“Dumb insolence” (a disciplinary offence for other servants of the Crown)

All the news reports are full of a parliamentary study that finds migration has brought zero economic benefits to the United Kingdom. The government is not disputing the report in any significant way. Senior government figures are not giving interviews to discuss what is currently the top news item (“you can tell when a government is on the skids when their ministers stop appearing in public”).

The immigration minister Liam Byrne did, however, appear on Andrew Neil’s Daily Politics at 12 today. He had nothing to say and responded to questions with a sickly sort of grin and a provocative display of “dumb insolence” (a disciplinary offence for other servants of the Crown). Andrew Neil did not spare him (“you seem determined not to answer a single question I ask you… these figures are nonsense… thank you minister, we’re done with you”).


You might need to click on the above image to read this letter to The Guardian.

Switching over to The Wright Stuff (starts at 12.30) a panel of Richard Bacon, Marcus Brigstocke, Mel Giedroyc and John Torode was again discussing immigration. After the intellectual rigour of Andrew Neil, this trashy discussion went nowhere. Marcus Brigstocke repeated the slur that Polish field-workers are hard-working and enthusiastic whereas indigenous teenagers are lazing around on benefits drinking beer from the bottle (the reality is that Polish migrants are motivated by desperation, not enthusiasm, and that the beer-drinking teenagers on benefits are also facing a desperate employment situation - one that has been created by government negligence).



Above: into the county (and other counties) over the last five years the government has imported wholesale an underclass of “peasants”. They are real peasants (as defined by the old Soviet formula), and back in Poland they would vote for the reactionary Polish Peasants Party. It is unbelievable that in the twenty-first century the wages and conditions of the rural poor should be set back by over a hundred years (and also unbelievable that the Labour government should be proud of this “productivity”, immigration minister Liam Byrne saying today “employers have made decisions about who best to employ”).



The simple laws of economics mean that either the labour market must be closed or the benefits system will collapse (or is this already too late - can the welfare state survive more than ten years, given the existing underclass that must eventually be absorbed into it?). If the labour market were to be closed, even temporarily, wages must rise to attract people off benefits and into work. Why does no-one in the government understand the concept of labour market equilibrium?

And as for Marcus Brigstocke, Johann Hari, David Aaronovitch and all the other “British people don’t want to work” commentators, is it not possible to import some Polish feature writers and employ them at the minimum wage competing against some of the home-grown professional chatterers? Then perhaps we would see Marcus Brigstocke “too lazy to get out of bed in the morning”. And Johann Hari and David Aaronovitch swigging beer from the bottle as they turn their backs on the “Job Centre” (an Orwellian contradiction in terms) and stagger off to claim their “Jobseekers” allowance.



One newspaper that did not give the report front page billing was The Independent. They gave the item a tiny little box on page 16. The editor in chief of The Independent is Simon Kelner.

Views of Simon Kelner: “he has always favoured a view of the world as he would like it to be, rather than as it factually is…” “in those days he probably had a chip on his shoulder as a result of going to a polytechnic…” “people think his turning The Independent into tabloid format was some stroke of rebranding genius, but actually it was an attempt to maximise advertising revenue by nearly doubling the number of so-called ‘full-pages’ which they continued to sell at the old broadsheet rate - what a con for the advertisers!”.