Time to own your own history

Starting with the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning and continuing throughout the day the news has been dominated by a report produced by the Equality & Human Rights Commission absolutely damning about home care services for the elderly.

Commentators on the report have been so shocked that I can hardly add anything to the outrage already expressed except to say that I am also shocked beyond belief.

However I hope I can be forgiven, in this unimportant little blog that hardly anyone reads, for pointing out that we have been continually lectured about how the care services "would collapse" in the United Kingdom without large scale immigration, particularly from the Indian sub-continent and the West Indies.  We are endlessly told, whenever anyone attempts to discuss immigration, that "we wouldn't have any carers in this country if it wasn't for the hard-working immigrants".  Therefore if the apologists for large-scale immigration are claiming the care profession as a triumph of "hard working immigrants" presumably they must also share responsibility for the evil behaviour that has taken place.

This is not to construct some tenuous connection that doesn't exist.  The local council caring professions have already been claimed by the pro-immigration lobby.  To quote Gary Younge, it's time to own your own history.

And doesn't this episode illustrate just why large scale immigration is so pernicious?  Carers need to be well-paid, well-motivated and well-supported (as they largely were in the 1950s).  Instead, the importation of cheap labour willing to do "the dirty jobs" for next to nothing has allowed councils to shirk their responsibilities, cut local taxes, and at the same time sanctimoniously praise the imported carers as a model to be emulated by the lazy work-shy indigenous population (and if anyone tries to protest they are called "rascist").

Difficult to see what can be reclaimed from this mess.  But perhaps next time immigration is discussed in a serious context possibly we can do without the lectures about the caring professions "collapsing" if it wasn't for immigration.  The caring professions have already collapsed if this report is to be believed.

Hugh Muir, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Darcus Howe etc - time to own your own history.