IMMIGRATION: NEVER TRUST THEY GET IT

by Alex Kurtagic

On 6 June 2007, the United Kingdom’s Daily Telegraph reported:

[Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer] Gordon Brown promised yesterday to launch a drive to train thousands of unemployed workers for jobs currently being filled by immigrants flocking to Britain.

The Chancellor put a new emphasis on "Britishness" at the heart of his programme for government when he takes over from Tony Blair [as Prime Minister] in three weeks' time.

"It is time to train British workers for the British jobs that will be available over the coming few years and to make sure that people who are inactive and unemployed are able to get the new jobs on offer in our country," Mr Brown told the GMB union.

Adding

The Government has faced growing complaints that a new wave of immigrants from countries such as Poland and Romania is driving down wages and reducing job opportunities for domestic workers.

Brown’s statements were part of his pre-election strategy that year, aimed at appealing to Tory voters disaffected by the opposition leader David Cameron’s fear of even talking about immigration. This strategy also included a reduction in the main rate of income tax (clawed back through hidden increases elsewhere) and being photographed with Margaret Thatcher in front of 10 Downing Street.

As we know, the unpopular Brown took fright after the Labour conference and cancelled the election.

All the same, in January 2009, Brown insisted

I understand people's worries about their jobs. I understand people's anxieties about employment across the country. But we are doing everything we can both to get economic growth moving in our country and to help people who are unemployed, to help them into new jobs."

...having previously orated at Davos that he

came into politics to help people out of unemployment, to help people who were poor by building an economy that was confident and strong to weather this storm. I believe that the action we have taken to help people in work stay in work, to help people who lose their jobs get jobs again . . . is the way to do it.

But, of course, figures from September 2008, reported by the Daily Mail, were already showing that in the year since his “British jobs for British workers” pledge unemployment, work permits issues to foreigners from outside Europe, and the number of workers born outside the United Kingdom had all gone up, while the number of British-born workers had gone down.

What happened? Was it a blip? Was it that mean-spirited reporters from the Daily Mail did not give Brown’s patriotic immigration reforms enough time to work their way through the system?

The BBC provided the answer last March:

The level of net migration into the UK rose by 36% [in the year up to June 2010], Office for National Statistics figures show.

An estimated 572,000 people entered the UK on a long-term basis [during this period] . . .

Since there was a general election in May 2010, the year till June 2010 that comprises the above statistic includes the final 11 months of Brown’s Labour government.

This was, therefore, fully Gordon Brown’s policy.

So I guess my snort of contempt upon hearing of Brown’s sudden conversion to a patriotic immigration policy was justified. 
This was the same man, after all, who was at the core of a government that orchestrated a secret conspiracy to radically transform the United Kingdom through mass immigration.

As confessed by former Labour speech writer Andrew Neather in October 2009,

the deliberate policy of ministers from late 2000 until at least February [2008], when the Government introduced a points-based system, was to open up the UK to mass migration.

Brown was number two to Blair, whose cabinet thinktank, Performance and Innovation Unit, wrote the report that market the beginning of the policy.

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled "RDS Occasional Paper no. 67", "Migration: an economic and social analysis" focused heavily on the labour market case.

. . . in other words, it focused on the economy, Brown’s area of responsibility at the time.

According to Neather,

The PIU's reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy.

Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.

. . .

earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.

Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche's keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour's core white working-class vote.

This shone through even in the published report: the "social outcomes" it talks about are solely those for immigrants.

And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour's 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.

The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.

Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom.

But ministers wouldn't talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.

In other words, the Labour government consciously and deliberately betrayed the nation, knowing their kooky views were drastically at odds with the citizenry.

Well, Brown’s party was finally fumigated out of Downing Street a year ago (and now the Royal Palace spurns his and Blair's company). In came David Cameron’s coalition government, with an apparent resolve to right some of the wrongs of their predecessors—to cut the immense deficits and reduce immigration by a whole order of magnitude.

But, given the precedents, should we believe him?

In January 2009, with the inflow of immigration still raging despite the recession, then Conservative opposition leader David Cameron said the following about Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” pledge:

The Prime Minister should never have used that slogan . . .  On the one hand he lectures everyone about globalisation and on the other he borrows this slogan from the BNP.

Such a statements takes on added meaning when we consider that Mr. Cameron supports United Against Fascism (UAF), a terror group that welcomes immigration and campaigns for multiculturalism. UAF supporters regard the BNP as racist.

So Mr. Cameron regards “British jobs for British workers” as racist.

I therefore cannot but remain acutely suspicious of any pledge by an establishment politician to reduce immigration. I cannot but look out for the inevitable loophole, omission, tromp d’oeil, or legalistic subterfuge, designed to deceive and pacify a restless electorate. Mr. Cameron’s recent declarations concerning the failure of multiculturalism have zero to do with conclusions about the viability of this immoral social experiment identity and everything to do with worry about a potentially dangerous restless electorate and his party having spent 13 years in opposition.

Mr. Cameron’s proposed alternative, “muscular” liberalism, is the best predictor of future levels of immigration under his leadership: for the reason I gave earlier this year, liberalism is incompatible with a strong national identity and therefore with patriotic immigration reform. Therefore, we can expect more of the same, even if there is a temporary reduction in speed.

Bear in mind also that we are still talking about simply reducing non-EU immigration, not ending it or reversing it after years of deliberate excess and decades of stupid policy.

Millions of non-EU immigrants and their descendants remain, fertile, hostile, and, because  citizens, with full access to both the labour market and political power.

Establishment politicians are acutely aware of the consequences for them of social unrest. Neather also revealed how despite their kooky ideas they are, in fact, in touch with the electorate, fully aware of voters’ conservatism and aversion to immigration and multiculturalism. Far from clueless, they rely on a calculated strategy of secrecy, deception, distraction, and managed decline. Philosophically they are all in agreement, cosmetic changes to policy notwithstanding.

There will and cannot be change without a crisis serious enough to produce an intellectual and political rupture. Yet such is our accumulated economic power, and the superiority of occidental societies, that it  is quite possible for establishment politicians to play a long game and use incrementalism and subterfuges to carry out their experiments without precipitating a rupture. We have recently seen it again both with immigration and the debt-based economy. They call it “progress.”

In light of such circumstances, it is up to us artificially to precipitate the crisis—the crisis that finally makes it worthwhile for the citizen to accept the inconvenience and disruption of pushing for fundamental political change, not just a change of politicians, but a change of establishment.

Until that happens, we will be lied again and again, told about native jobs for native workers while the definition of “native” changes as the social transformation continues.