Council of Europe's human rights commissioner Nils Muiznieks

Article in today's Guardian in which Alan Travis and Shiv Malik report on comments made by the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner Nils Muiznieks (the headline says he is an EU official, which confuses me as I thought the Council of Europe was separate from the European Union):  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/mar/29/eu-watchdog-britain-shameful-rhetoric-migrants

The article is much what you might expect.

European politicians seem to say to the United Kingdom more fool you for having a welfare state that attracts people.

Note particularly this section:

This is basically repeating the lie "British people are too lazy to do these jobs".

The locals have not "deserted" the jobs - they cannot take the jobs because the wages have plummeted.

Recently I have been reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. 

It contains a devastating expose of the "too lazy to do the jobs" argument.

What we are experiencing in Europe at the present time is what America experienced in the 1930s when the dustbowl Okies were streaming into California undercutting wages and being undercut in turn.

It took the stimulus of a world war before that economic mess corrected itself.

Grapes of Wrath is a very great book.  I had to read it slowly because there was so much that I wanted to take in.  The Okies would have been better off staying at home and organising themselves to oppose the tyranny of the banks (by foreclosing on mortgages the banks drove the dustbowl farmers off the land and turned them into the sort of destitute migrants Nils Muiznieks approves of).