Realising that I was one of only two non-Polish women while partying with the youngsters from my local Pizza Express – my home-from-home for a decade now – I had to laugh at myself. How I love my waitress mates; Marta, Polina and Camila have become almost like family, showing up self-funded and shoutily supportive at my theatrical endeavours over the past couple of years. Now one of them has left to return home, I felt a sense of loss.
How odd to see the likes of the Guardian favouring such red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism
And to think I used to believe that Poles coming here was a bad idea. Growing up adoring my communist, trades-union-organiser father, my objection to mass immigration was to do with the cheap labour, union-busting angle rather than something stuffy like not liking the smell of their cooking (I love pierogi). I still think it’s ludicrous that we have so many idle youngsters wasting their lives on the dole – my preferred word for unemployment, which makes it sound like the waste of life it is, rather than ‘benefits’, which makes it sound like something improving – when they could be working in restaurants, making friends, learning a trade and having a laugh. But compared to the illegal immigrants coming in on the boats most days, the Polish are very pleasant indeed – and not just my girl-gang from Pizza Express. Back in 2005, I thundered in the Times:
It is amazing how quickly journalists from liberal newspapers who revere the trade union movement and the workers’ struggle become fervent supporters of free-market politics when it means they can get a dirt-cheap Polish plumber, and are so willing to swallow the reactionary old lie about how the British workforce is too idle to do certain jobs. I’d argue that when someone refuses to do a job for less than £5 an hour it doesn’t signal idleness at all, but simply a certain dignity and self-worth, and an understandable reluctance, after the long hard struggle of the British working-class to unionise, to simply roll over and do tricks for pennies. By all means hire a polite Polish plumber rather than a bolshy British one, and then get your tragic kicks gloating over the little saving you’ve made. But don’t kid yourself that this makes you a bona fide member of the brotherhood of man; it merely makes you a penny-pincher who cares more about getting a bargain than social justice and fair wages for all.
I’m still not convinced that mass migration doesn’t drive down indigenous wages. But my friendship with Marta, Polina and Camila has left me asking another question about today’s migration crisis: where are the women? For the vast majority of small boat arrivals to be healthy young men in their late teens, twenties and thirties goes against all we know about the logic of asylum, from the Kindertransport to the Ukraine. If this is the way they behave on small boats, I dread to think how they’d have pushed in on the Titanic – ‘Women and children last’.
Professional bleeding-hearts like Zoe Williams may snivel in the Guardian that ‘We have allowed the demonisation and dehumanisation of male refugees – they are victims too’. But for those of us not working 24/7 at being holier-than-thou, we instinctively distrust a racket in which 87 per cent of small boat arrivals last year were male, and three quarters were between 18 and 39 years old. The dire position of women in the countries that most of these arrivals come from – Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria – makes the mass abandonment of their oppressed and impoverished female population by their menfolk seem callous. They certainly aren’t the most deserving – they’re the ones who could afford to pay the trafficking gangs £10,000 a pop. How odd to see the likes of the Guardian favouring such red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism.
Not only must the fleeing of a nation’s fittest men condemn those countries to continuing misery, but it also brings a new kind of misery to the countries they come to – especially to the female populations. Last year, Germany found that while refugees made up just 2.5 per cent of the population, they accounted for 13 per cent of all sexual offences. A third of all criminal suspects in the country are now non-German speakers. In the UK, men commit over 80 per cent of violent crime and 98 per cent of sex crimes; the latter would probably be even higher if some sex-offender male transvestites weren’t being classed as women by stupid police forces. When we see a thousand young men released from prison we instinctively feel something bad may happen; if a thousand female prisoners were released, we wouldn’t.
Some 12 per cent of the male prison population are foreign nationals, costing us around half a billion pounds a year to accommodate. Remember that we are told that prison space is so squeezed that cons must be released early onto the streets. One thinks of the Ugandan charmer who beat someone to death in the back of an ambulance,was convicted of murder, given 16 years in prison in 2006, to be deported on release – but appealed at a tribunal and was allowed to stay under an ECHR ruling which decreed that, due to his ongoing psychiatric disorder, he might face ill-treatment if returned to his country. Which bring me back to the Poles. Yes, it’s unfortunate that they’re the second largest (after Albanians) foreign presence in British jails. But, as is the case with every nationality, only a handful are women.
There are different repercussions when thousands of young single women are allowed into a country; a lot of them will be fit, leading to a rather amusing recent stat from Poland itself with regard to Ukrainian women:
In-depth analysis shows that mainly young women contribute to the lower support for accepting refugees among the youngest respondents. In fact, the level of support among young men aged 18-24 is relatively high (77 per cent), while among women of this age it is as much as 30 percentage points lower (47 per cent), which makes them stand out in society. As many as one-third of female respondents aged 18–24 (34 per cent) are against accepting refugees. Perhaps the more reluctant attitude of young Polish women towards refugees from Ukraine is related to the fact that a significant part of the newcomers are young women who may be perceived as potential rivals in various fields.
Various fields, indeed. So a Slavic hottie might steal your man – but if you can’t keep your dog (or bitch) on the porch, that’s on you. These girls are grafters; a lot of them will be doing the all-important work in care homes, which the boys pouring off the boats certainly won’t be.
Of course, there are men who deserve to be here. Any man who’s risked life or limb to help this country, from Afghan interpreters to the Gurkhas; straight in, red carpet, bells on. But it’s with tongue only slightly in cheek that I suggest that if we want a country more attractive in every way, it might be an idea to ensure that every male immigrant is allowed in only if accompanied by a female – like at sex parties? Let in the fit women, keep out the fighting-fit men; bring in the babes.
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