Afternoon music
Tweets seen
Talking of American “Christian Zionists”, when I lived in New Jersey, over 30 years ago, one would often see cars carrying bumper stickers, occasionally amusing. One such was that proclaiming “If the driver of this car disappears, he has gone to Rapture“, “Rapture” being the idea that the religiously “Blessed” will all be taken up and protected by higher powers as the world in general is destroyed.
Actually, there were several bumper stickers seen back then that I found amusing, such as “My wife— yes. My car— maybe. My gun— NEVER!“, and the short and rather bitter “Jane Fonda— American traitor bitch“.
Most English people do not go in for bumper stickers, though I saw one many years ago in Cornwall that said “Too close for missiles; switching to guns“, which I took to be a former Naval person of some sort.
“I’ll admit it: I never really expected the Tories to cut migration by much, despite their promises. But I also didn’t expect them to double it. In fact, net migration has more than doubled since Covid. In 2019, about 227,000 more people arrived than left the UK. In the year ending December 2022, it was 745,000.
[that’s “more than tripled“, not merely “more than doubled”]
One might explain that extraordinary figure as a product of one-off factors: a catch-up after the pandemic, plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong schemes. But as of this week we have another half-year of data. In the year to June 2023, net migration still added an astonishing 672,000 to our population. So this is not an anomaly.
It is a further, massive liberalisation of Britain’s economic and social model after a period in which voters have made it overwhelmingly, blisteringly clear that they want to tighten it.
• I don’t know plan to cut arrivals, says Badenoch
The rationale, as ever, is the fiscal bottom line. During the past couple of decades migration has increasingly been the lever pulled to smooth out structural problems in our economy, but never has it been used so dramatically. The latest uptick in numbers is driven primarily by the recruitment of overseas care workers, who were made eligible for visas only early last year. Within months, care workers began to account for a third of all long-term work visas granted by the entire British immigration system.
Why did this happen? The government’s migration quango, the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), stated that visas might be used as a “temporary” measure to make up for the inability to recruit immigrants from the EU. But this “temporary” measure has led to a surge in care workers far greater than we have seen before, this time from India, Nigeria and the Philippines rather than eastern Europe. Like the previous surges, it will no doubt permanently alter the labour market.
The main effect is to prevent wages from rising and working conditions from improving. The MAC has stated for years that we do not have enough care workers because care homes don’t pay them enough. Turnover in the sector runs at 28 per cent, creating a constant need for overseas recruits.
Unfortunately, instead of solving the shortage, the new recruits mainly replace current workers. As Miriam Cates pointed out in parliament this week, the UK recruited 70,000 care workers last year but vacancies in the sector only dropped by 11,000. Meanwhile, 20,000 British staff left, making the workforce ever more reliant on visas, which in turn gives employers greater power to exploit staff and effectively shave wages further. So much for this being a temporary fix.
In most sectors, of course, we would demand to know why employers are not fixing the problem. During the chronic shortage of lorry drivers after Covid, the spotlight rightly fell on the haulage industry, which had not delivered a real-terms pay rise in the UK for more than a decade. The usual suspects declared that solving the problem without much higher migration was impossible because modern Britons are constitutionally ill-suited to driving lorries. Instead, the industry began handing out massive bonuses and the government granted more licences. Miraculously, the shortage eased.
Why can’t the care sector do the same? Quite simply, because its biggest customer is the government and the government won’t pay up. It would rather let the sector run on knife-edge margins and loosen visa requirements. In other words, it is cannibalising its own supply chain in the manner of the most short-sighted and rapacious corporate.
The stupidest part is that this will probably end up costing money rather than saving it. The data suggests that whereas EU migrants tended to pay more in taxes than they received in benefits, non-EU migrants are, on average, net recipients from the tax system. This is particularly true when they bring dependent family members, as many on the new visa scheme do, and work minimum-wage jobs, as in the care sector.
Worse, despite overseeing a huge increase in annual migration, the government has made absolutely no plan for how it will build the additional infrastructure, housing and public services capacity needed to make sure the new workers have everything they need. The Treasury does not account for these costs at all on the bottom line. Perhaps that is because it knows the government cannot build this stuff anyway — in which case, the economic cost will be reflected in overcrowding, rationing, queues, rising rents and a general deterioration in living standards.
As should be obvious, none of this is the fault of the workers themselves. And if I had a close relative in care, it is the attitudes of the staff that would interest me rather than their home continent. This is not a question of judging individuals by their background. It is a question of numbers, the pace of cultural change and the economic model this country aspires to build.”
[Juliet Samuel in the Times]
[Note: the above quoted article only became available to republish on 2 December 2023].
“Woke” is a pseudo-religious belief system which views minority groups as sacred, is hostile toward the majority, subordinates individual rights behind fixed group (racial/sexual/gender) identities, opposes the objective scientific method in favour of subjective “lived experience”, & expands speech codes (“hate”, “racism”, etc) to erode free speech and try and silence critics in the name of “social justice”.“
In some respects, Matt Goodwin talks a lot of sense, but his apparent adherence to the Jew-Zionist lobby rules him out, politically.
The “CAA” goblins, admitting once again (they have done so several times) that I was recently prosecuted only because they applied political pressure for that over the past two or three years.
They also admit that the “CAA” has been secretly pushing for my prosecution (on various trumped-up charges) since at least 2016, and have admitted on their website that Jew-Zionist-lobby puppet “lord” Ian Austin (the former expenses cheat MP and Israel puppet) had actually written to the Director of Public Prosecutions demanding that I be prosecuted.
Apparently, this was because tweets on my then-existing Twitter account (closed in 2018 after more pressure from the same Jew-Zionist lobby) were supposedly “antisemitic”.
Ironically, the “CAA” thus shot themselves in the foot, because the closure of my Twitter account in 2018 meant that the CPS did not have evidence sufficient to charge me —as the “CAA” and suborned police idiots wanted— with a more serious offence —absurd though that would have been— that of “incitement to racial hatred“.
Soon, the Online Harms Bill will be law. Under that law, I could not have been prosecuted at all (because “harm done” will apparently be the nub of the new law and, in my recent prosecution and trial, the Crown Prosecution Service admitted from the outset that there had been no harm done by the 5 allegedly “grossly offensive” blog posts allegedly published). Neither were they able to produce even one notional “victim”.
I suppose that the “CAA” goblins will then have to invent some “harm done” so that they can continue to repress free speech via a supine or suborned police and CPS establishment.
I did, or did not do, the same, was never affected or (maybe) infected by “Covid”, despite being a great deal older than tweeter David Morgan.
Bravo.
…and, were I to do the same (on the blog), I should probably have the Hampshire Police (“cosplaying” as a more polite kind of DDR Stasi) at my door again (as has happened several times in the past, the last such having been in 2021).
I agree. Both my (slightly younger) brothers, both amateur sportsmen all their lives, both without previous serious medical conditions (one living in the UK, one in Australia), had emergency heart operations in 2022. Both survived (one had a triple by-pass) and recovered. Anything else? Oh, yes, both had had multiple “Covid” pseudo-“vaccine” shots…
Late tweets
Andrew Neil was the best political interviewer in the country. His fatal flaw is his adherence to the Israel lobby and the general Jewish-Zionist lobby.
What can one say? Our political system is totally broken. A total moron such as Esther McVey can be appointed Cabinet minister only because the political system is at rock-bottom.
Idiots like her, however, are taken care of by the corrupt System even when the voters chuck them out, as happened to Esther McVey in 2015. Having lost her Commons seat, she spent 18 months as Chair of the British Transport Police Authority, despite knowing nothing about either policing or transport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_McVey
Wolves are remarkable animals. They are said to kill any of their pack that are wounded badly, rather than allow them to be captured by enemies.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 