revealed for what they are.
It feels to me as if the Tory party are making merry with a rope that keeps getting longer.
Very sensible posts from Ba’al and Anon1
For me BREXIT should be HARD and FAST.
Nobody round here has changed theirs minds, those that want BREXIT want it more fervently now,
they are hardening their views.
If there was a second BREXIT Referendum, like Little Tim wants, BREXIT would be MORE EMPHATIC.
How transparent is the ownership of the ‘handles’ that you just mentioned, your own included? How transparent is the political and economic influence on those handles, how transparent is the allocation and use of public/private money in this type of media riposte that you do so well. If it is non-transparent, there remains a whiff of potential fasiscm? 🙂
But I don’t *Know Your Name*, either. I must have miised the comment in which you told us. And if I did, it might mean as little to me as mine (I guarantee) would to you. Maybe we should all post mugshots. And our tax returns and bank statements…..er, we appear to be at the frontier between surveillance and transparency, don’t we? I would certainly like more transparency from people who do things in my name, but I don’t comment in your name or claim to represent you, so what’s the beef?
Great question; transparency is that I am posting here “as a representative citizen with a concerned point of view”, I am always verifiably posting open source information, I was seriously asked to investigate freedom & democracy on the internets, I devised an research art project – à la Bowie – pretending to be a fervent democratist, without the spiders from Mars . Posted here for a few months and subsequently received genuine attack mail from (identifiable) people who did know my name, who do master the Internet, who contacted my work and protested that I was a Snowjob or an Assange. . .do I publish (eventually*) in Nature or Architecture Today? Habs does know my name, he’s been rather subtly asking questions that pick up on some of my random geographic mentions, with the implication that he knows which particular points are relevant to my bulk-personal-dataset database! Is he funded by citizen paid funds, oligarch funds?
Is the UK as sewn-up as this place described below (this is a simplified model) red lines are personal influences – blueish ones are the money route
http://image.kreativ.hu/original/201897.png
*I’ll have to run it through my hierarch first!
aaagh. But I’m as happy to depart from the Left’s orthodoxy as the Right’s, when reason points that way.
“You once shared a platform with Anon1”
The direction of travel has been blindingly obvious and a serious problem since the 4th of May, 1979.
Bert.
Question for liberal elitists:
You can have a generous welfare system. You can have open borders. But you can’t have both.
So which is it?
The prospect of a hard Brexit is grim news for expatriots living in other EU countries, who have not become citizens of the country in which they reside. If any of these countries decide to retaliate in kind, not only will we lose our rights as EU citizens, our status in the country where we have settled will begin to look dicey.
Yes, and as at least 4 of the British diaspora have been awarded Nobel prizes this week, that shows the intelligent people might have already left! (I might be slightly overlooking the million strong exUK residents in quaint Benidorm, who haven’t yet received chemistry/physics awards – give them time. . .)
Irish police hold EU “workers” at Dundalk border
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-37545897
A County Armagh vegetable grower says businesses need more clarity about border controls, after eight of his workers were detained by Irish police on their way to work.
The men, all EU nationals, were stopped at Dundalk on Monday morning as they crossed the border in a work van.
They were on their way to pick leeks in the Republic of Ireland’s County Louth.
The checkpoint was set up as part of a day-long operation run by the Irish police’s National Immigration Bureau.
err.. the ‘British Diaspora’ in terms on Nobel laureates is overwhelmingly based in the US, not the EU, so what is the relevance of this to the point Mr Chater made ?
Calling people “racist” because they oppose mass immigration is not a winning argument.
I thought the Brexit referendum result would have established that by now.
My God Craig WTF happened to you across the pond ? Or were you still jet lagged when you wrote this pile of manure? It is all over the place
Example 1- ‘Immigrants to Britain are going to be hauled up to produce documents at numerous moments of daily life to prove their right to be here. ‘
err this is standard practice in most other EU countries, a fact which you obviously wish to ignore for the purpose of this post, and which of course sits uneasily with your generally EU friendly stance. It is also one of the principle reasons for the existence of ‘the jungle’ in Calais- the chancers who live there know full well they can live a clandestine life in the England with far less intrusion from the state, either local or national, that would be the case in France or many other EU states.
Example 2- the references to Enoch Powell ,Yellow Stars and fascism- can’t you do better than this? You’ve really strayed into Dave Spart territory here!
Example 3- ‘Theresa May could not have been more explicit that Scotland is but a part of the UK, that the UK voted for Brexit, that Westminster will handle Brexit negotiations and she really does not care what the Scots think. There very plainly is no process, or any intention of any process, that could result in Scotland maintaining a more integrated relationship with the EU while within the United Kingdom. That idea was always fantastical anyway, as it would be an impossibility to accommodate such an arrangement within EU treaties, as I have previously explained.’
Yes- Sturgeon’s fantasy was always a piss in the brisk Scottish wind- so why is it somehow bad form for Theresa May finally to point out this obvious fact ?
Example 4- Your repeated references to ‘English’ racism.
You have chosen to live in a country where blacks are (compared to England) very thin on the ground and where the only large ‘visible’ ethnic minority, the Glasgow Pakistani community, has not behaved as scandalously as it’s fellow countrymen have in Rotherham, Oldham, Telford et al.
Do you seriously believe that if the % of ‘visible’ ethnics in Scotland was comparable to that in England, and that one of the largest constituents of the same had been raping Scottish lassies by the dozen across the depressed towns of the old Fife coalfield, that ‘racism’ wouldn’t also be a problem up there ?
Pull the other one
“My God Craig WTF happened to you across the pond ?”
Apart from losing his iron you mean? Obviously they water boarded him to come up with this post. That would also explain why the shirt was creased if he was wearing it at the time.
While I am sure that coalfield fifers would not be any more virtuous or accommodating than those in Rotherham/Oldham etc, you seem to be arguing or suggesting that racism is a valid response to anti-social and criminal behaviour. Racism is of course an irrational response that cannot be justified. I am sure there are white pimps and white Rotherham and white coalfield fifer sexual abusers.
There may be DGP- but statistically they are dwarfed by the number of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Middle Eastern & Somali males engaged in such practices- as everyone knows, but is shit shared to say out loud.
Old Mark; “but statistically they are dwarfed by the number of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Middle Eastern & Somali males engaged in such practices-”
90% of UK child sexual abuse is committed by family members; outside of family, 70% is committed by Boyfriend/Girlfriend.
You are comparing oranges with apples Macky- and you know it.
I am not talking about incestuous sex abuse within families, I am talking about the sexual predation of vulnerable young girls out on the streets.
Now, take a few minutes for that distinction to enter your numb skull, and remind me again, which demographic in the UK is primarily responsible for the on street sexual predation of young vulnerable girls- American Mormons ? Welsh Methodists ?
– girls like Charlene Downes
http://ukcommentators.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/rest-is-silence.html
You may have forgotten about Charlene Downes- in the way one can never forget about, say, Stephen Lawrence, because the masters of the internet universe are doing a pretty good job in sending this stuff down the memory hole, keeping saps like you in their state of blissful ignorance-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Charlene_Downes
@Old Mark, sounds like you must have the stats on the ethnicity of the perpetrators, please do link to as I would like to see how many of the Westminster & BBC/Celebrity pedophile rings had ” Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Middle Eastern & Somali males”.
Attention all car drivers- a massive diversion sign has just been erected (15.41pm -06/10/16) on Craig Murray Way, Edinburgh by a strange man in a Dirty Mac.
He is described as swivel eyed conspiracy theorist who was rejected for a job at the Exaro News website, as they have enough ‘researchers’ working on the Ted Heath Westminster Pedo connection to be getting along with just now, ta very much.
Try again next week.
LOL ! What an infantile response ! 😀
I guess then that you don’t have the stats on the ethnicity of the child abuse perpetrators, so your comments must be just based on your prejudice.
Macky- for a committed conspiracy theorist you have a touching belief in the honesty and transparency of government departments when it comes to placing in the public domain statistics that the PTB would rather keep to themselves.
@Old Mark, Firstly you state that “Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Middle Eastern & Somali males” “statistically dwarfed” others who engaged in child abuse cases, and when I ask to see these “statistics”, you then say that they don’t exists !! 😀
Secondly you keep calling me a “conspiracy theorist “, of what I haven’t a clue, yet you are the one who seems to hold opinions based on evidence free assertions !!
Macky-
Now listen very carefully, and don’t move your lips as you try to read this- statistics DO exist on the ethnicity of ALL sex offenders- which of course includes intra familiar sex offences, and sex offences between parties who were hitherto in ‘long term relationships’. I certainly don’t claim that, for these types of sex offences, there is any particular pattern in terms of the ethnicity of such offenders; however, even allowing for this, the official stats, such as they are, DO show an over representation of ‘black’ and ‘asian’ convicts in the sexual offences category-
http://raedwald.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/uk-govt-stats-on-sexual-offences-by.html
Now ask yourself a few questions-
1. Given this raw data on all sexual offences, what do you think a more detailed breakdown would reveal about a particular type of sexual offence- say, one perpetrated on females under the age of 18 who first encountered their assailant in a public place ?
2. However, a statistical breakdown of offences in the category described above appears not to exist in government documents put in the public domain. Why is this so ?
@Old Mark, so your “statistically dwarfed” has now mutated to “over representation” ! And no wonder you didn’t want to link to this straight away, as it destroys your case that Asians are particularly high child abusers, as for each of the ethnicity statistics for sexual offences, Asians who formed double the Black percentage of the general population, are more or less on parity, and for the “serving an immediate custodial sentence for sexual offences”, the Asian percentage is actually lower than the Black percentage; yet it’s the “Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Middle Eastern & Somali males” that seems to trouble you most, which leads me to think that your real problem is they are all Muslims, and that you are in fact are suffering from Islamophobia.
You daft “Now ask yourself a few questions” proves who really is the conspiracy theorist !
Macky
If you consult an atlas, you will find out that Somalia is in Africa- therefore my inclusion of ‘Somali males’ in my comment of 12.03 earlier today rather invalidates your argument, extruded just now, that I was seeking to link a particular form of sex offending disproportionately to ‘asians’.
You’ve proved yet again that your comprehension skills are a bit lacking, to say the least, but hey, you’ve also proved you got a gold star in being an obtuse fecker!
BTW Charlene Downes isn’t the only dead young white female, abused by men of an immigrant backgound, to have her wikipedia entry deleted; the same thing has happened to the unfortunate Mary Ann Lenaghan of Reading-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Mary_Ann_Leneghan
Do you feel any compassion, or wish to make any comment, upon the fate of these white working class girls in twenty first century England ?
@Old Mark, I see that my last reply fell foul of our arbitrary & immoderate moderation, but at least your comments are still here for any fair-minded & honest person to realise all they need to know about you.
Macky-
Thanks for your last comment- interesting to see that your initial attempted reply to me fell foul of the moderators; in my view that fact, and your refusal to comment on either of the two tragic deaths of the young white working class girls that I mentioned previously (and the sordid circumstances that accompanied their deaths) says a heck of a lot about you as well.
To get back to my original point, which clearly your brain hasn’t yet assimilated, I made a distinction between the Pakistani community in Glasgow (which hitherto appears NOT to have engaged in the on street grooming of young, vulnerable white girls on any significant scale) with many similar immigrant communities south of the border, which undoubtedly have done this, as innumerable recent court cases, and convictions, have shown. Why is this so ? Might it have something to do with the fact the numerically such communities are much larger in many urban centres south of the border, and that in several areas (parts of Tower Hamlets, Bradford, Oldham and elsewhere) these communities have a stranglehold on local political power ? And that this flexing of political power locally emboldens predatory sexual behaviour by the males belonging to the same ethnic groups wielding this political power at a local level ?
The point I was attempting to make, in countering Craig’s ridiculous claims about Scottish ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusivity’ vis a vis England, is that in Scotland, where the immigrant communities are proportionately so much smaller, they (in the words of Bachman Turner Overdrive) ‘Ain’t seen nuthin’ yet’. When the Scots HAVE experienced mass immigration on a similar scale to that that has occurred in England, I might take observations on the subject from greenhorn Scots rather more seriously than I do at the moment.
So what about US-born radical Shaykh Hamza Sodagar – who has dubbed non-Muslims “kuffars” and released a video detailing “one of five ways” to kill homosexuals – is speaking at the Islamic Republic of Iran School in London which started on October 4 and runs until October 12.
In his depraved video, Sodagar details different “punishments” for homosexuals, calling for their beheading and for them to be set alight.
No discrimination there then?
http://speisa.com/modules/articles/index.php/item.2889/american-imam-chop-their-head-off-that-s-easiest.html
“American Imam: – Chop their head off, that’s easiest”
But I guess that is OK, and we’re all being intolerant and racist to complain about him even being let into our country?
““My God Craig WTF happened to you across the pond ?””
Yes, where is the Craig from before the Brexit referendum who was overflowing with indifference, who chose to ignore the “embarrassing” referendum and at the last minute decided he might vote Remain for the sake of his mother.
Suddenly the issues we were voting on are important to him but they didn’t seem so important then, you almost got the impression that Scotland leaving the UK was more important to him than Britain remaining in Europe and these changes to immigration policy never happening.
Welcome to the “new reality” Craig!
I’ve been shouting from the roof tops about the dark undercurrents of racism and xenophobia in the guise of “anti Muslim” sentiment whipped by none other than the zionist cretins and the embittered going nowhere “patriots” that has been so well invested into by the various political stooges masquerading as the “people’s representatives”.
Anyone reading the “moderated” comments in DM and the other plethora of oligarch owned rags, they will find the degrees accepted and tolerated in your face racism, makes der Sturmer to become a scout’s periodical.
Great! “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” FFS
I thought Craig would applaud the move to train more doctors. Currently half the UK citizens applying to study medicine are turned away because of a lack of places and the NHS has been drawn to poaching trained medical staff from countries who can ill afford to lose them. Ghana alone subsides the NHS to the tune of £39 million training medical staff who then migrate to the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3135512.stm
The notion that immigration impacts the living standards of ordinary people is demonstrably false is simply not true. The way people who hold the view that immigration is good generally like to support their argument is by pointing to a correlation between increased immigration and increased GDP, but the argument is flawed – and not just because correlation is not proof of causation.
First, GDP measures economic activity. So more people results in a higher GDP. Thus, one has to look not at GDP, but GDP per capita. When you do this, the increase disappears.
Second, generally GDP naturally increases over time. So one has to reduce the GDP per capita figure by the rate GDP would have increased anyhow, which is in developed econmies normally about three percent(albeit somewhat less since 2007). And when you do this, the figure shrinks even more.
Third, there are many other aspects of well being that are very important. Immigration means more people needing housing. This pushes up housing costs (and thus looks like a plus in terms of GDP) which makes it more difficult for young people to buy or anyone to rent a house. More immigration also means more pressure on health and education services, which again disadvantages the native population.
Fourth, immigration depresses wages. This is particularly the case for lower skilled workers, but effects the majority of the population. Countries subjected to neoliberal immigration policies have experienced stagnant median incomes.
Fifth, immigration ensures an ever growing pool of people who are removed from the labour force.
These results seriously harm many. But the negative consequences are not evenly shared. They fall on the employed class, and especially on those in the lower reaches of the socio-economic heirarchy.
However, there are serious advantages to immigration. These all flow from the fact that immigration depresses the cost of labour. Immigration massively advantages the employing class. Of course, in a supposed democracy, the majority of people are not going to vote for a policy that disavantages them for the sake of an elite. So immigration is not addressed in mainstream discourse as a policy choice. Rather any opposition to immigration (even illegal immigration, which all citizens who believe in the rule of law should oppose) is immediately constructed as racism, xenophobia, hate speech.
What a fallacious and convoluted, lengthy drivel to justify racism and xenophobia based on the monetary constructs?
For the sake of clarity the GDP is calculated based on;
Gross domestic product can be calculated using the following formula:
GDP = C + G + I + NX
where
C is equal to all private consumption, or consumer spending, in a nation’s economy, G is the sum of government spending, I is the sum of all the country’s investment, including businesses capital expenditures and NX is the nation’s total net exports, calculated as total exports minus total imports (NX = Exports – Imports).
The drivel here is yours, “fedup”, not Steve Hayes’; your platitudes about GDP, dressed up in a 10-year-old’s idea of “sciency”-looking equations (and spiced up with a bit of abuse (e.g. ” fallacious “, ” convoluted “, “xenophobic” and the would-be clincher, “racist”)) have no bearing on Steve’s (valid) arguments.
Clearly you are struggling to understand concepts involved; hence the contribution;
your platitudes about GDP, dressed up in a 10-year-old’s idea of “sciency”-looking equations
“Platitude” is the multiple divisions and pseudo”economic” drivel that is going nowhere but hey sounds good enough to justify racism and xenophobia. This being a close to your heart subject as your “contributions” stand in evidence!
“Immoderate” my foot!
Bet you are the one and the same multiple IP single source entity spamming away as usual albeit under new guises but the same racist undertones.
Answer Steve Hayes’ points if you can; insulting me and making unsubstantiated accusations is a childishly transparent diversionary tactic.
Answer Steve Hayes’ points if you can; insulting me, spouting gobbledygoook and making unsubstantiated accusations is a childishly transparent diversionary tactic.
“Answer Steve Hayes’ points if you can; insulting me and making unsubstantiated accusations is a childishly transparent diversionary tactic.”
Shades of Kukie galore the pretender steams on, regardless of its “contribution” not so many posts past!
“The drivel here is yours, “fedup”, not Steve Hayes’; your platitudes about GDP, dressed up in a 10-year-old’s idea of “sciency”-looking equations (and spiced up with a bit of abuse (e.g. ” fallacious “, ” convoluted “, “xenophobic” and the would-be clincher, “racist”)) have no bearing on Steve’s (valid) arguments.”
yeahp such a convincing disguise;
Well, let’s pump up GDP a bit. Increase C by making the government give everyone more money to spend, which will have the useful effect of increasing G as well. We can increase investment expenditure I by forming more companies which don’t do very much and investing in them. We can export accountants, and we can stop importing stuff altogether to maximise NX. Who said economics had to be difficult?
The Noddy equations are common in economics, Neil. Doomed attempts to characterise a (mathematically) chaotic system as if it were not infinitely recursive, and discredited completely come the next crash, will not end in my time, I’m afraid.
Beautifully put, Steve.
“The best evidence we have, then, suggests that to the extent EU free movement raises unemployment among the UK-born at all, the effect is small; it goes away after a few years as the labour market adjusts; and is strongest in recessions. . . .
Has free movement boosted wage inequality in the UK? Chart 4.5 maps the best estimates we have on the effects on the wage distribution. Sarah Lemos and Jonathan Portes found no effect on the wages of the bottom 50 per cent. The estimates of Christian Dustmann and colleagues at University College London suggest that EU migrants have reduced the wages of the poorest decile by 1 per cent, while raising the wages of the 5th and 9th deciles by a similar amount. The work of Stephen Nickell and Jumana Salaheen caused a stir in 2015 because it found that immigration reduced the wages of Britons working in ‘skilled production’ roles – electricians and plumbers, for example – and those working in semi- and unskilled services work, like retail and childcare. But the impact is small. In skilled production roles, it amounts to a cut of 0.3 per cent between 2004 and 2015, and in low-skilled services jobs, 0.7 per cent. By comparison, the increases in the national minimum wage between 2004 and 2015 amount to nearly 4 per cent in real terms. And the government’s tax increases and benefit cuts between 2010 and 2019 will reduce the incomes of the poorest tenth of Britons by 10.6 per cent, according to the UK’s Institute for Fiscal Studies. . . .
However, the authors of these studies do not isolate the longer-run effects of skilled immigrants on productivity. One cause of long-run economic growth is the quality of the human capital stock: the more highly skilled the workforce, the higher its productivity, which raises output. Thus western European immigration is likely to have had a mildly positive impact on British output by improving the composition of the workforce. But what impact has this had on the employment prospects for highly skilled natives? While direct evidence on the impact of skilled Europeans on the UK economy is hard to come by, the evidence for high-skilled immigrants in general suggests that they are complementary to, and not substitutes for, British workers, and are thus likely to raise the latter’s wages. ”
http://www.cer.org.uk/sites/default/files/smc2016_26april2016.pdf
Wild overreaction, Craig. You’re a good man, but this is foolish, immoderate stuff.
Hitler and the German “socialists” started their campaign “lightly” with signs in shops that told customers that the owners were NOT Jewish…… and then by many thousands of little steps brought the German people to such a horrendous bout of fascism and racism that they for the most part never got over their shame.
The post is correct. If you have never taken the trouble to ask what racism really “is”, or whether indeed you are racist…… then you probably are.
Racism is a very natural human instinct that has to be constantly countered if it is to be overcome. Even those “elitists” that abhor racism have to fight those basic instincts in their own minds, and must continue to speak out, as it is plain where “the people” with “concerns” are headed.
I don’t believe there was anything like the current problems in Palestine, until the mass immigration of millions of ethnic Russians and Eastern Europeans over the last 75 years or so.
Craig’s logic implies that any Palestinian resistance to this mass immigration to their country is racist.
Tony
No it doesn’t. For fuck’s sake…
“If it were not for immigration, there would have been no economic growth in the UK at all since the millennium.”
If so this is a damning indictment of British management. Peter Drucker, a famous management writer, said “Growth that adds volume without improving productivity is fat. Growth that diminishes productivity is cancer.”
That being said, if someone can point me in the direction of the economic theory that demonstrates that you can add 3 million workers without lowering wages or increasing house prices I’d be very grateful, because it flies in the face of the classical supply & demand stuff I was taught. (One that covers all industries and all areas, because our macroeconomic experience can average out a multitude of sins.)
In terms of racism, it does not make a blind bit of difference to me whether immigrants are white, English speaking Canadians, white English speaking Poles, or any other combination of colour or nationality. There are limits to growth as anyone remotely interested in systems theory knows. Wages are too low: house prices are too high: why make a problem worse? After Sadiq Khan has concluded his investigation into London house prices I suspect we will see similar pressure to limit overseas ownership of domestic housing where property is just left empty as second homes or for investment purposes.
I strongly agree with your comment, DG. Craig is a great guy – and a very brave and principled man – but I sometimes think he focuses a little too much on qualitative considerations, and not enough on quantitative. Too much on ideas and ideals, not enough on facts and numbers. (I’m usually sensitive to this failing, as it is one I share).
The UK is already over-populated by any reasonable criteria. No matter how much we would like to be jolly good fellows and welcome the poor of the earth to our shores, there have to be limits.
Tom Welsh is right, Craig: Britain is already grossly over-populated. This is heading towards a grisly reckoning, since we’re not even recognising the crisis officially, let alone doing anything effective about it. Opposition to making the current overpopulation situation here worse isn’t necessarily racism. I spit contemptuously on all forms of racism. But I still think we should only let in truly desperate cases of people who need asylum from awful things that have happened to them elsewhere; especially if the crooks in Paedominster have had a material hand in causing their suffering in the first place; it’s our particular responsibility then. We’re likely to get plenty of incomers, even on that strict criterion. On the other hand, letting in waves of economic migrants just because there are some arguments that they might – only might – be ‘good’ for the economy, briefly, is simply courting even harder the ultimate grisly reckoning that we will face eventually, because of our already-chronic over-population here.
“Britain is already grossly over-populated”
Its population is higher than its ever been but to call it grossly over-populated is surely over-stating the case. Japan for instance has a population roughly twice the size on territory about the same area.
MJ,
Parts of Britain are not overpopulated, but the South East of England is one of the most densely populated places in the world – almost entirely due to immigration.
Japan is one of the places I really would love to visit, even though it is theoretically more densely populated than Britain.
However (maybe Craig would consider Japan racist – I have no idea what its immigration policy is – but China is very open to English immigration). Any visitor to the capitals of China or Japan – will largely experience Chinese and Japanese people.
Check out Oldham, London…etc….
It seems most of the English (including Craig Murray) have left.
Now why is that?? I rather like English people…and have no problems with a multi-cultural society in England – except for the quite obvious fact – in many parts of England – the indigenous English are already in the minority.
That doesn’t quite seem right to me but I’m not that bothered about it – and I’m certainly not racist.
Tony
That’s right, MJ. And Japan is even more grossly over-populated than Britain. The point is that neither country can sustain itself at current population levels without getting a constant inflow of goods and materials from other parts of the world, whether by – unfairly-tilted – trade, or by even more frank imperialist attack and exploitation. And do you expect Britain’s capacity to enforce these conditions to continue permanently?
When ‘we’ can no longer do that, how exactly do we even provide adequate diets, let alone provide all the other toys of the ‘good life’ – meaning gross, unsustainable over-prosperity – to the current excessive population? Simply from the already heavily battered resources here at home? *The short answer is that we can’t.* And once the already-unfolding Synergising Global Crises confront us starkly with that reality, we may well find that Britain too – along with Japan – has become a net-exporter of refugees, from an unliveable situation.
That would be the younger, more energetic people, of course. A lot of the rest of us will just have to lie down and die where we are, more or less protractedly. Fortunately, I’m now so old that that wouldn’t be so much of big deal for me; and I’d take care to ensure it wasn’t protracted, but brisk and timely. I do fear, though, for my twenty-something grand-daughter and my three-year-old great-grandson.
For these intractable, non-negotiable reasons of *reality*, I remain opposed to anything but humanitarian incoming of new people into Britain. We can’t sustain any more than that. Those who are in the most desperate hardship, though, especially those who are there because of the vicious overseas doings of ‘our’ state-machine, should be helped, out of simply humanity – as long as we continue to have the means. But how long will that be…?
It’s only because of the English Channel that many Brits don’t try their luck abroad as economic refugees. I’m sure many who have been sanctioned and left penniless would if we had a contiguous border with any European country. It would be a natural thing to do, survival, to not stay here for weeks or months with no income but to seek solutions elsewhere.
Tax-dodgers like Branson and Green are economic refugees. They’re at the other end of the scale but they moved abroad for more money. It’s a reverse nationalism because greed has no nationality. That’s why they should blush whenever they fly the flag.
“If mass immigration made a country’s people poorer, then Germany and the USA would have the lowest living standards for ordinary citizens in the world”.
As it happens, the standard of living of average people in the USA (adjusted for inflation) has not improved since 1970. It may have declined slightly. Meanwhile the wealth of the top 0.01% has skyrocketed. You have to be careful when dealing with statistics – especially those involving very large numbers. The US GDP and “standard of living” are extremely artificial constructs, reminiscent of the old joke: “Bill Gates walks into a working-class bar. Suddenly everyone in the bar is a billionaire – on average”.
I have no corresponding information about Germany, but I am pretty sure that the current inundation of refugees will not increase its standard of living.
“As it happens, the standard of living of average people in the USA (adjusted for inflation) has not improved since 1970. It may have declined slightly. Meanwhile the wealth of the top 0.01% has skyrocketed.”
Same applies to Germany. Like the US, Germany is wealthy – but only for the elite. Immigrants push down wages and reduce the bargaining power of the workforce, and the employers reap the rewards. Traditional secure jobs have all gone, replaced by insecure and much lower paid jobs. half the working population is forced to work massive unpaid overtime at the risk of losing their insecure jobs if they protest, while the other half is unable to find any reasonable work. As a result of artificially depressed working conditions Germany is able to produce cheaply and export to the rest of Europe at the cost of the rest of Europe.
So the disparity of wealth and contracted out poverty that had been the main stay of your “permanent” jobs past, is now the fault of the foreigners too? Whence poverty moves in land and closer.
Talk about myopia, even Mr. Magoo could see farther past his nose than you!
You seem to not understand that poverty of outsiders is no longer possible because abject poor have nothing to be robbed from, hence the same robber barons moving inland and closer is really the fault of immigrants, and foreigners? These who instead of staying put and dying from hunger are making their way to the other places that they can find low paid jobs and get exploited all the same, are in fact criminals for taking those jobs. Are they?
All the while with the addition of the derision and complaints of the likes of you, that helps their exploiters to hire the said immigrants for even cheaper prices!