Miliband admits immigrant workers in pole position

Noa

Yes, spot on Rod.

Reading Ed Milliband's comments carefully it becomes apparent that what initially appears to be a interlinked summary is in fact two separate statements.
The first sentence says that 'people' were worried by Polish immigration and its consequences. Not that he was. In fact I venture to say that, in private he didn't then and doesn't now give a damn about falling UK worker living standards. Because he was, and is, an integral part of the Labour Neather Neather land team.

He has also said previously that nothing can be done (so nothing will be), to control immigration from the EU or elsewhere.

Given the total falsity and hypocrisy inherent in that first statement, the cooing oxymoronic sentiments of the second really amount to:- 'Dear voter, Labour feels your pain, a bit, sorry'.

normanc

I believe they were castigated as 'bigoted' rather than racist by senior members of Labour.

Baron

Is Gillian Duffy, the dour Scot’s favourite bigoted woman going to speak at the conference?

She cut it well then, may still have an idea or two up her sleeve, now.

Ray

You're right, Rod. He does.

Chris

It's funny how the people who get most upset about being called racist are the racists. Rod Liddle is a racist. The fact that Milliband has decided, in a particularly seedy way, to court the racist vote, doesn't make that any less true. It just shows Milliband's contempt for the British electorate.

Oedipus Wex

Wod,

I think you're more a 'WaaaAAAaacist' as the diffewence in pwonunciation to the Jewemy Hardy-like baby voice (with a bit of ‘Ken nasal’) is a sign of a Libewal leaning wuse that maybe started in the early 80s - pwobably in Lambeth Council - of spuwious postuwing over wace and shutting down any argument wegarding neo-libewal policies in employment.

I'm happy to be a 'waaaAAAaaacist' although I'm a life-long anti-racist!

Hexhamgeezer

So thats immigration cleared up then. We were 'worried' about the 'poles'

I feel like I'm being invited to lie beneath Ed while he empties his bowels over me.

Tiberius

Wacism is a very weal source of rancour.

Oedipus Waaacist

Chris

"It's funny how the people who get most upset about being called racists are the racists. Rod Liddle is a racist."

Er...evidence? Usual idiotic assertions aren't valid.

Fergus Pickering

It's not enough, Chris, to call those who disagree with you racist. The word is just a word and explains nothing, solves nothing. Youmight start by defining what you mean by a racist. Is a racist someone who notices the differences between, say, a German and a Jamaican. Or do you have to do more than notice? Tell us what you mean. Or do you not know what you mean?

Archibald

Chris, it is not racist (or even nationalist) to acknowledge an economic reality and a concern of many people within a nation. To not acknowledge such things would be really quite ridiculous, although being really quite ridiculous is pretty much the normal state of affairs in Britain with so many closed minded bigots like yourself around, incapable of seeing their own intolerance of any view other than their own.

Maurice Glasman, one of Ed's ideas men, was ditched because he spoke about immigration. That's the level of discourse so many of the new left have bought in to. It's the new fascism.

If there is a problem, it should be discussed and possibly addressed if necessary. If it turns out there is a problem with only perceptions rather than reality, then this should be made clear. As a nation, we seem utterly incapable of having adult discussions, so instead well-meaning but ultimately anti-democratic opinions inform the debate and things become unmentionable, never mind being worthy of an actual discussion.

Because of our inability to deal with these issues in public, groups like the BNP rise, as they cover ground where there may be geniune issues and taint it with their own extreme views.
I hope that this mention by Ed is one small step to having some of Glasman's more 'extreme' views an airing and he is being welcomed back into the fold.

R.McGeddon

Weren't Red Ed's parents Polish immigrants ??

Leo McKinstry

As Rod so wisely points out, there is no sign, for all Miliband's weasel-worded apology, that Labour is going to change its fanatical, extremist, ideologically driven open-door policy on immigration. In any case, Miliband's focus on eastern Europe is an irrelevance, a distraction to hide the real problem of uncontrolled immigration from Asia, Africa and the West Indies, which now makes up the majority of the influx. Labour deliberately jacked up non-white immigration on an epic scale as part of a vast exercise in refashioning the very fabric of British societ, both for narrow political reasons, since 80 per cent of ethnic minorities tend to vote Labour, and because of their peurile loathing for their own country. In their eagerness to "rub the noses of the right in diversity", to quote Andrew Neather's immortal phrase, they were also determined to create a new social order where multi-culturalism ruled and the natural human impulse of patriotism could be portrayed as xenophobia and racist. With the rate of arrivals now running at almost 600,000-a-year, the treacherous Labour party succeeded triumphantly in its destructive goal.

Ian Walker

normanc: Michael Howard, who was the first to have a pop at this, was described far and wide as "playing the race card."

Rankin

@R.McGeddon

"Weren't Red Ed's parents Polish immigrants ??"

Er. No.

Woodbine 'Hideously White' Willy

Rankin: "Er"
I do like that word. What does it mean?

JennieLaurie

Get 'em, Rod.

Rob

@ Rankin
Well...er...actually, yes they were, although Ralph was born in Belgium to Polish immigrants

Stephanie Tohill

"As Rod so wisely points out, there is no sign, for all Miliband's weasel-worded apology, that Labour is going to change its fanatical, extremist, ideologically driven open-door policy on immigration."

In fairness Labour's policy on it now is irrelevant as they're not in power. The Tories don't seem to have any plans in place to halt EU migration.

Incidentally according to this link from Wiki, the top countries contributing to the number of foreign born Britons are India, Poland, Pakistan, Republic of Ireland and Germany. So I guess Europe is an important source of immigration to these shores and that has to be tackled as well if the aim is to drive immigration numbers down.

Stephanie Tohill

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_United_Kingdom

Adam Maguire

Considering the strength of the Polish economy, and the prospect of more and better to come; I really cannot imagine why any right minded Pole would want to come and live on this horrible little rapidly desecrating molehill anyway.

rod liddle

Hallo Leo - yep, agree with that.

Stephanie: is there something wrong inside your head? How can it not matter what Labour proposes? Bizarre. And the point I was making was that they now admit they got it wrong, as many of us warned at the time.

Maddy1

@R.McGeddon
September 26th, 2011 5:40pm

Yes and yes and they were also illegal immigrants! They are trying to change the law about refugees arriving at, after leaving countries, respectively and of course to the advantage of all and sundry who been allowing this law to be broken since 1945! Why not just say the problem is not immigrants but non productive illegal immigrants (parasites) who are a drain?
Sky at Night, Astronomer, used his 12 inch retractor to work this out a few years back and he still kept his job and got a nitehood so it cannot be all that bad to admit this!

arnoldo87

Chris,

You have probably noticed, as I have, that Rod has a disproportionate number of posts devoted to ethnic issues.

I think that Rod has these "thoughts" in his head that he worries might be construed as racist.

This makes him feel guilty so his method of dealing with it is to lay these thoughts out in his posts and columns, and then invite his readers to agree with him that left-wingers are going to accuse him of racism, and don't we all agree that that would be a ridiculous accusation. It's a little bit like the confessional, really.

Of course, in a Spectator blog, he will more often than not get the reassurance and absolution that he seeks.

So - if Rod IS a racist he is at least a self-aware and piously sensitive racist.

Oedipus Rex

Maddy1

"Yes and yes and they were also illegal immigrants!"

I think the term is 'genuine refugees'.

If right-wingers here can't grasp how Jews fleeing Hitler were rightly allowed to remain here, you're either mad, Nazis or you're "Erica Blair" (or are those three things synonymous?)

rod liddle

Arnoldo: this isn't an ethnic issue. It's about the free movement of labour and the effect this has on the lowest paid in this country, regardless of their race. Do you think you can understand that? Or are you determined to see racism in a handful of dust?

arnoldo87

Rod,

Sincere apologies. I thought that I had spotted the word "raaaaaacist" in your post, and several comments referring to the possibility of your being a raaaaaacist.

Optical illusions - obviously.

I was merely trying to explain to Chris what goes on in your troubled mind.

No offence intended.

Lungfish

'What I think people were worried about, in relation to Polish immigration in particular was that they were seeing their wages, their living standards driven down'

What he is actually saying here is that eastern european workers come here to work as oppose to many from other parts of the world who don't.

Wily Seacole Trout

Labour rely on the stupidity of their voters to get elected. Oh sorry, you're one, I forgot.

pete-s

I had always assumed that labours rationale was 1) How to keep the unions pay demands in check without confronting them; 2) 4M low paid would add to their voter base.

labour will DO anything to stay in power, no matter how unbeneficial it is to the country as a whole.

E Hart

They [the main political parties and employers] are all in it together. They all believe you can having a thriving economy with British, EU and migrant labour all paid peanuts and with substantial numbers of people under-employed, unemployed or employed or on the minimum wage. There are 2.5m out of work and 500,000 vacancies. Since 1979, the jobless figure has ranged from 1-1.5m. It is a systemic problem.

Even if we were to curtail immigration from the non-EU, we are still going to be left with a culture that believes that unemployment and paying people a pittance is good for business. What its advocates don't understand is that subsistence wages support little more than a subsistence economy. That's the folly here. It's isn't immigration - per se - it is the market belief that driving down wages begets anything more edifying. If you want to live Poundland and Squalorville it's ideal but it will do little or nothing for this country's long-term prospects.

Baron

A single blow, and Stephanie hits the nail on the head: “…the top countries contributing to the number of foreign born Britons are India, Poland, Pakistan, Republic of Ireland and Germany.”

Free condoms on the NHS, perhaps?

Baron

and another thing:

E Hart, sir, a heart breaking lament, but what’s the point of it, any businessman anywhere will only pay for its inputs what he has to, it ain’t ‘culture’, that’s what free market is all about, if you ran an outfit turning out chairs, someone offered you wood at half price, you should take it, your chairs will become cheaper, you corner the market for them, hire more people, most likely pay them more to attract them, you don’t take it, your competition will, you go belly up, those you employ will be on social security. The same applies for labour, another chunk of your input costs, whether you like it or not, it cannot be any other way.

What has screwed up the labour market here initially was globalization, the idea of making chairs in parts of the world where labour input costs are massively lower than here, then shifting the stuff over large distances to places that couldn’t compete.

The only way out is to follow the German model, small to medium firms, specializing in things that cannot be easily mass manufactured, needing medium to highly skilled labour, global reach for the output. Could our comprehensive school educated labour force be up to the job though?

Allowing low skill immigration, immigration of high skill labour willing to work for less cannot offer a permanent solution to our predicament, we’re unlikely to get the chair making back from the Chinese or whoever, until their supply of cheap labour gets exhausted. All that the high level immigration has done is what you say, displaced our low skill labour, already reluctant to take up jobs because of the welfare anomaly, in the leaner years ahead, we’ll be stuck with much higher number of the low skill unemployed that we would have been if our immigration policy wasn’t as short sighted as it was. Madness really.

Alan Hill

Neither the Labour Party or the Trade Unions have ever represented the British Working Class although until recently the latter have been too dim to realise it. There are now faint signs that they are waking up....possibly too late.

Maddy1

@Adam Maguire
September 27th, 2011 8:21am
Has the ability to conceptualise, about economics been bred out of Nation? A Polish Ph d. can earn enough, pushing a broom around in a factory to earn enough to build a detached house in Poland. This is why sections of the Polish economy are heat hot, but Peter Day does not really tell us why.Of course the Poles still have to have some business acumen, especially staying power.The Chinese sea-shell pickers, well!, you should see their family house in China. In the seventies an Indian cleaner earning a fiver a week in the Gulf after twenty years, could buy her, village back in India.
It is bigger and littler fleas, manual worker Thai people go to Malaysia, talented Malay people go go to the UK or Oz and so on. This is the basis of people coming here for free money! The Somalis who have a pad in Mayfair could support a complete take up business here in the UK. run by (wrong word), indigenous people but of course true economics does not work like this.
Most people would be shocked if they could see how even parts of Swaziland are developed relative to some parts of the UK!!!!

Eddie

Too much immigration to the UK has meant the population has increased from 56 to 62 million is 30 years. Anyone who thinks that hasn't had and won't have a huge negative effect by making the UK overcrowded is arguing from a position of selfishness: immigration benefits those who own houses because of ever-increasing property prices in an overcrowded country, and it also means cheap cleaners and au pairs, and lots of ethnic restaurants for the well-off to enjoy. Those without property, however, are impoverished by mass immigration. The solution is NOT building more houses in the countryside - it is in controlling immigration as much as we can and expelling those with no right to be here.

And this is not to even consider how some parts of the UK have changed utterly in character - so much so that they are no longer really British at all (eg Southall where 90% of the population is non-white).

The fact is, very many British people leave London - and indeed the UK - to get away from the problems caused by mass immigration. The rich can insulate themselves from the negative sides of immigration - and of course, the multi-culti-obsessed left wingers love immigration (well immigrants usually vote Labour) and also the right-wing greedy capitalists who just want ever-cheaper labour so they can make more profits. Ordinary people are represented by no-one. So much for democracy!

What has happened to this country is very sad. Who will defend the rights of ordinary British people who are being impoverished by mass immigration? I can see that no politician will. Perhaps if we sacked them and replaced them with foreigners who'd do their jobs for less than half the price then they'd get it?

Also, if anyone thinks British people get equal access to jobs abroad in the way foreigners can get jobs over and above natives here, then they have clearly never lived abroad or experienced the racist closed shop that operates all over Europe.

arnoldo87

Baron says:-

"The only way out is to follow the German model, small to medium firms, specializing in things that cannot be easily mass manufactured, needing medium to highly skilled labour, global reach for the output. Could our comprehensive school educated labour force be up to the job though?"

I totally agree with this, Baron, but wouldn't it be nice if the political parties both expressed the same sentiment and, more importantly, laid out their short and long-term plans to introduce the necessary industrial policy and educational improvement plan to achieve the goal.

The Coalition are making some hesitant steps, but they come across as unco-ordinated.

What we need is a crusade to transform and raise the level of the employment skill profile of the U.K.

Noa

Eddie

"Perhaps if we sacked them and replaced them with foreigners who'd do their jobs for less than half the price then they'd get it?"

That's an interesting thought.

Two areas where the untoward effects of immigration have not yet been felt are politics and the media.
Both are ripe for an injection of foreign competition to shake up their complacency.
In politics the creation of an English franchise of Geert Wilders Freedom Party would have a dynamic effect on the regeneration of pro-nation politics, being without the baggage of the BNP.
And in the media the most healthy antidote to left leaning rflex globalism is the thought of that savvy, fluent English-speaking Polish blonde, or Singaporean hottie displacing our tired old Paxmans, Naughties and Liddles (heaven forfend in the latter case, of course!)for one fifth the wages but five times the questioning tenacity.

Moira

Noa, your idea of bringing in immigrants to do the jobs of politicians, news reporters/ media (especially in the BBC) is an excellent one, though I would like to see them pass some kinds of tests on integrity,loyalty to their new country of abode, anti-communist ideologies,as well as English language first. Then we can ship off those who wish to perform social experiments on our society to somewhere like Siberia, with any luck.

Adam Maguire

Maddy1

http://www.economist.com/node/15394158

nuff said?

I can't help feeling that the media have been suckered by the procession of Labour seniors confessing that they got it wrong on East European immigration to this country. It is purely a feint to distract attention from the real issue.It is not the sudden influx of East Europeans that has wreaked the most damage to our societal cohesion, national identity and character. What Labour are desperate to avoid is any scrutiny of their open door policy implemented from 2000 to 2009 when there was unfettered immigration involving many, many millions from all over the world. Andrew Neather and others have confessed that this was a deliberate ploy to irrevocably change the face of Britain.
Many of us look about and see a country irrevocably changed and are not sure it's for the better. What we are sure of is that we were never asked.

Richard of Moscow

Moira
“Then we can ship off those who wish to perform social experiments on our society to somewhere like Siberia, with any luck.”

God forbid! Siberia is a beautiful part of the world, with a growing economy, a sound education system, and is in every way far too advanced to accept an influx of the backward, educationally-subnormal, pampered little pansies which infest the UK’s media and major political parties.
On the other hand, on their arrival, the sight of all the fur coats would probably trigger a mass suicide among the deportees. Worth a try.

Amanda

Terrific stuff, Eddie. If only the Tory MPs could recognize and articulate Britain's problems as you do, then they would be on their way to devising some coherent solutions. Which, on this blog at least, look obvious enough.

Contemporary legislators pride themselves on understanding 'nuance' and complexity, which complexity they spend their whole careers aggravating.

Superior leaders, such as Thatcher and Reagan, don't waste everyone's time in the impossible attempt to untie the Gordian knot. Now and then you need an executive with clear vision, resistance to socialist excuse-making and misdirection, and bravery to cut the bloody knot and be done with it.

Britain's problems are not so very intractable, nor are they so very complex. What's missing is realism, patriotism, and political will.

Frank P

Rod

"Or are you determined to see racism in a handful of dust?"

You're right, Arnoldo is a downright dustist.

Richard

Baron,
I think a lot of these 'Germans' are Turks or other minorities from Germany.

ed l

The problem with Socialists is that they are always obliged to find a new Proletariat to wage their class warfare.

Unfortunately for Britain they needed to ship in millions of alien foreigners to get their new Proles - and they ain't Poles.

Fr. Seamus McGuinness

So how come the English working class can't compete with the Poles? Why shouldn't their standard of living be lowered if they are not economically worth the standard they currently hold?
The trouble with the English working classes is that they are good for nothing and they think Labour is out to represent them over everybody else in the country. They should try harder to emulate the industrious Catholic Poles in this country and we would all be better off.

Noa

Fr. Seamus McGuinness 5:26pm

"So how come the English working class can't compete with the Poles? The trouble with the English working classes is that they are good for nothing..."

Umm. Lets clarify if we may - I think you mean British, rather than English working classes and I think you probably also mean the non working classes rather than the working class.
But those English working classes are paying the great bulk of taxes which now keep the multitude of Irish, Scots, Welsh, Polish and other EU and non EU non workers in the UK, but really, mainly in England.