It is not controversial to say that the UK’s immigration system is utterly broken. The reason is very plain but seldom noted – decades of cuts in which the cheapness of the system is crazily prioritised over the system working.
The costs to the economy of the system not working are simply enormous.
I have line managed the managers of two of the UK’s largest visa departments abroad. Over twenty years I witnessed first hand the systematic deprofessionalisation of the immigration service, which has continued apace since I left.
The plain truth is this: while governments driven by a desire to cut public spending are unwilling to fund the administration of immigration with reasonable levels of professionalism and expertise, it really does not matter what the policy is. The tool to carry the policy into effect was degraded long ago.
It is not that the system has collapsed under the weight of applications. Ever increasing applications are a complete myth. To take asylum applications as an example, do you know in what year asylum applications peaked? 2002. Yes, twenty years ago. 2022 is seeing something of a surge on 2021, but that surge will take 2022 to about 50% of the levels we were seeing twenty years ago.
The problem is not increased volume of applications. The problem is the wanton destruction of the machinery to cope with them.
When I first worked closely with immigration officers, in the British High Commission in Lagos over thirty years ago, this was the system:
All visa applicants had their case initially reviewed by a member of locally employed staff, but still a UK government employee of UK nationality. They would carry out an initial sift. Obvious visa grants – people who had previous visas and had never overstayed – would be put in a pile for rubber-stamping. All others would be granted an interview.
There were 22 visa officers to do the interviews, half from the Immigration Service and half from the Foreign Office. They would interview the applicants who required it. These officers were all well paid and well housed, enjoyed diplomatic status, and were highly trained and frequently very experienced. They would serve three or four years in the country and many took real pains to develop expertise in its culture. There were two Chief Immigration Officers in charge.
I remember one wise CIO impressing on their staff to judge the person in front of them. You give a visa to an individual, not to a document. Paperwork could be forged, or a genuine applicant may have difficulty getting the mound of papers together. Conversing with the individual and asking them questions, making due allowance for nervousness, was the most important part of the process.
The system had not substantially changed when I was Deputy High Commissioner in Accra 20 years later, except that rather more responsibility was given to the locally engaged staff, and the FCO insisted that we should no longer employ British local staff but could hire much cheaper Ghanaian staff for the initial sifting.
I viewed this as crazy; the pressures brought on local Ghanaian staff by extended family and friends over visa issue was immense, and it was pretty well socially impossible for them to avoid what we would view as corruption.
Now the system has changed completely. It has been privatised – almost everywhere in the world, Visa departments are outsourced to private firms with a slim layer of official management. Most visa decisions are taken by very low paid agency staff working through a computer checklist. Very few applicants get interviewed at all – it is done almost entirely on the documentation.
There are no appeals against refusal of a visit visa. If you are turned down, you are turned down.
Businesses in the UK suffer massive damage from important export customers being inexplicably refused visas, with no right of appeal. Equally very large numbers are allowed in on the basis of entirely fraudulent applications and forged documents. We liberals are not supposed to admit that side of the equation, but it is true.
Furthermore the number of visa departments abroad has been radically reduced. Visa decisions are now often taken by a minimum wage person, working for a private company, operating from a computer checklist in a completely different country to the home of the person being judged. The person taking the decision almost certainly knows nothing about the education system, economy, social systems or corporate structures of the country the applicant is applying from.
Rational, evidenced decisions are simply impossible in this situation. The excuse for cutting back visa departments to “regional hubs” was – wait for it – the cost of the machines that print out the high technology visas. This is symptomatic of the crazed accountancy of the whole system – for the price of about £3 million in capital expenditure the UK abandoned all local knowledge and expertise in its visa issuing process.
Let me give you an example of the effect of this. Visas for Uzbekistan are now processed in Istanbul. Two years ago I was shown an instance of a visa refusal where the minimum wage drone writing the reason for refusal, believed Tashkent to be in Turkey.
The UK Immigration Service I used to work alongside was a service, regulating immigration. That was abolished in favour of the “UK Borders Agency”, a title more suited to the privatisation agenda. It then got changed to the macho “UK Border Force”, a paramilitary sounding body that conjures images of lantern jawed heroes holding back Suella Braverman’s “invasion” of foreigners.
The Tories change the name regularly, and I am not sure what it is this week. But all the time the administation is sliced and cut, farmed out for profit, and run on cheaper and cheaper lines, with contempt for any notion of professional expertise.
There are still experienced and good immigration officers in the service of the Border Force, but these are now heavily concentrated at UK ports of entry. When there was a professional and competent visa service operating abroad, the visa officers at ports of entry had a relatively easy task, looking out for forged visas and passports, or applying intelligence material on smuggling etc.
Now, however, the person arriving from India with an entirely valid visa in his entirely valid passport, is being scrutinised at Heathrow for the very first time by somebody with skills and experience; after being given the visa by a 18 year old at a private company who never laid eyes on them.
The immigration officers at ports don’t trust the visas their own government has issued in its crazy cheap system. So in effect you have immigration interviews being conducted at the arrival airport desk, while thousands of passengers are queued up behind. That is the reason for periodic immigration chaos at airports – and results in immigration officers effectively being instructed not to do their jobs. Morale is at an all time low.
Asylum is a related but different issue. The Observer today reports that Home Office staff are being recruited to decide asylum cases in the UK who have no relevant experience and have come straight from working in supermarkets or cafes, being empowered to decide cases after three days of training. The report confirms that the grade of such staff has been reduced to Executive Officer, again to save money over using more senior staff.
The UK does not receive disproportionate numbers of asylum applications. Asylum applications per head of UK population are just half the level of the EU average. This from a UK parliamentary library briefing:
In 2020, 72% of all asylum applications were accepted as genuine at first decision by the Home Office. About one third of the remaining 28% were accepted on appeal. So 81% of all asylum applications are ultimately judged genuine. The Patel/Braverman line that most are “economic migrants” is a plain lie.
The mass arrival of Albanian citizens by boat is a relatively new phenomenon. I am sceptical that the numbers are as large as being put out. It seems to me wildly improbable that 2% of the adult male population of Albania is crossing the Channel in small boats. But it is worth noting that over 40% of Albanian asylum applications are accepted as genuine at first decision by the Home Office. The shameful painting of all Albanians as criminal is plain wrong.
Let me again upset some of my “own side” by saying that the Home Office is so denuded of well paid, expert staff that the bad decisions are not all one way. There are horrible instances of refugees being returned to torture and death after a bad asylum decision. But equally, there are bad decisions the other way, with frauds and criminals also gaining asylum.
The government simply refuses to pay for the degree of knowledge and expertise to make good decisions. I represented (without fee) a number of asylum applications at Immigration Appeals Tribunals – and never lost a case. The reason that so many appeals succeed is that the tribunals are before a real judge, and the Home Office officers have an embarrassing lack of basic knowledge and expertise, often depending for country information on publications or – very frequently – denials of human rights abuse by the particular despotism in question. It just does not cut ice with a judge.
Personally I am pleased that the system in general errs towards generosity to asylum seekers, once they get out of the hideous limbo of years of waiting for the application to be decided, frequently effectively in prison, and even when allowed into the community denied the right to work and support themselves.
It is now illegal in UK domestic law to arrive in the UK for the purpose of claiming asylum – contrary to international law and the UK government’s obligations under the Refugee Convention. At the same time, there is no provision to claim asylum outside the UK. In effect, the Conservative government has made it impossible to claim asylum other than by the desperate measure of pitching up in a small boat.
They then claim astonishment that people pitch up in small boats.
There is nothing in either the 1951 Refugee Convention nor its 1967 Protocol that stipulates that refugees must claim asylum in the first safe country they reach. That is a peculiar right wing canard. There is an obligation to treat refugees humanely, assist with housing and allow to find employment. The UK is failing in all of these duties.
At the risk of diluting the impact of this article on why the UK’s immigration system does not function, I cannot refrain from noting that this is part of a much wider trend in neoliberalism.
Twenty years ago a visa applicant facing refusal would have an interview with a real, experienced and properly paid immigration officer. Now the decision is taken by a low paid employee with a computer checklist who does not see the applicant.
This is for precisely the same as the reason I cannot normally see my GP as I would simply have done twenty years ago, but have to explain my symptoms instead to somebody with little or no medical qualification working their way through a computer checklist.
It is precisely the same reason I cannot see a bank manager, in the branch I have used for forty years but which no longer has a manager, about a loan for my company. Instead I have to speak to a low paid person in a call centre working their way through a computer checklist that simply applies a formula related to historic turnover and profit, with no experience or understanding of start-ups and investment periods.
We have had decades to get used to the replacement of the skilled working class through automation. What we see now is the replacement of the professional middle classes through automation. Be they local bank managers, immigration officers, or GPs a computer checklist and unskilled operator is cheaper.
In all cases, the delivery of the service which is the reason for the process is massively undermined, but that is ignored in favour of very short term financial benefit.
I expect this trend will attack higher education soon, with the need for face to face interaction with students denigrated and mass redundancies among lecturers in favour of computer learning. That is one of my dystopian predictions for the next couple of decades.
To return back to immigration, the Tories have destroyed the system meant to implement their flailing policies. The policy levers have no viable implementation mechanism at the end of them. It could be fixed, by substantial investment, reversing privatisation, and re-establishing a worldwide expert immigration service again.
If you add that to a genuine and effective legal mechanism for accepting and processing the European average of refugee applications and a sensible policy to admit the workers the UK economy desperately needs, the benefits would far outweigh the cost. But in a mad universe where all public spending bar defence is effectively viewed by the Tories as loss, it will not happen.
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It seems like the end of the Roman Empire in the West. Everything is breaking down.
Interesting article by Michael Hudson on The Saker, making (and amplifying) the same theme:
https://thesaker.is/germanys-position-in-americas-new-world-order/
Hudson teases out similarities between the Papacy and the US.
This time last year, I’d never heard of Albanian asylum seekers. Now they’re all over the front page.
Why Albania, why now?
I can’t be certain of this but was there some thing before Rwanda that the UK had asked Albania to accept immigrants and asylum seekers, but Albania had refused?
If so, is what we’re reading about Albanian asylum seekers some kind of UK government revenge or payback?
Automated judicial decisions in low value cases may arrive at some point; I hope not.
Very interesting and informative post, but I don’t get why it’s right wing to query why asylum seekers don’t claim asylum in the EU states they travel through before the U.K.?
But they do. EU countries take many more asylum seekers than this country, as many more apply for asylum in EU countries than apply for asylum here. The idea that they all want to come to the UK because of what Cameron disgustingly called “our generous benefits system”, ie they’re all scroungers, is a lie, ie a right wing myth. Unless you think nobody should apply for asylum here because they have to travel through other countries to get here. Also there wouldn’t be a need for these poor desperate people to flee their own countries if our western governments stopped destroying their homelands.
The majority of those arriving by boat from France are from Albania so far this year. The UK has granted asylum to more Albanians than any other European country so far this year, France has granted asylum to only 8% of those who have applied, Greece and Sweden have not granted asylum to any Albanians.
When in the EU we were signed up to the Dublin convention which stated that asylum seekers were obligated to claim asylum in the first safe country they came to. France and Holland were very co-operative in this regard, sharing intelligence as well, and keeping the numbers who came here low.
This is why you still hear people claiming that asylum seekers should do this, but since we left the EU, there is no obligation for them to do, or for EU countries to assist us. But they sill cling on to it, as if somebody else should protect us from people who would actually be very helpful in filling jobs here and helping our economy. There is also no reason, other than government obstructionism, that asylum seekers should have to take to small boats to get here. But you won’t hear any common sense from the govenrment or the media in this.
If I follow this logic then we have large groups of ‘illegal’ immigrants wandering Europe unchallenged and if they apply for residency in an EU country and are refused they are free to wander on towards another EU country or the UK ? Seems that at best the EU is lax, at worse complicit in people smuggling !
I’m not convinced these people (mainly single young men ?) will help our economy, what skills do they bring ?, where do their wages go ? I believe they are primarily a boon for the unscrupulous and the corrupt and the exploiters, (aka tories) is that the sort of country we want, it certainly fits the tory agenda which wants a population of low paid serfs and slaves.
No, you are not following any logic.
Ian, pray tell us what your “logic” is then.
Stevie, I totally agree with everything you have said. Our infrastructure and services are at a breaking point in the UK, the NHS not able to cope, teachers leaving the profession in droves, increasing numbers of English rough sleepers. England has one of the highest population densities in Europe, we simply cannot take an extra 40,000 illegal immigrants each year.
We’ve taken around a million *legal* immigrants this year, Andy:
https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/news/2022/08/25/immigration-at-all-time-record-level-with-record-1-1-million-visas-issued-to-come-and-live-in-the-uk
No, we have issued 1.1 million visas which is a quite different thing. Just under a half were for students, about a third for work which is obviously to fill vacancies. So, hardly as threatening and scary as you would like to imply. But then, migration watch is just another loaded rightwing propaganda site.
Thanks for your reply, Ian. Even though it obviously has an agenda, the Migration Watch site was citing official government figures. I’m aware that approx half of the visas were for students, whose families / governments are largely being rinsed for rapidly-devaluing degrees at UK universities – that’s being going on for quite a while, though not on this scale. Of course, they won’t be competing for most people’s jobs (unless it’s bar / sex work etc), but they will need somewhere to live for a few years and will thus be driving up rents. The point I was trying to make is that most people on this site, as well as most people in the UK, seem to be falling for the government’s Albanian bogus asylum seeker chaff, and ignoring the much deeper societal problems created by mass legal immigration.
I don’t think ‘legal’ immigration is a problem, many if not most of the students won’t be staying, for instance. Housing them should not be an issue, and should not disadvantage anybody else. And we need immigration anyway, it is good for the country. Migration Watch may well use official figures, but they twist them to suit their purposes, omit vital information, and then get quoted all over the rightwing media. It is classic astroturfing operation which feeds partial and misleading information into the public sphere.
The whole boat thing is entirely unnecessary and stokes the hate/paranoia. The govt could set up an asylum centre in France, as the French have offered, process claims there (with good, professional civil servants, pace Craig).
The Albanian situation is well explained by the Albanian professor in the article I linked to. Really, the whole issue should be de-escalated and then we can proceed in a civil way, realising the potential while rejecting the chancers – as Craig eloquently pointed out.
For a positive side to the story read up on, or go and meet, many of the Syrian families who have resettled in the West of Scotland.
Andyoldlabour, your argument doesn’t make sense.
The NHS needs staff, as record number leave. We need teachers, as many quit.
Immigration provides a resource of people to fill these gaps. We must also wonder why everything appears to be breaking down. It is the lack of investment by the government, with below inflation pay rises over the last 12 years. Nothing to do with immigration, except as a potential solution.
Plus asylum seeking is a internationally enshrined human right, perfectly legal.
Thanks for your reply, Ian. I think that legal immigration has been a problem in the UK over the last 20 years or so, not least because the resulting 10 million increase in the population has strongly contributed to the situation that the average UK house price (ca. £300,000) is now 15 [FIFTEEN] times median household post-tax income (ca. £20,000 a year).
The Migration Watch article clearly and truthfully outlined the immigration situation over the last year in detail. It didn’t state things like: ‘Over a million migrants came to Britain last year to steal your jobs.’ Of course it has an agenda – as do you: ‘we need immigration…it is good for the country’. Of course, immigration has been good for some people: rental property owners, owners of businesses in the service sector etc, – but for the rest of the country, particularly workers who don’t own property, not so much.
It’s true that the NHS needs immigration (though if it was run more efficiently – using yes, more managers not less – it would need less of it), but most immigrants don’t work for the NHS. They don’t even work for the public sector, but provide cheap labour for private, profit-driven businesses.
A lot of student accommodation has been built in university towns and cities over the past few years, but I doubt whether it will be enough to cover the 200,000 increase in international student numbers over the previous year. Even if it is, after paying through the nose for their tuition (it costs £27,300 a year for international students to study chemistry at one of my alma maters, which wasn’t even Russell Group until a few years ago), plus the cost of flights, books, socialising etc, I’m sure their families would prefer it if they were paying £300-£400 a month to live in a shared house, rather than around £300 a week to live in halls. As landlords can make more money renting property out to students than families, this will drive up rents in university towns.
The ‘Albanian invasion’ narrative has been whipped up by the government etc to distract from the unprecedented levels of legal immigration that have arisen under successive Tory governments, which initially promised to get immigration “down to the tens of thousands”. As I keep saying: it’s chaff.
It’s nice that some Syrian refugees have been given the opportunity of a new life in the UK – but how many did we take? Was it 15,000? – out of the millions that are still living in camps in Turkey & Jordan, plus the millions living in camps in Syria itself, some of which got cluster-bombed by Assad’s forces a few days ago. After Brexit, we could have taken half a million of them, perhaps more, and after giving them lessons in basic English, found their menfolk minimum wage jobs in the public sector, so they could support their families – with a bit of help from the benefits system. But we didn’t.
Really, Lapsed, you just repeat a litany of myths and prejudices with zero evidence, just the same old moans and whines. It is a waste of time presenting people like you with facts, evidence or reason. It doesn’t change a thing.
“10 million increase in the population has strongly contributed to the situation that the average UK house price (ca. £300,000) is now 15 [FIFTEEN] times median household post-tax income (ca. £20,000 a year).”
That is entirely due to the lower interest rates enabling people to borrow a larger multiple of their salary and nothing to do with immigration. Coincidence is not causality.
Thanks for your reply Bayard. As with most things in life, the dizzying rise in UK house prices over recent years is not ‘entirely due’ to any single factor. It’s multi-factorial, though increased demand for housing from the 10 million additional people who’ve moved here in the last 20 to 25 years is the biggest. Very few lenders will lend six or more times the breadwinner’s salary – let alone combined salaries – and most won’t go above five times. There are, however, plenty of cash buyers in the market.
Thanks again for your reply Ian. You may think it’s a waste of time presenting people like me with facts and evidence (which may explain why you haven’t done so), but I’ve presented you with plenty.
Lapsed Agnostic, the three main drivers of increased house prices in approximate order are:
1. Easier Credit
2. Low Supply
3. Increased Demand
1 because few could afford a £400,000 house without a long mortgage at low interest rates. If people cannot afford it there can be no demand.
2. We built far more houses in the 50’s and 60’s. This is a matter of priority. Ever since Thatcher made it harder for local councils to finance house building, council house building went almost to zero. We are intelligent, we can choose to build this or that if needed. But we stopped.
https://fullfact.org/economy/house-building-england/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7014484.stm
3. There are not 10 million extra people in the UK due to migration. Adding up all migration, in and out over the last 40+ years amounts to about 6 million. There are about 10 million extra people in the UK since 1990, since then there has been about 21 million births and 18 million deaths.
https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/statistics-net-migration-statistics
https://closer.ac.uk/data/births-deaths/
We can choose to fix our problems, recent governments have chosen to focus on other matters like empowering the security state.
“though increased demand for housing from the 10 million additional people who’ve moved here in the last 20 to 25 years is the biggest. ”
No it isn’t. Do stop torturing facts to make them fit your pet theory. If it were because of demand from immigrants, you would see an increase in prices in places where there were a lot of immigrants and not in places where there are none, however the price increase is across the country. Also, you would see a large increase in prices of those houses that immigrants can afford, i.e. the very bottom end of the market but the rises have been right across the market. Immigrants tend to be poor and poor people tend to rent.
In any case, for a given supply, prices may increase with demand, but that presupposes an ability to pay. If no-one has more than £100 to spend, it doesn’t matter how many people want to buy something, or how badly they want it or need it, it is not going to be sold for more than £100. The multiple you can borrow of your salary to buy a house depends neither on how badly you want to buy a house, nor how many other people are wanting to buy a house, but it does determine your ability to pay.
” There are, however, plenty of cash buyers in the market.”
Where is all this cash coming from then? Millionaire immigrants? Are you seriously suggesting that the influx of largely poor immigrants has prompted the native population to find oodles of cash to buy houses they hadn’t realised they previously had? What is more likely is precisely the opposite of what you are suggesting, that much of the price rises, especially in places like London are because rich foreigners are buying property and then NOT immigrating.
Thanks for your reply MD. To address your points:
1. But rich people can afford to buy £400k houses (often for cash) and they’re interested in buying even at super- high prices because they think they can get higher returns on rental property than they can on shares or bonds.
2. Yes, supply is the other side of the equation. House-building peaked in the late 60’s, but then fell off as there was less demand for houses as population growth subsided – partly due to heavy restrictions on immigration coming in at the turn of the 70’s – and more people had become owner-occupiers of new houses rather than tenants. Since then, council planning committees have become a favoured habitat of NIMBYs & BANANAs*, and even the few that aren’t find themselves assailed by strident groups of concerned residents whenever they try to approve modest development proposals. Not increasing the demand for housing through mass immigration was/is an easier political sell than increasing supply to meet it.
3. There are around an extra 10 million people in the UK since 1990 due to immigration, because many of those 21 million births will have been to recent immigrants. If, in the last 25 years, immigration had been restricted to the levels it was from 1970-1997, the UK population would now be falling due to a combination of net emigration and deaths exceeding births. That would have created problems of its own for sure, but likely less than many people are experiencing now, or are about to experience. The best thing would have been to find a happy medium, where the population was held roughly constant, by only admitting as many immigrants (including asylum seekers) as were required to fill vacancies in hard-pressed public services. But then NewLabour came along.
* Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone
Thanks for your reply, Bayard. I don’t have a ‘pet theory’ on this. As I said, the rise in house prices in the UK over the last 20 years or so is multi-factorial – but the largest factor is demand for housing generally exceeding supply (though not in absolutely all areas of the UK – see below) due largely to high levels of immigration. You’re the one with the theory that it’s ‘entirely due’ to lower mortgage interest rates.
There have been dramatic increases in prices at the lower end of the housing market over the last couple decades. Here’s an example: in 1999, the shared house in a former pit village in northern England that I used to rent a room in changed hands for just under 20 grand; in 2006, after having had about 10 grand’s worth of (mostly cosmetic) work done on it, it was sold for 160 grand. During that time, about half of my housemates were recent immigrants, mainly working or studying in the nearby university town (to which there was a regular bus service).
However, similar things haven’t happened in all former pit villages up north (or down south if you’re in Scotland). For example, in Horden*, Co. Durham, you can pick up a two-bed terrace on the numbered streets for 25 to 30 grand (or you could last time I checked a couple years ago); however, they were changing hands for around 80 grand in the mid-noughties. Can you explain how that fits in with your uniform price rises theory? It’s not due to subsidence issues or coastal erosion, if that’s what you’re thinking. (If anyone wants to know the answer, let me know and I’ll tell you).
Unless they’ve got a massive deposit, someone on an average salary is going to struggle to buy a mid-market house because the banks will generally only lend up to five or six times salary. It doesn’t matter whether mortgage interest rates are 2% or 8%. After the financial crisis, the banks have also clamped down strongly on self-cert. So, if they’re buying at all, people on average salaries are having to buy at the lower end of the market, making that unavailable for people on lower incomes.
Where is all the cash to buy houses coming from? Well the Bank of England has essentially printed quite a bit of it. But also cash buyers are investing money in rental property that they would otherwise have put in shares or bonds because they (reasonably rationally) believe they can get better returns on housing. Those returns wouldn’t be available were it not for mass immigration, because there would be far fewer people looking to rent. High-end property in London is a small section of the market.
* I recently found out that Horden was the inspiration for the song ‘Red Hill Mining Town’, the curtain-raiser on side 2 or U2’s multi-million selling eighties landmark album ‘The Joshua Tree’. I always used to think it was about somewhere in the Mojave desert.
Re: ‘I’m not convinced these people (mainly single young men ?) will help our economy, what skills do they bring ?’
Illegal immigrants don’t just help our economy, Stevie – they pretty much keep it going. There’s reckoned to be anywhere between 250,000 and half a million illegals currently working in London, many of them in the food supply industries. Without them, London would just grind to a halt in days because people would begin to starve, and then so would much of the country as Londoners’ tax revenues pay for a considerable portion of public services including state benefits. Of course illegal immigrants are being exploited, mainly by their employers, but also by people who benefit from their very cheap, non-subsidised labour – which is most of the UK.
“…Londoners’ tax revenues pay for a considerable portion of public services including state benefits.”
Pardon? London – the most heavily subsidized part of the country – pays for the rest of the UK? I don’t think so LOL.
Thanks for your reply, Jeff. London may have the most public spending per capita of any part of the UK – just beating Scotland & Northern Ireland – but the point is that, due to there being far more higher-rate taxpayers in London (my brother’s whinging about having had to take a pay cut to just over 100 grand a year), who also contribute much more in VAT etc on their spending (£9 a pint anyone?), the average Londoner is putting much more into the system than they take out, and therefore significantly subsidising most of the rest of the UK. There’s no LOL’s about it.
“due to there being far more higher-rate taxpayers in London … the average Londoner is putting much more into the system than they take out”
No. London produces almost nothing that anyone needs. Where do you think your food is grown, tended, and harvested – Trafalgar Square? Most Londoners have never even seen a factory: they are in out-of the-way places like the Midlands or oop north. Research is done around places like Cambridge or Derby. Being the seat of government, London extorts resources from the rest of the country – that is how capital cities have always worked. Those “higher-rate taxpayers” are in government or banking. Banking is an essential service – retail banking consists of taking deposits from plebs like us, and using the money to make well-secured loans on houses or business ventures; what the City does, making risky bets that are hugely profitable when they pay off and which the taxpayer bails out when they fail – is just another way of extorting money from the rest of us. That is how London takes vastly more out of the country than it puts in.
Thanks for your reply, Roger. Most people in the UK need very little: around 2000 kcal a day worth of balanced diet (oats, vitamin & mineral pills, omega-3 pills should just about do it), water, basic clothing & footwear, a -20 deg C sleeping bag, a small tent with enough land to pitch it on, and possibly weaponry to protect these things from theft. Relatively few people in the UK have jobs that are concerned with providing these; all the other jobs are devoted to providing goods and services that at least one other person wants (at least in theory).
Most people working in London (including higher-rate taxpayers) are not involved in financial services, and of the people that are, most do not work for retail banks. However, the ones that do, in general, are helping to provide useful services since, among other things, retail banks look after people’s money, and enable them to pay regular bills without much faff, as well as enabling them to buy things online that might otherwise be time-consuming / difficult for them to obtain. The banks generally offer these services for free to people all over the country, and they’re able to do this as it is paid for in interest payments by borrowers, mainly mortgage holders. Many of the people and businesses with the largest mortgages are based in London (like my brother) and provide the banks with a large portion of their revenue.
The only two retail banks that the government had to bail out in the financial crisis were Lloyds Banking Group and RBS (which is based in Edinburgh). The government managed to eventually sell its stake in Lloyds for a small profit, but it is still sitting on a loss of around £20 billion iirc on its stake in the parent group of RBS (which – did I mention? – is based in Edinburgh).
Under its QE programme, the Bank of England has essentially printed hundreds of billions of pounds and given it UK financial institutions. However, it hasn’t given that to them for nothing, but in exchange for an almost identical value of (mostly government) bonds. Essentially the government, of which the BoE is part, has written off around 40% of its own debt although, in the headline figures, it doesn’t appear that way.
Most people in Britain, not just London, have never seen the inside of a factory because these days around 80% of the UK economy is composed of services, with relatively little manufacturing – and that includes northern England and the Midlands, as well as London. When I had a full-time job, I was one those northerners still involved in (chemical) manufacturing, sometimes generating £100,000’s of value per year,* though of course I wasn’t paid anywhere near that. However, I was a rarity.
Anyone who isn’t an anarchist would accept that we need government, most of which is usually based in a country’s capital. Even though some might find it hard to believe, relatively little of the close to one trillion of the UK’s public spending goes on politicians and civil servants. London is not extorting money from other regions of the UK. What it takes, it gives back – and for most regions of the UK (which the exception of South-East England and Scotland when the oil price is high) it gives back more.
* No, it didn’t involve controlled substances – or legal highs, as they then were – thanks for asking.
Thanks Craig
This is the best account I have read about our immigration ‘system’.
When I was a counsellor for a low cost counselling centre, we had a contract with a local authority.
I began to see a pattern in my clients referred to us and came to the same conclusion that there was a wider context and that it is largely neo-liberalism.
As Professor Paul Hoggett said ‘private industry is de-regulated. Public services are micro-managed.’ Cost cutting is not ‘efficiencies’ as Mr Hunt would have us believe. It is a core part of the ideology.
There are many people who have a public service ethos and want to do a good job as they believe it is for the common good, but the constant cuts, management fault-finding and expected compliance with vacuous ‘mission statements’ would de-motivate a saint.
Craig Murray said, “We have had decades to get used to the replacement of the skilled working class through automation. What we see now is the replacement of the professional middle classes through automation. Be they local bank managers, immigration officers, or GPs – a computer checklist and unskilled operator is cheaper.”
This is only the beginning. Wait till governments truly embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI). Once they do that they can cut out the middle-man or woman entirely — paying a wage to a human being is decidedly a drain on profit or ‘resources’, what’s not to like?
A heartbreaking but essential read.
Excellent article here from an Albanian professor based at the LSE:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/04/albanians-scapegoats-britain-failing-ideological-project-invaders?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Albanians have become a hate group for the tabloids and the Murdoch press because they are all apparently ‘gangsters’ – like the professor presumably. It beggars belief that we are struggling to fill jobs in health, farming, care and hospitality but are determined to treat immigrants as worse than plague victims.
I also believe that the French have consistently offered the UK a base to process asylum claims in France, thus ending the need for the small boats to cross the Channel. The government refuse, because they know the majority are awarded asylum, preferring to treat them despicably grimly, like prisoners, in the futile hope this will somehow vanish the problem away.
Craig talks complete sense, and this degrading of our administration, with the sneery attitude that cuts to the Civil Service are always popular and a ‘good thing’ just demonstrates how these incompetent grifters and chancers haven’t the slightest idea what managing a complex system and using professional standards actually means. This is the awful price we pay for having a sham democracy that doesn’t work, allowing the absolute worst of people to climb the greasy pole and fill their boots.
See my comment/questions below:
Why don’t they apply for asylum in France then?
Because they know it wouldn’t be granted, because due to the Dublin agreement they should have applied in Bulgaria already and instead?
Because it is in general easier to obtain in the UK than in France?
Because they prefer fish&chips etc….?
See the artilce I linked to, and learn something.
We aren’t in the Dublin convention any more because we left the EU. Funny how brexiteers still claim that somehow other countries we have spurned and insulted should somehow help protect us from our own idiocy. Besides, we need workers.
He did not say that the Dublin agreement applies to the UK. His reference was to its effect upon asylum claims, made in, and to, France by those who had entered the EU through Bulguria.
You could always get to know some immigrants and ask them yourself.
I agree with you, with one quibble: the (Tory) government doesn’t “hope this will somehow vanish the problem away”. They *want* the problem to continue, because it allows them to keep deflecting blame for the decline of the UK onto people with funny names.
Since this narrative plays well with the voters, especially those swayed to vote for Brexit and the Tories, Starmer is obviously running with it too. See yesterday’s disgraceful interview.
To pick up in one of the points in your article:
The errosions of professional class has been happening since the 90s at least.
The attack on Higher Education teacing started in the 1990s and a whole generation of senior lecturers forced to early retirement, by one means or another to save on salaries often not even the top salaries, just a salary. Making working conditions unbearable by use of contractual changes. Meanwhile the younger were not allowed a foot in the revolving door of lecturing and thousands of posts, were scrapped despite ever increasing numbers of students to teach. The majority of the rest been on one year contracts with no rights, or sick pay or holiday pay, no security of tenure and no right to reapply so these posts are filled by new hopefuls each and every year to be used and spat out again for the 25 years. Short term contracts means no mortgage. Causing backward social mobility and homelessness of the UK’s well-educated well-trained and self-motivated young professionals who consequently had less families less home ownership and our culture or education system, making them financially and socially excluded. That includes no rights to social housing, passed over for unskilled new migrants for the last twenty years who had came from a social system that provided everybody with state housing…to travel from for higher wages using families as a lever even if they did not follow. This was how the Freedom of Movement was abused by government to drive down wages but it has skewed life for professionals who were unemployed permanently to save on wage bills. Our society is poorer for it and now those policies see the collapse of our fabric of society.
Poorer people were worse hit by illness including by the pandemic.
Very interesting background info, and I totally agree with your dystopian general analysis and outlook.
I refuse to use supermarket self-checkouts for that reason.
In the EU, that ‘right wing myth’ is a law in form of the Dublin agreement though.
I don’t know, whether it had or still has any legal relevance for the UK. The certainly convenient interpretation that any asylum seeker coming from the EU c/should have applied for it at his PoE there, and that he is safe there, is correct though imho.
What I don’t understand, is why these people want to continue their journey from France&co to the UK?
Is it the language, is it relatives/gangs, is it easier to get asylum granted?
Surely the housing, benefits and legal/illegal
employment situation is not that much different from the ones in the big EU countries bordering the UK?!
If we do not have this information, we cannot address, let alone solve, this problem.
And a problem it has become.
We have nothing to do with the Dublin agreement any more. That was an EU agreement, We left. Other EU countries are not obliged to help us any more, and why should they? Most of them take far more immigrants than we do.
It is easier to disappear from the official radar in the UK because, unlike most continental countries, we don’t have identity cards, and you can rent a flat or a room without any documentation. Basically once someone is not actually in custody in the UK, they can go anywhere and blend in to the informal economy. The authorities have no way of tracking them.
I don’t know how difficult it is to get a fake identity so as to get a NI number or register with a GP, but as long as someone works in the informal economy and is healthy, neither is really needed.
> you can rent a flat or a room without any documentation
This is not true. Landlords are required to verify that their tenant has the right to be here.
It’s a long time since I lived in the UK – perhaps things have changed. But two questions occur to me:
1. How is the landlord supposed to verify? I’m a British citizen; if I try to rent a flat in London, what document would I be required to produce?
2. Landlords are “required”. How is that enforced? If I buy a flat in London and then rent it out, who checks that I’ve asked the renter for proof of right to be in the UK, and what exactly is checked?
Nobody has checked that my German tenant has the right to live here. But both he and his wife produced documentation that they were allowed to live and work here.
Private landlords were drafted in by (I think) Theresa May as supernumerary immigration officers. Thing is, it’s quite difficult to enforce rules against private landlords, because there’s no registry of them. My hometown recently introduced a registration scheme whereby I’m required to produce gas and electricity safety certificates, and provide all kinds of details about myself and the property.
But without a cetral registry of private landlords, the only landlords that willl register are the good landlords. The only way they’ll catch the bad ones is when someone complains about their neighbours.
Because the UK grants asylum to more Albanians than any other European country by far.
Ask the folk of Blackpool and Fylde what they think of recent influx of Albanians gangs dumped in their locale.
There is very obviously gangs brazenly engaged in drug dealing in busy public places on Central Promenade organised criminality involved in people trafficing for prostitution.
Whilst no country can be painted by minority of criminals…
What system is deliberately inflicting these and many other on deprived communities around the UK? Not just cuts to trained staff. It seems much more a deliberate policy of redistribution and dumping consequently unravelling our social cohesion further that plays into the hands of right wingers. So seems to be a self serving policy by the Tories. Perhaps it is these newcomers that they want to consult over fracking!!??
Albanian drug dealers haven’t been dumped on Blackpool and the Fylde, Dodds; they’ll have gone there because that’s where a lot of the customers are (I think Blackpool had the highest drug deaths in England a couple years ago), and will have eliminated most of the competition with the threat of ultraviolence – or, if that didn’t work, the use of ultraviolence. If they’re dealing brazenly on the Prom, they’ve probably got kompromat on some of the higher-ups in Lancashire Constabulary too – possibly footage of them with a trafficked underager in one of their brothels, but more likely, that old standby: wads of cash. Tam McGraw wasn’t known as ‘The Licensee’ because he ran a pub.
If that is the case, I should say that that would still make Lancs Police saints compared to some of their colleagues in the West Yorks force, as you will know if you read the blurb on the book ‘Drug Wars’ by former bizzie Neil Woods – or, better still, read the whole thing:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drug-Wars-terrifying-inside-Britains-ebook/dp/B0741WX2Z4/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Of the many people I met who have been trafficked from Africa to Italy all had been given the same message, “head to Germany, Sweden or the UK.”
They were told before they had even met any local Italians, that Italians (and / or French) were racists and to get out as soon as possible and head for these three more tolerant countries where there was jobs and housing as if promoting a Shangri La.
Contrary to the local government agencies and charities and volunteers giving the migrants, housing feeding clothing them and ultimately after about a year for the paperwork, granting them the right to work and live in Italy. They lived in flats not detention centres and ony suffered boredom, often as one eighteen year old told me living in a boring rural area that was very similar to what he had left behind. (He was looking for bright lights and clubs!)
From listening to their many stories ALL had been encouraged to leave studies or jobs or in some cases small businesses, to “earn more in Europe”, regardless of the fact nobody had told them that there had been the global financial crash devastating Italy for example and there was mass unemployment across the EU from 2009 onwards. In ither words those guys began to realise that comparing their country to the situation in Italy, it was all relative and not much different in relative terms.
But Italian small businesses had faced unimaginable difficulties in Italia because of their tax laws causing many suicides and newspaper headlines highli ted elderly Italian folk being caught stealing food from supermarkets. There is no unemployment support if you work for a foreign based company, such as the textile industry being based in the Far East. So I knew many highly skilled unemployed Italians who would never find another job and lost their mortgaged homes.
Not a single politician nor journalist has ever addressed the question of who encourages young men from realtively stable countries without conflict or the worst of deprivation to make the most dangerous often year long journey across Africa through war zones and the dangerous mess Libya has been left in before they even set foot on a dodgy dinghy in order to seek a higher wage to help their families?
Each year more and more are conned into this in Africa.
Many are too embarassed to go home because they wanted to go home having earned money and saved wages to help their families in the best cases and the worst cases are in debt to ruthless traffickers for the passage.
Even students have made the trip because doing a degree in more stable African countries involves fees of £4000. About the same as the passage at 2015 rates. Refugees and asylum seekers from war zones and dangers will do anything to escape for their lives they have no choice.
But nobody ever asks why traffickers are not stopped from encouraging hopeful African youngsters elsewhere to leave their homes and humble lives for the unknown. When regional development and anti trafficker targetting would stop the trade in people and local development would make a difference to their economies instead of all savings and hope being put in the traffickers hands.
“There is nothing in either the 1951 Refugee Convention nor its 1967 Protocol that stipulates that refugees must claim asylum in the first safe country they reach. That is a peculiar right wing canard.”
But you are missing the point, though. If a person is trying to escape genuine torture, imprisonment, and death, then what they want and need is to escape that. And the first country they arrive at which offers it is the solution. There is nothing right wing about this argument, unless you consider basic logic to be in the right wing domain.
Really, I for one am increasingly surprised how you can go into such depth and be so informative on matters, but miss these simple things. You also do it with the trans thing.
You are looking at this from the wrong point of view, that of the asylum seeker. The asylum seeker would no doubt be delighted to remain in the first safe country they get to, but that doesn’t mean that that country will be delighted to have them. Without a convention like the Dublin Agreement, the officials in the first country just say no and on the asylum seeker goes to the next country, where the process is repeated. The Dublin Agreement is binding on countries, not asylum seekers. Now all the EU countries know that they no longer have to take asylum seekers if they can pass them on to the UK, which is not in the Dublin Agreement any more as we have left the EU and is thus fair game.
> And the first country they arrive at which offers it is the solution
The first country is A solution. Refugees are entitled to choose in which country they will apply for refuge.
uh huh. uh huh.
If you are floating about in space, running out of petrol, and Mars is close by, you don’t wait until you get to Jupiter.
This is indeed something that happens and happened in the private sector. As a freelancer in a totally different way of makng a living I noticed it back in the 90s, and I guess it was happening before just that I was lucky (and picky) in the contracts I had. Back in the day companies were often sales driven, so sales and marketing had a lot of influence, customer services were consulted as they had depths of knowledge about what customers liked, and of course manufacturing / production had the word on the costs and timescales. Then the accountants and legal got to check it all over and sign it off, whatever it was.
I also guess that the CEO / MD was a reasonably capable person, any board appointed them to do a job and left them largely to it. But then the accountants clawed their way to the top, or rather spreadsheeted and powerpointed their agendas and got appointed the top jobs. You can see it on the likes of Dragon’s Den where never mind the product, what about your totally made up projections for the next 3 years? You have to lie to get on. And what you get there is that the people with ability who know hoe to get things done either have to lie and say “Yes” that wlll work haveing tried it before and seen it failing, or get booted out or shunted into a corner to liee out their remaining 10 or 20 years. Luckily for me I got out and did my own far less well paid thing. With other freelancers expressing their jealousy as these corporates got worse and worse and worse.
Anyways, this:
“Let me again upset some of my “own side””
One of my reasons for Independence is the distance of Westminster and being one of 5.4 million rather than just one of 65 million. But our lot are just as incompetent largely as the UK lot, and have no incentive to change with “we’r’e better than England”, while failing abominably with IT contracts, construction projects and subcontracts. That won’t change while we have to keep voting them in to have any chance of getting Independence, which makes a very strong argument for YES:
“Vote YES and then be able to vote in a competent Government, one which is Scottish not one which copies the UK”.
“Vote YES and then be able to vote in a competent Government, one which is Scottish not one which copies the UK”
Howcan you insulate an independent Scotland and its elections, from whatever has produced these effects in all other western countries?
“It is now illegal in UK domestic law to arrive in the UK for the purpose of claiming asylum – contrary to international law and the UK government’s obligations under the Refugee Convention. ”
I’m absolutely astonished by this; I was under the impression that it wasn’t illegal in any fashion to come to the UK to apply for asylum.
On the contrary, the professional class is growing in size.
The following is from: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04252/SN04252.pdf
“Overall participation in higher education increased from 3.4% in 1950, to 8.4% in 1970, 19.3% in 1990 and 33% in 2000”
This doesn’t mean people are getting smarter. Indeed in order to have more educated people, standards to some extent must fall (at least in the average). But if you equate higher education to the professional class, then you can see that it is growing rather than shrinking. This of course assumes most graduates are eventually able to find work in their chosen profession. Moreover, each professional is able to do more than ever before – in the 1950’s accountants were far less efficient than today. I find it hard to accept that the UK is being deprofessionalised.
However, it is certainly true that the UK is much less friendly towards immigration. This was the spirit of Brexit. The British people have never been particularly friendly towards immigrants so that is not new. Perhaps what is new is that previously the government tried to rise above this, but today it is ruled by populism. Woke is out. (This is also consistent with the picture that today’s politicians like Braverman speak from their heart rather than adhering to carefully crafted statements that reflect acceptable government policy).
I should add that populism is not anti-democratic. It is doing exactly what the people want. Mob rule if you will.
Andrew. As I said previously, judge the tories on what they do, not what they say.
Patel acted the Nazi towards immigrants but in reality nothing changed, now Braverman is pulling on the jackboots will anything change ? I doubt it. Uncontrolled Immigration will continue and if you complain you must be a racist.
The tories say we need foreign nurses because we cannot recruit locally – absolute rubbish. The tories, actually Hunt, stopped nurses bursaries and limited local recruitment and training numbers. This is the same for uk industry that won’t invest in local employees because they can buy in cheaper foreign workers. It’s not anti immigrant to want the country to invest in its own and to stop stealing labour and skills from overseas countries.
Stevie Boy: “This is the same for uk industry that won’t invest in local employees because they can buy in cheaper foreign workers.”
The good news for you here is that the per capita GDP of Poland and Czech Republic is set to pass that of the UK in the next ten years. They already have lower unemployment and lower debt as a percentage of GDP. Then it will be the white Brit intelligencia (including nurses) going to work in white Poland for better pay, lower taxes and better employment prospects. All will be well in the UK!! Will we then try to block emigration? The fundamental flaw in democracy is that it allows fools to be emotionally manipulated.
Stevie Boy also: “Uncontrolled Immigration will continue and if you complain you must be a racist.”
It is very difficult to separate those that merely oppose immigration from the pure racists. Always has been and always will be. Go black home is as true today as it was 40 years ago. We can only end this when the GDP and quality of life for your average African exceeds that of the average Brit.
We can only end this when the GDP and quality of life for your average African exceeds that of the average Brit.
Patience friend, patience..
“Patel acted the Nazi towards immigrants but in reality nothing changed, now Braverman is pulling on the jackboots will anything change?”
Not genuine Nazis .. theyre shameful.
The account of how the service has been de-professionalised, with huge degradation in quality, is completely believable.
I’d be interested in Craig’s comments on issue of passports at British Embassies, which was discontinued many years ago. In the 1970s, living in Switzerland, I got my passport renewed at the Geneva consulate. Now, if you live in Switzerland you have to send your passport to London for renewal. This costs much more because you have to use a courier service (£20 each way) whereas you could just send it by ordinary local registered post before. The rationale was that it saved money, but it’s just shifted costs onto the citizen – I’d gladly have paid a £30 surcharge for renewal at an embassy, because (1) it would still be cheaper than 2-way courier, and (2) it was quicker.
The politicians seem to think that they are the only ones who need intelligence; all other jobs can be outsourced to trained monkeys. This also explains why almost all government software-development projects fail.
> This also explains why almost all government software-development projects fail.
They fail because the government doesn’t actually develop the software; the work is contracted out to a consultancy company. Remuneration for the consultancy firm will be some kind of cost-plus, i.e. the longer the work takes, the more they stand to earn. Consultancy firms are not incentivized to complete projects.
Consultancy companies bid for the contracts, and the low bid wins. The consultancy then hires programmers, usually contractors. It hires the cheapest, i.e. basically monkeys. I’ve seen this happen.
Computer programming is one of those fields where you definitely don’t want to hire the cheapest people available.
the wrecker
the destroyer
knows no bound
all value
we once counted
in the west
reduced to
nescience in our
stepping wake
This is why I check Craig’s blog every day for new posts ….. stuff like this…… excellent.
Lets not pretend this is a problem caused by recent conservative governments (its maybe not even a right wing initiative) as its being going on for years.
My first encounter with a rendition passenger, on a trip to Lagos circa 2005, painted quite the picture of cool Britania, with the poor mother reduced to hysterics (never mind tears) having been abducted for no given reason along with her 2 children after several years living happily (but in extreme relative poverty to family life in Nigeria!) in Newcastle.
No idea whether the staff accompanying her for the jolly (couple of days to refresh in comfortable accommodation, presumably, before the return flight) were permanent civil service or seconded from an employment agency but sadly to say they had tuned out from the obvious distress and even had the gall to loudly complain about her/ the cuts that led to sharing such flight with other passengers.
Those initiatives were very much rightwing inspired, concocted between New Labour and the Sun newspaper. All conveniently unremembered by propagandists for new New Labour.
Profoundly grateful Craig for this. Can’t imagine where else I could have acquired this information about a subject that has always puzzled me.
Explains so much about the void in the values Dept of modern life.
Competence is a dirty word.
My frustrations pale by comparison with refugees, but living outside the UK it is barely possible to have meaningful communication with the passport office, the pensions agency or my UK bank. These institutions claim that email is not secure, yet seem to believe that mobile phones are. I am offered a menu system, none of which ever quite fits my particular problem, then listen to classical music for around 20 minutes (these bodies are invariably ‘experiencing a high volume of callers.’) Eventually I am put through to a young person keen to call me by my first name who is clearly trained only to deal with general enquiries. On occasions when I have insisted on being put through to a specialist department I am put on hold, then the phone connection is simply cut.
I am sure that all of my queries could have been resolved within five minutes of speaking to a competent employee, preferably face to face although that is not an option when overseas I concede. My recent request for a renewed passport was handled by an agency but, alas, my photo was discovered to be 2mm too short when it arrived in the UK. I would have paid extra so that an office junior could take it to the nearest photocopier to be enlarged but that is not part of the service. For as Craig implies, these agencies are no longer serving the public. They prefer to keep the public at arm’s length.
Welcome to the tick-box society we in the UK live under nowadays. When the Tories leave office, as they surely some day will at some point in the future, some Tory minister will leave a note saying “There’s no money left”.
> believed Tashkent to be in Turkey
Tashkent isn’t in Turkey, and it seems reasonable for the visa clerk to reject an application from someone claiming to be from Uzbekistan who doesn’t know the name if its capital city.
It was the low-paid clerk working supposedly for Britain who thought Tashkent was in Turkey, not the applicant.
Ah, OK, that figures. I read that passage twice, and mis-parsed it both times.
Mind, that’s not altogether surprising given that (according to Reuters) a UK Foreign Secretary earlier this year said she would never recognise Rostov and Voronezh as Russian, and had to be corrected by her ambassador.
Yes, the efficiency of Britain’s once renowned civil service has significantly deteriorated thanks to decades of large-scale, ideologically-driven shrinkage and dilution of state provision. The rules of 21st-century British bureaucracy are coming less and less from inside the bureaucracy itself and increasingly from the outside, dictated by unscrupulous capitalist interests.
Factor in too a longstanding effort by Tory and New Labour politicians to ensure senior civil servants adhere to the ruling establishment ideology of free -market liberalism. Then too there is the ever more systematic “revolving door” between top bureaucrats and private business interests. The UK is known to have more former politicians and top civil servants ensconced in blue-chip companies than any other country in the OECD. This essential corruption among the British elite is heavily at odds with lingering popular mythology about the British establishment (a creation over many decades of the establishment’s media arm).
It’s sad because if we had a less self-serving, more public-spirited ruling class they might view the recent nadir of British bureaucracy during the pandemic (and the shock of Brexit) as an ideal opportunity to completely overhaul and reorder Britain’s organisational culture on the old Weberian ideals of bureaucracy. That is, ideals of organisational efficiency, fairness and freedom from corruption, which would benefit the general population rather than a few select businesses and careerist bureaucrats and politicians. Were British bureaucracy to return to being modelled on such tenets it would be an important cleansing vehicle for British public life.
However, is this any longer even possible?
Who would be willing to make such a change when those in power benefit, often personally, from present arrangements? Would a wholesale Weberian-type reform be on the agenda if the deregulators and “buccaneering free-enterprise” Brexiteers pass from the stage and a different party takes over in government?
The career paths of former New Labour ministers and mandarins following their public service (and those of their recent analogues in ChangeUK) do not inspire great confidence that a new brush would sweep away the inefficient trends and revolving door culture of recent decades.
Moreover, nowhere in mainstream British politics or the commentariat does one hear urgent concern about the grip of big business over British bureaucracy and governance. It is very difficult if not impossible in the present political and media environment to ever see the grip of big capital loosening and British bureaucracy ever again being characterised by Weberian ideals.
Weber thought it was an iron cage too though didn’t he.
“ruling establishment ideology of free -market liberalism.”
Which boils down to turning public services into revenue streams for private capital. I wonder if the intelligence services are subject to this process.
“the benefits would far outweigh the cost” Yes. You are right that everything is being dumbed down. I weep for my country. It tells you that those “well paid, high skill jobs” are words that will never become true. Are the Tories so blind or is there another malicious agenda? The other joke for me is ‘sovereignty’ – that has been sold off gradually since Thatcher. The only sovereignty that really gives power is economic sovereignty, but our industries have been sold off to our economic competitors, the most absurd recently being semiconductor circuit designer ARM. A lot of financial activity is parasitic but that’s what we will be left with. 40 years ago I had the most helpful bank manager who supported me when I needed it. Suddenly about 1990 he left the job. I found out where he lived and took him out for lunch. He told me how stressful the job had become, head office blocked most of his decisions. He used to run every day till his feet were sore to deal with stress. Then he had made a bad mistake (I didn’t ask for details) and he was out of a job. I found later from a new dentist that I started attending that they has applied to him for a loan to buy the premise they were in and had been turned down, I guess by head office.
Apparently, the Tories favour ‘light Government’, sounds good but what it means in reality is farming everything out to the private sector. In the private sector profit and infinite growth are the priorities, which means that services are pared to the bone, cut as soon as they don’t deliver and where there is minimal, if any, investment. So ‘light government’ has given us:
– travel services that are overpriced and operate only at the convenience of the service provider;
– utility companies that don’t invest in infrastructure and flood our rivers and beaches with effluent;
– health services that don’t help sick people and where senior staff use private healthcare;
– care services that underpay their staff and overcharge their customers;
– local government services that continually increase charges but cannot empty rubbish bins.
We’re always told ‘you have to pay top whack to get the best’ – still waiting for the best to show up !
“We’re always told ‘you have to pay top whack to get the best’ ”
I find that the people telling us that tend to be senior government, local government or charity employees justifying their enormous salaries they have negotiated on the basis of nothing more than knowing the right people.
If the banks really operated in the “free market” like they are supposed to do, then one of them would go back to offering a service where you could see a professional manager who had some sort of decision-making power. The fact that none of them do shows that they are in a cartel. The real freedom in the much vaunted “free market” is the freedom to form monopolies and cartels.
I remember reading about 20 years ago a claim that we only had one patrol boat for 100 miles coastline
5 yrs later it was 3 boats for the whole island
Then under May’s ministration I read it was down to 1
Craig, the service you describe 30 years ago (of which I was also a part) meant our immigration ‘border’ was prior to boarding the plane to the UK and was effectively staffed to accomplish this but it was also cost neutral ie funded by the visa application fee. However as the service levels have been reduced to ever cheaper versions the visa fee has been ever increasing. I often wonder where all the money, from the application fees, is going to. If it is not to fund the professional service, as it was back then, nor to cover the privatisations costs (met by the separate handling fee) what exactly are they funding? This is an equally interesting question in my opinion.
Alan,
Yes thought about that myself. Can only be two things, it is going to the Home Office’s other functions, and to the profits of the private companies involved.
“in effect you have immigration interviews being conducted at the arrival airport desk, while thousands of passengers are queued up behind”
That’s the truth. Last time coming into Manchester airport I was stuck at passport control for 3 hours behind loads of people being grilled and having their papers checked. I was thinking didn’t they have visas, and all their papers checked when they applied.
That said, the privatized UK visa service in the country where I live is actually a lot more efficient than the old system that was run from the embassy, at least for routine applications and passport renewals.
Any trip to the old embassy, you’d have to get there first thing in the morning, take a number, wait around a hour or two, see somebody for a first chat, wait around a bit longer to see somebody else, usually more senior, wait around for lunch break, maybe come back another day if you didn’t get to see the right person on the first visit, etc, etc. It was pretty excruciating. Now with the new service, the visa agency is based in offices at a shopping mall which is easy to get to, you get all your papers in online first, then set an appointment usually just a few days later, the appointment is always on time, takes about 30 minutes in-and-out, they do go through those papers and check the originals with you during the appointment, you sign off on the forms, all is sent by courier to The UK, you get a decision back within a couple of weeks.
So how to combine the professional judgement of the old system with the efficiency and user-friendliness of the new? I guess if we knew that, the whole nationalized vs. privatized debate might be solved right there…
“We have had decades to get used to the replacement of the skilled working class through automation. What we see now is the replacement of the professional middle classes through automation.” – exactly, absolutely. (* And I just picture a clerk in the office whose position is “Fighting Russian disinformation” who has to report his/her positive achievements (to have reasonable hopes for a pay rise or promotion) every morning during the stand-up meetings and twice a year at the performance review. Whether there was a “Russian disinformation” or not. *) Another factor is constantly increasing “granularity” and an avalanche growth of micro “regulations” – all designed and working towards, as the author rightly noted, to replace skills with automation – as well as assuming that the staff member is precisely that, a brainless automation. And so simultaneously increasing entropy (=complexity, as in “multiplicity of small tasks”).
Mr. Murray did not mention whether the amount of paperwork required for a visa application increased over the time he was in the office. I bet it did.
A book further illustrating Mr. Murray’s view of our future https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 (chapter 1 is sufficient).
The systematic dismantling of the state, the so-called light government dream of the neocons, which even Maggie and Ronald did not dare to inflict directly is being enacted slowly since then. Liz Truss gave the game away and didn’t have the talent or the sense of timing to succeed but nevertheless the agenda is inexorably carrying on. It is like boiling a frog if you do it slowly the frog goes into a stupor but if you do it fast it jumps out of the quickly heating water. Now of course Sunak will do the same, continue to dismantle the state, under the guise of austerity MII, out of ‘necessity’.
The advantages to politicians of light government are enormous. They can do anything they like and blame the markets or the outsourced services which were given to their cronies to make money, so that when the politicians are out of a job, they can just tag onto the gravy train. To have profitable outsourcing, you need cheap labour, either through ‘deprofessionalisation’ or by exploiting the developing world, either directly, or by import of cheap labour through selective immigration. Even liberals and progressives seem to ignore the immorality of how the rich west depends on developing countries to train doctors, nurses and others, so we can generously give them visas to come and brain drain their countries of origin. There is no acknowledgement of how shameful this is. The whole saga of integrating the former communist east European countries into the EU and Nato are part of this process of parasitism if not cannibalism.
This is part of the continuing fight, or agenda, of Capitalism versus Socialism.
The capitalists want instant gratification/profits without effort, ‘people’ are just expendable resources, there is no loyalty or investment. The planning horizon extends no further than the next, bottom line, review.
IMO, Socialism is more focused on protecting and using the assets of the country to improve the lot of ‘the people’ and there is a loyalty and pride in one’s country. This is no more apparent than in the obvious differences between countries like Venezuela, Cuba and China when compared with The USA, UK and the other Western regimes.
The trouble is that the people have been brainwashed to fear Socialism and love Capitalism, even as the system destroys them.
That dystopia you foresee enveloping higher education is already well underway unfortunately. There was further progress last week with the mass redundancies announced by Birkbeck. The British establishment is hell bent on destroying humanities and the arts for any number of ideological reasons.
“then what are we fighting for ?”