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Sunday 22 November 2009

Not funny, but it struck home

Ms Bland’s joke and the link between immigration and emigration

These facts were reported as if they were entirely unrelated. Nobody dared to venture that there was perhaps a very direct and even causal relationship between the record numbers of British people leaving the country and the record numbers of non-British people coming in. This seems to me a bit of an oddity, because, colloquially, one hears emphatic verification of such a causal relationship almost every day. I know a couple of people who have recently left Britain and the reasons they gave were very simple: we’re being flooded with immigrants, it’s madness, it is not our country any more. Sometimes these views are preceded by the more polite, ‘We don’t like the way the country has changed’, and that they merely wish for a better life. There will then be a quick rundown of just how things have changed — too crowded, don’t want the kids brought up in schools where the majority language is Urdu, don’t want to be blown up on the Tube, etc. — a litany of complaints leading in one direction only. And then, after a while, when they think no one else is listening, it comes: too many immigrants who seem to get preferential treatment over the indigenous Brits. You know, I ain’t racist, but ...

It may be that my friends are wholly untypical of the other Brits who have left, but I would guess that the reverse is true. They are working-class, hard-working, low-paid and disillusioned. They are not mad on the huge influx (80,000 last year) of immigrants from Eastern Europe and especially Poland. These incomers depress local wages, apart from anything else — talk to your local English sparkie or plumber about his views on the recent competition from Gdansk and Bratislava. But that isn’t their main source of discontent by a long way. Their real objection is to those arrivals — a city the size of Sunderland every year — from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Somalia. That is, people who are a different colour, and from formidably different cultures, who may speak no English at all and who may have no wish to integrate with the rest of us. That’s truly, unapologetically racist, I suppose. If they were opposed to immigration per se, one could argue that it was a laudably non-discriminatory state of mind. But, in fact, they are very discriminating indeed.

What surprised me, at first, was that nobody seemed prepared to report this very common and increasingly prevalent sentiment. After all, one could write about these Brits fleeing the country and state the likely reasons without necessarily concurring with them. Good riddance to these awful people, one might cheerfully conclude. But even for our most free-thinking and dependable think-tank, Civitas, this was a bridge too far; its spokesman, Robert Whelan, ventured that perhaps the parlous state of the health service was to blame for the exodus. You know, I suspect the majority of those who left have had next to no contact with the NHS: they are, in the main, pre-middle-aged and healthy. No, it seems patently clear to me that an important reason — perhaps one of several reasons but significant nonetheless — that so many Brits are getting the hell out is that they think there are too many non-European foreigners here, and underneath it rankles that these foreigners may abuse our hospitality and be treated rather better by the authorities than are the indigenous working-class whites.

More articles from: Rod Liddle | this section

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