"Obama said he would strengthen the middle class and introduce immigration reform"

Thus BBC Radio Four on the State of the Union address. 

Given that "immigration reform" is Newspeak for "legalise the illegals and invite their friends and family", it seems unlikely the middle class will be strengthened.

The wealthy class, very probably.

"Open borders make the eventual abolition of the welfare state imaginable"

Thanks to blogger BenSix in the comments for this, from libertarian economist Bryan Caplan.

(Graphs from Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote's "Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?")

Caplan thinks that the end of the journey is not only possible, but desirable. Key paragraphs :

"Diversity undermines solidarity. People don't mind paying high taxes to support people "like them." But free money for "the other" leads to resentment and political pushback.

That's exactly what we're seeing in the UK, and why Osborne and Shapps may get away politically with a real-terms benefits cut. They noted the outrage among working people in 2011 when benefits rose by 5% at a time of static wages.

If you're a social democrat, this implies a tragic trade-off between social justice for natives and social justice for potential immigrants. But if you're a libertarian, the opposite is true. The welfare state doesn't make open borders impossible. It's open borders that makes the eventual abolition of the welfare state imaginable."

Caveat - the first graph is based on 1990-1998 figures, the second on 1998 figures. Ireland and the UK, for example, are considerably more diverse than they were then. And the US is a lot more Hispanic than it was in 1998.

UPDATE - another academic blogger takes issue with Prof. Caplan  - no comfort here, I fear:

" In particular, let me stress once again that even if open borders makes the majority population more anti-government, after a while their preferences will not matter, since they will inevitably become a minority of voters. "

 But at some stage the money runs out, no matter what the voters want.

Prof Caplan responds - no comfort again :

"The claim isn't that open borders will "destroy" solidarity or the welfare state, but merely that open borders will undermine both.  And while free-marketers may well agree that some degree of solidarity is good, it's also hard for free-marketers to deny that current levels of solidarity are excessive.  Solidarity stands in the way of free-market reforms in pensions, education, health care, taxation, agricultural policy, and much more."

 Can't say we've not been warned.

More On Universal Credit - Stable Door Edition

When I wrote about the Universal Credit rules for the self-employed, which will do such damage to the self-employed handyman or the single mum selling her crafts at local fairs, I forgot about another target - the Big Issue Benefits Loophole :

"A Big Issue seller is claiming victory in a landmark case to have her work classed as a proper job and thus be eligible for extra benefits.

Romanian Firuta Vasile was refused housing benefit because a local authority judged that her job selling the magazine "didn't count".

But she has successfully argued that because she bought the Big Issues and sold them at her own profit or loss she was self-employed.

Speaking through an interpreter, Vasile, 27, said she came to the UK in 2007 to look for a job, but could only find work selling the Big Issue."

Romanians and Bulgarians aren't allowed to work here unless they're self-employed. And you'll have noticed the terrible shortage of Big Issue sellers which is crippling British industry. But it sounds as if the Big Issue is their flexible friend :

"The Big Issue exists to offer homeless people and those at risk of homelessness the opportunity to work and earn an income. This is offered irrespective of a person’s background or origin. Earning their own money reduces dependency on hand-outs from the state, charities and the public.. "

Even when the entire raison-d'etre of "earning their own money" is to get "hand-outs from the state" ? It's not surprising that Roma Big Issue sellers are an increasingly common sight.

The good news is that, come October, all this will stop and our self-employed sellers will be assumed to have an income of around £250 pw - whether they have or not.

The bad news is that, come December, the entire populations of Romania and Bulgaria will be free to move to the UK, self-employed or not.  

I do wonder if the aim of our rulers is actually to push immigration to the levels where the Brits will, of their own volition, call for the end of the Welfare State. Maybe that Grant Shapps isn't as stupid as he sounds, only as unpleasant as he sounds.

"I do think that it’s right for the taxpayer at large, who after going out, working hard, paying their taxes, should feel that they’re not having to pay for people who are in receipt of benefits to get a higher effective pay rise than the people actually working. So I think this is an argument about fairness."

As I've said before, benefits are meant to afford a minimum standard of living. Raising them by 1% a year for three years, when inflation on necessities is probably over 5%, will drop them a long way below that standard. Now maybe that standard was set too high. But that's not what he's arguing. He's arguing that it's "fair" that a minimum standard set by Parliament should be reduced because other, better-off people are tightening their belts.

I said he's not stupid. People working and still struggling to pay the electric bill aren't going to be overly sympathetic, to put it mildly. Good politics if lousy humanity.     
 

"What's Wrong With The Left?" Part 296

Andy Newman at Socialist Unity is worried :

"I think there is another underlying problem, in writing about what the left is doing,  because the left really isn’t doing much at the moment which engages with the political mainstream. I will write a longer and more considered article on this, but I am interested in what our readers think. Has the left lost its way?"

Well there's a surprise. What could the matter be, I wonder ? In a week when the statutory consultation period for large-scale redundancy has been reduced from 90 days to 45, and the Agricultural Wages Board ('which permits the fixing of minimum wage rates and terms and conditions for agricultural workers') has been abolished, all with hardly a ripple of opposition, what could a left-winger in the UK possibly find to worry about except US gun control and gay marriage ?

But if Andy doesn't understand what's going on, his commenters can fill him in :

Alan Gibbons : 

"The Tories have been relatively successful at slicing away at public services. There has been no ‘big bang’ provoking a generalised fightback... anti-welfare rhetoric has struck a nerve with some sections of the population. The second national anti-cuts march, while substantial, was smaller than the first...what worries me more, from the perspective of somebody involved as an independent activist in the fight against the cuts and particularly the campaign to save the public library service, is that the Left looks much older, greyer, divided and less confident ..."

You're telling me ... I think this post needs a link.

"The time of salami-slicing in public services seems to be coming to a close and whole areas of public spending may be axed, as shown by Newcastle’s withdrawal from the Arts. The assault on redundancy, the privatisation of the NHS, the proposed onslaught on the teaching unions and accelerating attacks on benefits show a weak government with a fragile mandate going ahead regardless with an offensive strategy."

A slight diversion here - I think some areas of public spending OUGHT to be axed. The dynamic of the last sixty years in local government is

a) central government puts statutory obligation on local government
b) gives them some money to fund it.

Until a local authority gets far more of its money from central government than from local taxation, and this is cancerous to local democracy, because you don't really get what you vote for. As a school governor, for example, I saw our Conservative local authority zealously implementing Labour's hideous "Every Child Matters" agenda, and wondered what the point of a Tory vote was. If central government want something done, they should do it themselves.

So anyway, I wouldn't mind if some of the legislative nagombi (how many diversity consultants) was dropped. Alas, this isn't going to happen any time soon. What's more likely is that the local authority (LA) staff will end up being outsourced to whichever company promises the LA that they can do the same stuff as the council did, with the staff having the same terms and conditions (except pensions - a not inconsiderable point, as LA pensions are index-linked final salary i.e. what you don't see in the private sector any more) - and all at 10-15% less cost ! I invite the reader to imagine at whose expense these savings will come.

I digress.

Nadia Chem - fine old English name, but she talks sense (though should that be "overestimated"?) :

"What has been missed is the reality that the working class might not have the confidence to resist such an offensive. The atrophy of working class organization at workplace and community level cannot be underestimated... the locus of the offensive has been as much in a general attack on living standards as in cuts. This has generated an enormous well of bitterness but little active resistance... the fact that this attack on living standards started under the Labour government from 2006 weakens Labour’s ability to grasp the bitterness."

Mr Newman himself :

"My experience of knocking doors for Labour, is that people are open to a traditional Labour message, but not with any real conviction that labour would be even different, let alone better."       

Trust the people, Andy.

"I fear that much of the left – including the so-called revolutionaries – have actually given up on social change"

I wouldn't say that. We've seen unprecedented social change, and will see more.

BrokenWindow :

"the Left is as atomised as the workers collectively are atrophied. Underpinning this is an absence or failure to theoretically engage in wider debates about globalisation and nation states... most of all it must re-engage with the people it hates the most,the young working class white men and women who have gone to the right."

So there are plenty of people who can see that there's a problem. But in 175-odd comments, no one seems to really know why they're up the Swanee.

"the best thing we could do for the cause is to recruit more people to unions/help install a sense of discipline/participate in community campaigns and start working where people are rather than where we want them to be." 

Of course ! Like good old  Boxer in Animal Farm, "I must work harder" ! If only we were better socialists...

Laban dropped into the comments a quote from the anthropologist Peter Frost (of 'Fair Women, Dark Men') :

"In late capitalism, the elites are no longer restrained by ties of national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves at the expense of their host society. This clash of interests lies at the heart of the globalist project: on the one hand, jobs are outsourced to low-wage countries; on the other, low-wage labor is insourced for jobs that cannot be relocated, such as in the construction and service industries.

This two-way movement redistributes wealth from owners of labor to owners of capital. Business people benefit from access to lower-paid workers and weaker labor and environmental standards. Working people are meanwhile thrown into competition with these other workers. As a result, the top 10% of society is pulling farther and farther ahead of everyone else, and this trend is taking place throughout the developed world. The rich are getting richer … not by making a better product but by making the same product with cheaper and less troublesome inputs of labor."  

I think Mr Frost describes it pretty well. The UK business elite in 1940, as noted in Harold Nicolson's diaries, were prepared to go down in flames rather than see Hitler triumph. But now ... even "conservatives" like Boris Johnson and Michael Heseltine* "are no longer restrained by ties of national identity", let alone businessmen who've seen their incomes soar, both absolutely and relatively. This is why the end of the journey will soon be in sight.
    
Anyway, Andy (or his gofer, I know not) deleted the post in about minutes one. They don't want to know, and that's why they'll continue to get shafted - along with the rest of us.

Andy is at this moment involved in  an industrial dispute between Carillion, an outsourcer, and their many Asian employees - mostly Goan Catholics and I'm sure good people (the details of the dispute make depressing reading - looks like third-world petty corruption is already here).

But you do have to wonder why people from half way round the world are needed to clean Swindon's hospital - especially as Swindon is a place where there are 30 applications for every vacancy in Next.

The answer to Andy's questions are literally staring him in the face - but there's none so blind as those who will not see.

    


* Heseltine gave a famous Spectator interview where, asked if he was worried about Britain being merged into a Greater Europe, replied "who now remembers the Heptarchy (the seven kingdoms of Saxon England)?" 

Universal Tribulation

One of my hobby-horses (see here, here, here, and here) is the apparent belief among our rulers that allowing mass immigration, from countries where corruption is endemic and a State job is an opportunity for self-enrichment, will have no effect on the culture of the UK.

That was always unlikely - and even more unlikely with a relatively generous welfare state and a default assumption of honesty in claimants. True in 1948 but not true now. The benefits system is open to looting on a grand scale, especially by those with access to forged ID - which means not many Brits but an awful lot of Londoners.

Another hobby-horse is that the law-abiding are penalised for the sins of the lawless. Some hapless electrician with a Stanley knife in his pocket is pulled in because of youths being stabbed on London streets, children can no longer (as I did in youth on a classmate's farm) use an air-rifle unsupervised, I can't buy sodium chlorate weedkiller any more because someone might use it to blow things up.

Which brings me, by a roundabout route, to Ian Duncan Smith's Universal Credit, slated for implementation next year, and replacing Child Tax Credit, Working Families Tax Credit (which people with an income of over 50K could get - thank you Gordon Brown for this last-ditch attempt to encourage welfare dependency) and a number of other benefits.

"When implemented, Universal Credit will drastically affect the low-paid self-employed as well as anyone who makes a tax loss. It is proposed that Universal Credits, like the current Working Tax Credits, will be "limited to those who exceed the 'floor of assumed income'" based on the National Minimum Wage."

What this means is that a host of small businesses - often the "single mum selling her handmade stationery" type, which might make no profit or small profits, will be assumed for benefit purposes to be doing a 40 hour week for £6 an hour - whether they are or not. If you recall, the number of self-employed has mushroomed during this recession .

“A rise in self-employment may, in itself, be a good thing, however previous analysis from the CIPD found that the recent rise was less a sign of a resurgent enterprise culture, and more evidence of a growing army of part-time ‘odd jobbers’ desperate to avoid unemployment.”

Alas, come next summer this is going to go into reverse as large numbers of self-employed close their business down and sign on again. So why is this entrepreneur-friendly (well, wealthy entrepreneurs, anyway) administration stamping on what could be the next Laura Ashley or Party Planners ?

"I think it will cut out a lot of fraud, i am a housing benefit processor and the amount of self employed taxi drivers working 40 hours a week and declare £50 a week earnings is beyond a joke, however i do feel for the genuine people who are struggling, who will be hit by this i think it is unfair. if your not earning this money then your claim should not be based on this amount."

My HMRC spies (aka the DWP website) are quite open about it. Reducing fraud, along with "making work pay" (but not low paid self employed work) is what it's all about. The good guys (and gals) are suffering for the sins of the bad guys.

"Universal Credit will make it much easier to catch fraudsters as it will calculate benefit levels using real-time information linked to the PAYE system. By picking up financial irregularities, such as earnings whilst claiming unemployment benefits, it will remove the main opportunities for fraud and error in the system."

Well, it might, if there weren't 83 million National Insurance numbers in the UK for a working population of 30-million odd. Fraudsters are very resourceful people.

So while I have small sympathy for this self-employed, low income person :

"I am a seriously talented artist but no-one wants to buy art at the moment"

You can't but feel for this couple :

"I am employed 25 hours i have asked my boss to increase my hours but there are no available hours?? we have 2 children under 16,
when my husband lost his job 4yrs ago down to the company going into liquidation etc,etc, he was forced into claiming benefits because after months of looking for work nothing was available, he signed on for jsa but didnt receive any money because of what i earn…. a job was going at a local bus firm term time only, which he applied and got and is still currently there… NOW this is the confusing bit…….. my husband is classed as Self-employed ?? He works for the local company and gets a weekly wage… BUT because the company dont deduct tax and insurance from this wage he is classed as Sub-Contracred-Self employed ... because his work is Term-time this means he only works for approximatly 38 weeks of the year, thus leaving our household with only my income for the other 14 weeks, we do rely on tax credit as a safety net during these 14 weeks, we have both and still are looking for more full-time work but its easier said than done and with 2 small dependant it is difficult….. so how is universal credits going to help my situation if we dont meet there criteria???"

I think the answer is - "it isn't going to help" - and that's a great pity.

More Thoughts On The End Of The Journey

From todays news :

"UK Border Agency working on plans for priority passport lanes for rich travellers at Heathrow and other British airports"

"Heh heh heh ... I told you those Zil lanes would be useful"

"Ms Miller, who is also the Culture Secretary, argues that extending marriage to same-sex couples will ensure that the institution retains its importance and relevance in modern Britain, and that its introduction is a milestone in Britain’s heritage “of freedom and fairness”."

"The new definition of domestic violence and abuse now states:
Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality. This can encompass but is not limited to the following types of abuse:
* psychological
* physical
* sexual
* financial
* emotional **"

"George Osborne wants two-year freeze in state benefits"

"Heh heh heh ... you get gay marriage, and we get a "flexible labour market" .. heh heh heh .." 

So the journey continues - there's been for quite a while now an acceleration of the "left" social agenda in tandem with the "right" (read "rich") economic one - and did I mention that the pressing problem of racism in football's still not solved?

John Whittingdale MP, chair of the inquiry, said: "Recent incidents of racist abuse in the UK highlight that there remain significant problems." MPs also said homophobia may now be the most prevalent form of discrimination.

Steve Rotheram MP, a member of the Culture, Media and Sport committee, said a lack of ethnic diversity in management and boardroom positions at many English clubs was holding back the fight against racism.

A couple of points. While the plan may indeed be working, there's no need to invoke a conscious conspiracy. I had a couple of long debates (and a monologue) on this subject a few years back, before the economic poo hit the fan. Capitalists will just take advantage, if the culture lets them. It's what they do. Mass immigration may be a necessary condition for the impoverishment of the UK working class, but not a sufficient one.

While it's not a cheerful thought (especially in finding yourself alongside, for example, George Galloway), I have to surmise that the collapse of Soviet Communism may also have played its part in what we see now. While there was an alternative model, no matter how evil and corrupt (as it was in many respects) it may have been, Western capitalists couldn't take the **** too much. Now anything is possible.

It's true that in a rational economic world, a high-earning working class might be considered a good thing for a nation - and that therefore it's not in our rulers' interest to take us back a hundred years - but that would also have applied for the several hundred years prior to, say, 1860-1960. The post-1945 settlement is not the natural order of things. Before that it was the plebs and the rest* - and the will to power, even constrained by Christianity, was strong. Unconstrained, what limits are there?    





* read a couple of Jane Austens over the last week. Ordinary people just do not feature. Reminds me of "Friends" or "Four Weddings And A Funeral", where making a living is the least of any of the characters concerns and everyone, while always appreciating more, has enough money. Still, Lizzie Bennet's dad is a hoot, although while Lizzie's wonderfully witty and self-assured, I prefer an Ethelberta - or still more, her sister.


** financial abuse can apparently consist of not giving someone enough of the family income - by which measure EVERYONE in my family, myself included, is a self-declared victim. If that's the case, do you think sexual abuse might consist of not giving someone enough sex? I look forward to some brave lawyer arguing that in court...

The End Of The Journey Will Soon Be In Sight...

Mass immigration doesn't "just" depress wages and reduce the power of working people vis a vis employers.

I haven't blogged much over the last year due to long hours, but still sniped over at CiF - and this comment sums my emerging view :

The greatest prize for the very rich would be the total dismantling of the welfare state and the removal of its consequent tax burden (although venture capitalists, on 10% tax - "entrepreneurs relief", do pretty well already).

It's a lot easier to justify a welfare state when the recipients are "people like us" and therefore easier to identify with and to think "there but for the grace of God". Social solidarity among working people, whether it be support for a welfare state or a trades union, will always be stronger in the absence of cultural, religious or racial divisions. Social scientists like Robert Putnam have noted how diversity weakens a sense of community.

So were I an evil capitalist billionaire looking to reduce the power of trades unions and destroy the welfare state, I'd start by funding Left groups supporting mass immigration.

I'd encourage such groups, and left-wing lawyers too, to support the most outrageous abuses of the welfare system, knowing that it would discredit welfare in the eyes of ordinary working people - and I'd chuckle to see Telegraph and Mail readers - and BBC commenters, too - getting angry when benefits rise, as they should do, with inflation.

"The plan is working ... heh heh heh ..."

I'd suggest, with all its faults, that the Welfare State is the most outstanding instance of UK social solidarity - started in Edwardian times by Lloyd George and nailed down in the aftermath of WW2 by a strong people, annealed in the fire of two world wars and quenched in the depression years of the 1930s.

I'd also suggest that the plan is continuing to work :

Despite the tough economic climate, the study by independent social research agency NatCen reveals attitudes towards welfare and welfare claimants have toughened. Only 28% of those asked wanted to see more spending on welfare - down from 35% at the beginning of the recession in 2008, and from 58% in 1991.

Report author and NatCen chief executive, Penny Young, said the study showed the public's view on welfare was "in tune... with the coalition's policies".She said: "The recession doesn't seem to be changing things; attitudes continue to harden. One thing that we've seen is that even where groups are seen as perhaps more deserving - so retired people, disabled people - again for the first time since 2008 we've seen that the number of people who are prepared to see more money go on disability benefits has actually fallen."

 "Heh heh heh ...." - the BBC Today programme this morning couldn't get over it - in the early 90s recession 58% thought we should increase welfare spending, now it's down to 28%. What could possibly have changed since the early 90s? They just couldn't understand such a dramatic shift in attitude.

"You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come,
Knock as you please, there's nobody at home"

In various posts over the last year, I've aired the fancy that in ten, fifteen years, the Guardian will be simultaneously

a) bemoaning the end of the welfare state and the new poverty of the working class
b) celebrating our ever-greater diversity

and I've pointed out that

Western welfare states carry a high tax burden, which makes life uncomfortable for the mega-rich. It would be a lot easier for them if social solidarity was destroyed to the extent that the welfare state no longer existed and their taxes could come down. A good way to do that is to create atomised societies of competing ethnicities.

Mass immigration will IMHO mean the end of the Welfare State, probably in the next thirty years. A pity. It was a good concept - for 1948 Brits and their descendants. And as an ageing boomer, I don't want the NHS to turn into any more of a death factory for the old than it currently is.

But at least we'll all be equal in our barrios, looking up at the gated communities on the hills.







UPDATE - "The government is considering ending the automatic annual increase in benefits in line with inflation, sources have told BBC Newsnight.

The whole point of benefits is that they're meant to be a liveable minimum amount.So if inflation rises, so should that amount. But there'll be little sympathy for that view from those whose expenses are rising but whose wages are static - and that means most of us. 

"Heh heh heh ..."

UPDATE2 - "To promote prudence and responsibility, rather than the dependency and waste of the welfare system, we should return to mutual aid societies

"Heh heh heh ..."

HMRC's Most Wanted

I posted a few years ago (and more on the same theme here) :

We're importing people from a fair few countries where corruption is endemic without any attempt at integration. We're simultaneously beating ourselves up that, say, 39% of the population of Trumpton are from minority x, yet only 2% of the local magistrates are. I don't know what magic the soil of the UK possesses, but our rulers are apparently convinced that the moment you set foot on it all the 'bad' practices of the old country fall off you, leaving only the good bits - you know, the ones that enrich us.

Absent such magical soil, I'd expect that as more magistrates/tax officials/police whatever are appointed from (unintegrated) minority x, so levels of corruption/violence/whatever will depart from those we've experienced in the last 150 years, and move closer to those in country x.

The Telegraph have published HMRC's Most Wanted - the chaps - and they are nearly all chaps - with the biggest unpaid tax bills who've not gone to jail (though note the absence of Vodafone, Google etc) :

Hussain Asad Chohan, 44, believed to be in Dubai. He was convicted at Birmingham Crown Court in his absence and sentenced to 11 years for his part in fraud worth around £200 million, which included importing 2.25 tonnes of tobacco worth £750,000 in duty. Chohan has also been served with a £33 million confiscation order.

Nasser Ahmed, 40, believed to be in Pakistan or Dubai, was convicted at Bristol Crown Court in 2005 for his role in VAT fraud worth around £156 million. He fled before verdicts were given, and was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison in his absence.

Zafar Baidar Chisthi, 33, thought to be in Pakistan, was found guilty at Kingston Crown Court for his part in VAT fraud worth around £150 million. He was sentenced to 11 years for conspiracy to defraud the public purse and one year for perverting the course of justice.

Darsim Abdullah, 42, believed to be in Iraq, was convicted at Guildford Crown Court for being part of a money laundering gang that processed £1 million to £4 million per month. Eleven other members of the gang were convicted or pleaded guilty, but he ran away before sentencing.

Leigang Liang, 38, believed to be in the UK, was convicted at Lewes Crown Court for illegally importing tobacco from China. He was sentenced in his absence to seven years. The estimated cost to the taxpayer of the scam was £2.6 million.

Olutayo Owolabi, 40, believed to be in the UK, was convicted in January 2010 for 27 charges linked to tax credits and money laundering, and sentenced in his absence to nine months in jail. The estimated cost to the taxpayer was £1 million.

Wayne Joseph Hardy, 49, now believed to be in South Africa, was convicted at Ipswich Crown Court for manufacturing tobacco products and not paying duty. He was given three-year sentence in October 2011. The estimated cost to the taxpayer was £1.9 million.

Adam Umerji - aka Shafiq Patel, 34, thought to be in Dubai, was jailed at Liverpool Crown Court for 12 years for VAT fraud and money laundering. The cost to the taxpayer was around £64 million.

Gordon Arthur, 60, believed to be in the United States, suspected of illegally importing cigarettes and alcohol and failing to pay around £15 million in duty. He fled in 2000 and a warrant was issued for his arrest at Maidstone Crown Court in 2002.

Emma Elizabeth Tazey, 38, also believed to be in the United States, is wanted in connection with the same allegations.

John Nugent, 53, thought to be in the United States, was accused of putting in fraudulent claims for duty and VAT worth more than £22 million. A warrant for his arrest was issued at Manchester Crown Court.

Malcolm McGregor McGowan, 60, believed to be in Spain, was found guilty at Sheffield Crown Court in December 2011 of illegally importing cigarettes worth around £16 million into the UK, and was sentenced to four years.

Timur Mehmet, 39, believed to be in Cyprus, is wanted over a £25 million VAT fraud. He was found guilty in absence and sentenced to eight years at Northampton Crown Court.

Vladimir Jeriomin, 34, thought to be in Russia or Lithuania, was part of a gang that made false claims for tax repayments. The estimated cost to the taxpayer was £4.8 million. A warrant was issued for his arrest at Liverpool Crown Court.

Cesare Selvini, 52, thought to be in Switzerland, is wanted for smuggling platinum bars worth around £600,000. A warrant was issued for his arrest at Dover Magistrates' Court in 2005.

Dimitri Gaskov, 27, thought to be in Estonia, allegedly smuggled three million cigarettes into the UK using desktop computers. He fled before trial and an arrest warrant was issued at Ipswich Crown Court.

Mohamed Sami Kaak, 45, thought to be in Tunisia, is wanted for smuggling millions of cigarettes into the UK between March 2005 and September 2006 and evading around £822,000 in duty. He was convicted in his absence at Isleworth Crown Court and jailed for four years.

Rory Martin McGann, 43, believed to be in Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland, is wanted for alleged VAT fraud worth more than £902,000. He was arrested in November 2008 but later fled.

Yehuda Cohen, 35, thought to be in Israel, is wanted over VAT fraud worth around £800,000. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport in March 2011 but later fled while on bail.

Sahil Jain, 30, believed to be in the UK, was arrested over alleged VAT fraud worth around £328,000 but failed to appear at the Old Bailey and a warrant was issued for his arrest on June 8. 

It takes an awful lot of minimum-wage cleaners and retail staff to compensate for these guys - in fact, given that a minimum wage earner in London or with a family will be taking more in housing and other benefits than they're paying in tax, no number will compensate. It'll take an awful lot of deputy managers and management accountants, put it that way.

Numbers ...

Telegraph :

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that unemployment was 2.62 million in the three months to September.

The number of non-UK nationals in British employment was 2.56 million, up 147,000 from the same period year earlier.

(That's legal employment of foreign nationals. God knows what the illegal numbers are like ...)

R.I.P. Richard Mannington Bowes

When Richard Mannington Bowes was born in 1943, the ethnic minority population of Britain was a few thousand people.

When he was eight years old, in 1951, Churchill's cabinet debated immigration into the UK.

David Maxwell-Fyfe, the home secretary, reported that the total of "coloured people" in Britain had risen from 7,000 before the second world war to 40,000 at the time of writing, with 3,666 of those unemployed, and 1,870 on national assistance, or benefits.

It's almost impossible for anyone growing up today to imagine what a peaceful and orderly (and staid) place post-war Britain was. The American anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1955 "Exploring English Character", compared the post-war English with their early Victorian forebears of 120 years previously* :

"One of the most lawless populations in the world has turned into one of the most law-abiding; ...a fiercely and ruthlessly acquisitive society has turned into a mildly distributive society; general corruption in government has been replaced by an extraordinarily high level of honesty... in public life today the English are certainly among the most peaceful, gentle, courteous and orderly populations that the civilized world has ever seen. ... you hardly ever see a fight in a bar (a not uncommon spectacle in most of the rest of Europe or in the U.S.A.)... football crowds are as orderly as church meetings.."

If you had told Mr Mannington-Bowes' parents that, sixty years later, their child would be beaten to death, in Ealing, by a mob of strangers bent on looting and arson, they would have thought you were mad.

They'd have thought you were mad if you predicted that he'd be fined in the local magistrates court - "for confronting youths for urinating outside his home".

This was England. The law was on the side of the law-abiding, and people were killed in riots in far-away countries, not here.

UPDATE - I would be interested to see a report of his trial and conviction, and who the magistrate was. I trust it wasn't this one. I don't want to come over all Polly Toynbee, and the people who beat him to death ARE savages, but the wholesale criminality (mixed with plenty of assaults just for the fun of it) is a product of an assault on the principles of criminal justice that's been going on for fifty years. Fifty years of mass immigration may arguably have been a necessary condition for his murder, but certainly not a sufficient one - and as I've said many a time and oft, there are plenty of native youth who'll beat a man to death for being a good citizen.

As I argued here and here, something in the water of post-Cultural Revolution UK seems to turn the children and grandchildren of previously law-abiding people into bad boys and girls. What could it be ? This Polly Toynbee column - or a read of the Magistrate's blog - may hold an answer.

* to be fair, the peacefulness of the English puzzled him greatly, John Bull being traditionally a pugnacious sort of chap, always ready to scrap when offended by a foreigner of any description.

You Couldn't Make It Up ...

One of the results of mass low-skilled immigration into both the UK and US economies has been to depress wages, by the simple mechanism of supply and demand. As Marx put it :

“The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”

So far so bad for those at the sharp end, so far so good for the people who employ them.

But why stop there ? As long as your income's safe - and let's theorise that you're one of the elite - why not expose a few people higher up the economic food chain to the bracing discipline of "if you don't want to do it, there are plenty of other people ...". After all, you don't pay anywhere near as much for cleaners and clerks as you used to. Why can't you cut the cost of your accountants and engineers?

But how do you do lobby for this without saying why? In the case of the low-skilled imported worker, it was easy - they were "doing the jobs the natives just didn't want to do for £5 an hour", but you needn't mention that last bit. They were doing us a favour by coming here at all - we should be grateful - how would the NHS run or City offices get cleaned otherwise?

So what's the narrative to be?

"Tell you what - and this'll kill you - how about social justice?"

"What ?"

"Well, you know how the incomes of the wealthiest have spiralled away while incomes at the bottom stagnated or declined?"

"Do I ! Great, isn't it !"

"Well, lots of people think it's very bad that we're stonkingly rich while some chav serving in Maccies is a tad penurious. There's something called the Gini coefficient ... but I had this thought. All we have to do is deflect attention down a bit - let's say onto something called 'high-income people' - you know - accountants, engineers, IT, scientists, the analysts and bean-counters - we can define who qualifies - and we can argue that their wages - and hence inequality ratios - are kept artificially high by lack of global competition - no, they're "subsidised by their protection" - no one likes a subsidy - "

"I do - I love 'em. Where would we have been without the bailout? "

"Will you let me finish? - and so we should allow far more high-skilled immigration, because that means greater equality - and that means we can do to their terms and conditions what we've already done at the bottom!"

"You, my son, are a ******* genius"

"But it doesn't stop there. You know how mass immigration's depressed wages in lower-paid jobs - the sort young people often do"

"I might have heard something to that effect ... nonsense of course (cough)"

"Well, we can also argue that their lower incomes indicate lower productivity - and that therefore we really need more high-skill immigrants to provide the productivity the natives just don't want to provide"

"Brilliant"

"And there might even be some truth in the bit about productivity. Between ourselves, you know and I know that some of the people who've come over aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer (anyone who says that is a racist, of course, and we'll say it's down to bad teachers) - so it's possible that the 20-somethings really aren't as productive. Either way, it just means we need more high-skill immigrants."

"Awesome. All we have to do is get the ball rolling."

Obviously, the above is just complete fantasy.

At The Globalist, an interview with former Fed chief Alan Greenspan :

Q. How could immigration reform reduce income inequality?

A. “Most of the debate on income inequality correctly focuses on raising the level of low-income individuals. However, it also works by lowering top-level incomes via more competitive immigration. There is much academic research demonstrating that it is the relative position of people in society that fosters views of ‘fairness,’ not one’s absolute status.”

Q. Turning back to the United States, what demographic shift will have major economic implications?

A. “In the United States, we are in the process of seeing the baby boomers — the most productive, highly skilled, educated part of our labor force — retire. They are being replaced by groups of young workers who have regrettably scored rather poorly in international educational match-ups over the last two decades.”

Q. What else points to the inability of young workers to compete?

A. “Most disturbing is that the average income of U.S. households headed by 25-year-olds and younger has been declining relative to the average income of the baby boomer population. This is a reasonably good indication that the productivity of the younger part of our workforce is declining relative to the level of productivity achieved by the retiring baby boomers. This raises some major concerns about the productive skills of our future U.S. labor force.”

Q. Can the U.S. government counter this trend?

A.“Yes, there are options to combat that decline, but contrary to what many people believe, we do very poorly in opening up our borders to skilled immigrants. Our H1-B visa restrictions are a disgrace. Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States. But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow.”

Q. What needs to change with respect to U.S. immigration?

A. “My view is that we should give a green card to every immigrant who gets an advanced degree in the United States. The proportion of those people who will be terrorists is miniscule. That would have a major positive economic impact.”

Apologies

For light blogging. New work, steep learning curve, long hours, longish travel.

Inshallah at some stage the learning cliff-face will be conquered and I'll emerge either into a fertile plain of relative competence, or a bleak, windswept plateau of not quite up to it. I reckon either way it'll be another three or four weeks.

One or two things that caught my eye.

Blackburn - twinned with Abbottabad. I thought the point of these school twinning arrangements was for the children to learn about other, unfamiliar cultures - in which case why choose Abbottabad, whose culture will be familiar to the pupils of Daisyfield School, most of whom are of Pakistani heritage? If they wanted to expose the children to an unfamiliar culture, why not a school in, say, Petersfield or Winchester?

The Conservative pledge to cut immigration looks like another one of David Cameron's cast-iron guarantees.

"Net migration in to the UK soared by almost half last year and is now close to the record levels of 2005. It is the fifth quarter in a row that net immigration has risen signalling a worrying upward trend. And two of the main drivers were a slump in emigration and a sharp rise in Eastern Europeans coming to the UK for work – two areas that will not be affected by the Government’s annual cap or other immigration measures. "

Three points here. One is that the counting immigration only in net terms is a neat way of ignoring the demographic transformation illustrated in the Blackburn link above. If all the native English were to emigrate and be replaced by incomers, net immigration would be zero and the BBC would doubtless headline that immigration WAS zero. To a large extent headline immigration figures have been reduced by the massive UK brain drain, as young natives with degrees leave to be replaced by young Afghans and Somalis.

Two is that the left and IPPR argument - "they're only here for the booming economy and they'll go home when there's a downturn" doesn't seem to have reflected reality. I'm shocked.

Three is that Cameron is so serious about cutting immigration that 5,000 jobs are going at the UK border agency. While that agency is useless, corrupt and incompetent, I'm not sure increasing its workload and reducing its staffing levels is going to improve it.


The TB jab returns? Only a few short years after declaring victory over tuberculosis, we're importing it at such a rate we've got to start all over again.

A Department of Health spokesman said: "We recognise that tuberculosis is a serious issue in London, particularly in more deprived boroughs and among the migrant community."

"Crucially, both the public and health care professionals need to be aware that TB is back, and growing fast."

26.5% of primary school pupils are now ethnic minority, up from 23% in 2008. The destruction of what was, with all its faults, one of the best places in the world to live continues.

Still, say not the struggle naught availeth, what ?

Could These Stories By Any Chance Be Related ?

Karl Marx, 1847 :

“The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”

Story 1:

Net migration in to the UK soared by almost half last year and is now close to the record levels of 2005. It is the fifth quarter in a row that net immigration has risen signalling a worrying upward trend. And two of the main drivers were a slump in emigration and a sharp rise in Eastern Europeans coming to the UK for work – two areas that will not be affected by the Government’s annual cap or other immigration measures.

: The number of foreign workers increased by 1.7 million in the last decade and accounted for all the increase in employment levels over the period.

: Work visas increased by six per cent in the year to March 2011

: Asylum claims increased by 11 per cent

: Migrants granted settlement in the UK increased by four per cent

Strange. I seem to remember being told that it was the booming UK economy which was the lure, that we should think of mass immigration as a tribute to our economic success, and that anyway, they'd all go home if there should be a slowdown. Most odd.


Story 2 :

The average wage taken home by 11 million British workers will remain 'roughly the same' until at least 2015, experts have warned. Think-tank Resolution Foundation said low and middle-income earners were not likely to benefit from the expected economic recovery. It predicted workers' pay in four years time would be the same as in 2001.

Up To A Point, Mr Allison

Lincoln Allison at the SAU blog is touring that fascinating country, India :

So there are two Indias, as there have always been two versions of Italy. One bristles with enterprise, the other with Soviet stupor. There are the hotels which cannot do enough for you and the tailor who will do a perfect alteration in ten minutes flat. And there is (or was) the guy who sold me my first Indian railway ticket. I slowly and dismally became aware that there was nothing in it for him if I reached Pune, but a certain amount of power, satisfaction and schadenfreude if he could stop me. Of course, he probably just wanted a bribe; the more complicated the form or procedure, the more likely you are to make a mistake which you will have to pay for as atonement or rectification. And seen in its broad context corruption is not a redistributive mechanism because the big guys do it big, the little guys do it little and the poor don't get to do it at all.

I think Indian enterprise will triumph in the end, but I'm an optimist.

He certainly is :

I don't buy the idea that India has put the Raj behind it, an idea which is dutifully trotted out by many western writers... I'd have liked them to sit with me on the Shatabadi Express last week, Delhi to Amritsar, first class compartment, with four English-language newspapers to choose from, all stuffed with IPL cricket reports, all to be digested with the free Indian Railways Morning Tea biscuits as you listen to the English conversations going on between Punjabi and Hindi speakers.

It may not be the India that the post-1858 full imperialists imagined? I don't know. But it is surely a world that more Liberal or earlier, less racist, imperialists would have happily conceived. It involves the greatest cultural exchange in history because they got cricket and we got curry, without any of us losing what we had in the first place. Globalisation at its best and anybody who tells me that curry is un-English should get as short shrift as anyone who says that cricket is un-Indian.

Globalisation at its best, eh ? A 50-50 swap from which we all benefit and no one loses?

Well, none of us have lost what we had in the first place - except the former native inhabitants of large parts of London, Birmingham, Manchester and larger parts of Leicester, Bradford, the Black Country and the former mill towns of the Pennines. Over the last 30 years I've been able to observe first-hand massive demographic change in Bradford and Birmingham.

During the Raj there were doubtless similar demographic changes to a few very small areas of India and Pakistan - I have a 1902 Guide to Simla with maps showing large areas of housing which could, from the names, be in suburban Surrey. But these involved very small numbers of people in a very large country - and were substantially reversed after independence. The demographic changes in England (and a few towns in Wales and Scotland) involve the movement of very large numbers into a very small country, and not only is reversal very unlikely, but the process, with its accompanying loss of native habitat, shows no sign of abating.

Croydon (V)

I noted Julia's post on the recent Tamil gang fighting in Croydon, and put it down as one more milestone on the road of diversity.

I forgot they've been at it since at least 2008 :

Gangs of violent men from Sri Lanka are "constantly tooled up" and "ready to go", according to police.There have been a number of violent clashes involving groups of Tamil men in Croydon and other parts of south London in recent years.

It's because of this sort of thing that I wasn't in the chorus of righties a few years back demanding that all the Gurkhas (and their families) be allowed in. Admittedly the Tamils of Sri Lanka have a violent recent history, whereas the violence of the Gurkhas has always been directed against the Queen's enemies. But it struck me that there were three objections to the idea :

a) do we want to recruit soldiers for whom the family immigration pass is the chief motivation?
b) is this not likely to impact upon Gurkha society back home, if the (hopefully - see (a)) bravest and best don't return to form a respected elder statesman class?
c) what's going to happen to their children and grandchildren, brought up in the culture of the UK? Will they retain both their fearsome warrior credentials and their dignified Nepalese culture, going straight into the forces as their fathers did? Or might they perhaps keep the warrior bit, but turn out like the children and grandchildren of those highly respectable people who got off the Empire Windrush, or those who arrived in the textile mills of the Pennines? The Gurkhas seemed OK to me just as they were, although there was always a case for upping the pensions.

I noted this killing a couple of years back :

Morden residents Rocky Gurung, 21, from Haig Place, and Kemik Thakali, 21, from Legion Court, both pleaded not guilty to murder during the trial last month but were found guilty of the manslaughter of the 23-year-old waiter.

During the trial, the court was told Bishal Gurung, who worked at the Sherpa Kitchen in Esher High Street, was chased along the Thames Embankment by a gang of 10 to 15 men including Rocky Gurung in the early hours of April 13, 2008, after being falsely accused of hitting Kemik Thakali with a bottle during a boat party to celebrate Nepalese new year.

He was kicked and beaten before being rolled into the Thames by Rocky Gurung and Thakali, the court was told.

Now I doubt that these people, though Nepalese, were the sons of Gurkhas. There's been no time for that. I just wonder what the streets of Aldershot, admittedly never the safest place to be out on the lash, are going to be like in twenty years time?

A town risks being 'overwhelmed' by Gurkhas and their families in the wake of the landmark decision to grant former servicemen the right to live in Britain, an MP says. Gerald Howarth, MP for Aldershot, has made a plea to the prime minister for more funding to deal with an issue he said was of 'grave concern' in the area, following an influx of thousands of former soldiers and their families. The former shadow Defence Minister's letter to David Cameron, reported in getHampshire.com, said: 'This has had a very significant impact over a very short period of time and it is now estimated that 10 per cent of the borough of Rushmoor’s population of approximately 90,000 is Nepalese.'

Cognitive Dissonance Alert - Daily Mail Edition

In the Money section, Jonathan Portes (Gordon Brown speechwriter and author of the report "Migration: An Economic And Social Analysis", famously revealed by Andrew Neather as "aimed to make Britain more multi-cultural for political reasons") :

"There is not a single serious economic study that suggests immigration has had any significant impact on the employment of British workers. Immigration may have had some effect on wages, but not very much. A report last year from MigrationWatch found that unemployment is higher in those areas of England that have experienced the highest levels of immigration. True. But those areas had higher levels of unemployment to start with - so it wasn't the immigrants who caused it. Even more to the point, during the period MigrationWatch looked at, the areas with more immigration actually did better in terms of unemployment.

Nor are immigrants a drain on the state. Some immigrants claim benefits, use the Health Service, have children at school, commit crimes and so on. But they pay taxes too. And on average, they pay more in tax and use less in services than natives. This is hardly surprising since many, if not most, immigrants come here to work or study. So overall they reduce the tax burden on the rest of us. Fewer migrants will mean higher taxes or cuts in services."

Alas he gives no references for these remarkable claims. I point readers towards the ONS figures for unemployment by ethnicity.





















Given that "Mr Portes remains an enthusiastic advocate of the benefits of immigration. He wrote a report for the Department of Work and Pensions last year rejecting claims that Eastern European workers had stolen the jobs of British counterparts, arguing Britons lacked the skills and motivation", I think we can probably take the attitude to his writings that Mary McCarthy took to Lillian Hellman's ("every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'").




I digress. In that same edition of the Mail, news section :

"Migrant crime wave revealed: Foreign arrests have almost doubled in just THREE years"

"The number of foreigners arrested for committing crimes in Britain has almost doubled in the past three years, police revealed today. Figures show that in 2010 more than 91,234 non-British nationals were held for crimes including murder, burglary and sexual offences. By contrast, only 51,899 foreigners were arrested in 2008 - meaning there has been a worrying increase of 76 per cent over the past three years."

And It Begins ...

18th March :

23:44:Libyan state television cites a senior security source as saying that Libya has decided to "absolve itself from taking responsibility for stemming illegal immigration to Europe"

Gaddafi, until recent events, was paid by Italy (I don't know what's happened to those payments) to police his Med coast - something he seems to have done effectively.

Now :

By Associated Press, Sunday, March 27, 11:32 AM

ROME — Boatloads of illegal African migrants have resumed setting sail from Libya for Italy, authorities said, overwhelming tiny islands and towns in southern Italy already struggling to host thousands fleeing unrest in Tunisia. Before dawn Sunday, Italian coast guard vessels escorted a boat crowded with 284 Somalis, Eritreans and Ethiopians to shore, the first boat to resume the long-established routes of smugglers’ boats toward Italy from Libya’s long coastline.

Since Lampedusa, a tiny island off Sicily, is already straining from sheltering the thousands of Tunisians, who have taken to sleeping on docks and fields after housing space ran out, the boat from Libya was diverted to Linosa, an even tinier island in the Pelagie archipelago south of Sicily.

Authorities said at least two other boats coming from Libya with hundreds of migrants aboard were spotted by fishing boats or coast guard air and sea patrolling the southern Mediterranean Sunday.

EU Borders

When the Glorious Tunisian Revolution took place in February, the first reaction of many Tunisians to their new world was to get the hell out to Europe. Between five and ten thousand illegal immigrants - "migrants" to the BBC - turned up in boats at the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Before the revolution Tunisian sea patrols intercepted and turned back boats heading for Europe. So did Libyan patrols, after a deal signed by Gaddafi and Berlusconi in 2009.

"Berlusconi promised to provide US$200 million a year over the next 25 years through investments in infrastructure projects in Libya. Italy provided three patrol boats to Libya on May 14, and has promised three more. Italy has also said that it will help construct a radar system to monitor Libya's desert borders, using the Italian security company, Finmeccanica.

Cosimo D'Arrigo, the commander of Italy's Finance Guard, said that the patrol boats would be "used in joint patrols in Libyan territorial water and international waters in conjunction with Italian naval operations," according to the ANSA news agency. So far, the joint patrols have succeeded in curtailing the flow of boat migrants to Italy."

Berlusconi, btw, has not AFAIK joined in the anti-Gaddafi chorus.

Gaddafi interpreted the deal broadly, and wasn't too fussy about the implementation:

"For Kwame Apeah, life as a migrant worker in Libya was good until about two years ago. 'For a while after I arrived, things were great. I had steady work, something I rarely had in Ghana, and I'd made Libyan friends,' he said. 'But then the police started cracking down on black workers in Tripoli. They didn't want to see us, and accused us of trying to reach Italy. Some friends were rounded up and thrown in jail. Another friend was shot in the arm,' he added."

North Africa has a large immigrant worker population. Most are sub-Saharan Africans who moved North hoping to find work either in North Africa or Europe, but there are also a large number of Bangladeshis.

The camp has a majority of single men, mostly labourers from from Bangladesh, Sudan, Somalia and Egypt. Aid agencies and Tunisian officials at the camp estimate the numbers to be 18,000, with 14,000 of them Bangladeshis. From the corner of the eye, you notice a Tunisian National Guard security official official stepping out of the shadows and tailing you. Time for a few questions, but he shoots first. ‘’What you doing here, nationality?’’ in halting English. Introductions done, he relaxes, lights a cigarette and gives you the inside story.

‘’There has been some fighting here between two groups,’’ he begins. You ask his name, he brushes aside the question. ‘’The Africans and Bangladeshis don’t get along, so we had to split them and keep them apart. The longer they stay here, the worse the situation will get.’’

The Africans and Bangladeshis don't get on, and neither do the sub-Saharan Africans and Libyans. Gaddafi's use of black mercenaries against his own people certainly hasn't helped, but the attitudes pre-date the uprising.

“There is a hierarchy of races.”

Blacks are widely referred to as “Abd,” or slaves*. Bangladeshis are viewed as little better, and even Arab Egyptians and Tunisians are considered to have limited rights. Migrant workers tell of the “gangsters” who hold foreigners at knifepoint in the Libyan streets, stealing their money and telephones with impunity. At night, said Francis Appiah, 35, a Ghanaian mason who fled the western Libyan city of Zuwarah, “you weren’t able to go out to buy anything,” for fear of attacks. He added that thieves had once stolen a DVD player, a television and speakers from his home. “I didn’t go to the police, because sometimes they arrest black people for no reason,” he said. His landlord once had Mr. Appiah arrested, he said, because he had requested payment for plastering the interior of the man’s house.

In Libya there are a million and a half illegal immigrants. In the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya I don't think there are benefits or asylum to be had (Google "Libyan benefits system"), Gaddafi seeming to hold to the socialist maxim "if you don't work you die", so they all work.

Sub-Saharan Africans make up a vast majority of the estimated 1.5 million illegal immigrants among Libya’s population of 6.5 million, according to the International Organization for Migration. Many were desperately poor people made even more so by investments of up to $1,000 each to pay smugglers to bring them across Libya’s southern border for a chance at better work in its oil economy... They are trapped in part because most lack passports or other documents necessary to board a plane or cross the border. They say they are afraid to leave the airport or try their luck on the roads to the border for fear of assaults by Libyan citizens or at militia checkpoints.

“Qaddafi has brought African soldiers to kill some of them, so if they see black people they beat them,” said Samson Adda, 31, who said residents of Zawiyah, a rebellious city, had beaten him so badly that he could no longer walk.

I keep hearing about the massive unemployment in Egypt, Libya's next door neighbour, and I seem to recall that Gaddafi was once keen on uniting the two countries in an Arab Republic. Why on earth aren't 1.6m Egyptians working in Libya ? I guess illegal immigrants are cheaper and have fewer rights.

I digress. It's possible that, win or lose, there'll be another Camp Of The Saints style boat exodus to Europe. If Gaddafi wins, there's no knowing what he'd do. If he loses due to intervention the current hefty influx may well increase. The EU doesn't seem to be interested.

"More than 3,000 kilometers away, on the 22nd floor of a Warsaw skyscraper is Frontex, the EU agency charged with border security. It has no ships or helicopters of its own, nor any autonomous decision-making power. Contributions are entirely voluntary, meaning those most affected by immigration flows bear the brunt of the costs. On Feb. 20, Frontex launched operation Hermes, named after the winged Greek god, to assist the authorities in Lampedusa. Italy is providing the most equipment: two patrol boats and a plane.

“Frontex does not replace the border-control activities of members states as these are performed by, and remain the primary responsibility of the latter,” said Frontex spokesman Michal Parzyszek. Interior ministers from six EU countries near the Mediterranean Sea called on member states last month to back the creation of a special fund that will help them cope with an “uncontrolled” influx of immigration from Libya. Their appeal has gone nowhere."

UPDATE - BBC News :

23:44:Libyan state television cites a senior security source as saying that Libya has decided to "absolve itself from taking responsibility for stemming illegal immigration to Europe".

Not to mention :

"Libya will be practising its right of self-defence according to clause 51 of the UN Charter. Unfortunately, according to this, civilian and military targets in the air and sea will be liable to serious danger in the Mediterranean. Due to this flagrant military aggression and this irresponsible action, the Mediterranean and North Africa have become an actual theatre of war."

Gaddafi knows that if he loses, he loses big, so he's capable of trying anything. He'll try and take the temple roof with him. On the other hand, that kind of statement - a threat to attack civilian ships and aircraft - makes it easier to justify removing him "with extreme prejudice".





* as in Libya, so in Sudan.

Those Tough New Immigration Rules

... explained by commenter Sassenach in this Guardian thread :

"From the main article:

It is right that immigration must be controlled, which is why Labour was right to introduce the points-based system (PBS) for managing migration.

Speaking as somebody who's worked for the last 6 years as an immigration caseworker and seen PBS in operation right from its infancy, I have to say I found this sentence rather amusing. PBS is a complete shambles. In fact it's such a complete shambles that in my more cynical moments I begin to suspect that it was deliberately designed that way. Fraud and abuse are absolutely rife across all tiers, and there are gaping loopholes all over the place that seem specifically tailored to making our job of controlling the borders more difficult.

Let's take Tier 1, which is supposedly the route for attracting highly skilled people. I know this area very well since it's the area I've spent most of my career working in. At present, if you talk to any caseworker who handles Tier 1 General applications they'll all tell you that it's a complete joke. I know this will just sound like hyperbole, like I'm exaggerating for effect, but I mean no word of a lie when I say that my estimate of Tier 1 General applications is that at the very least 50% of them are completely fictitious. I'm not alone in this view, and in fact I only differ from my colleagues in that I'm slightly more charitable in my assessment, most would put it well above 50%.

The most common ruse, and believe me it's almost physically impossible to go through a day without coming across an application of this type, is to supply completely bogus evidence of self-employment income in order to prove that you score points in the earnings band. This is so pitifully easy to do it's hilarious. The people who drafted the policy for Tier 1, in their infinite wisdom, decided that all we need to 'prove' self-employment income is a letter from an accountant accompanied by unaudited business accounts. Generally these are drawn up by dodgy accountants who deal exclusively with overseas nationals, but in reality it doesn't even require the accountant to break the law since they're not carrying out an audit, all they have to do is add a disclaimer saying that the accounts and accountant letter have been drawn up according to information supplied by the applicant. In effect this amounts to taking their word for it. We ask an applicant how much money they earned and whatever they tell us we accept at face value. I've lost count of the times I've seen somebody who works the night shift stacking shelves in Tesco for £6 an hour and then in his spare time works as a self-employed 'business consultant' on about £60k a year. We even talked one time about doing 'self-employed bingo' in our office, where we'd write out bingo cards with Tesco, Sainsburys, McDonalds etc on them and whoever came across Tier 1 General applicants working there first got to take a cash prize.... (we weren't allowed to do it though).

The reason I mention this in particular is because staff at the coalface who work Tier 1 applications have been making as much noise as we possibly can about this and any number of other laughably lax loopholes ever since PBS began but nothing has ever been done. There have been various changes to the policy but all of them have actually made it even easier to defraud the system. So whoever it was earlier in the thread who quoted that survey that supposedly found Tier 1 General migrants to be regularly working in high salary jobs, I'm afraid I still haven't stopped laughing. Sure, some of them are, but the vast majority are not, or certainly the ones I come across each and every day.

Now let's consider Tier 2. This is the system which was brought in to replace the old Work Permit system. Now, I don't actually have direct experience of working cases under the old system, but I obviously know a helluva lot of people who do and to a man/woman they all say that it was vastly superior to the system Labour brought in to replace it. Which is not to say that it was particularly good of course, but Tier 2 has been a disaster. The root problem is the sponsorship system that's been introduced. Under the old system an employer needed to make an application for a specific permit for a specific job and was required to demonstrate that they'd carried out checks of the domestic labour market and that the job met certain wage and qualification criteria before the permit was issued. In practice of course the checks were not especially tough and it was easily abused, but at least there was some attempt to vet the people who were being given permits and some of them were refused. That all changed with Tier 2, and it changed for the worse.

As I was saying, the change brought in with Tier 2 was sponsorship (which also affects the issuing of student visas under Tier 4, with similar associated problems). What now happens is that a prospective employer simply hasa to apply to go on the Sponsors Register and they will be issued with an allocation of Certificates of Sponsorship. They can allocate these to whoever they wish, and pretty much all a caseworker on Tier 2 now has to do is check to make sure that an applicant has a valid CoS. All of the other checks such as resident labour market tests and various other checks that were supposed to ensure that onl;y suitably talented and necessary individuals get given work permits have been sub-contracted out to the sponsor, who in theory is meant to carry them out before issuing any CoS. Yeah right, I believe that too. It's a massive conflict of interests. We're effectively handing control of our borders directly to businesses who have a direct interest in not playing too closely by the rules.

This wouldn't necessarily be so bad if the compliance features of PBS were effective. In theory there are supposed to be regular audits of sponsors to punish those who are not fulfilling their obligations. In practice of course the resources available for compliance visits are miniscule and the sanctions are too feeble to be a concern. There are no criminal sanctions for failure to meet your sponsor obligations, all that might happen is you may be downgraded from an A to a B rating, or at worst removed from the register. Big deal, you could have sponsored 20 or 30 migrants through the door by then, and in any case it's pitifully easy to just register a new company and get back on the register with a different name. Background checks are absolutely laughable. Tier 2 is absolutely wide open to abuse, and so of course it's being heavily abused.

But the biggest scandal around Tier 2 isn't really fraud and abuse, it's the perfectly legal Intra-Company Transfer scam. This is absolutely staggering. We allow companies to bring in literally thousands of skilled workers from overseas every year under these visas. The worst offenders are the big IT contractors. Tata Consultancy Services have an annual allocation of 2500 ICT visas. 2500 every year ! Many of these come in on short term contracts of just under 1 year and so they benefit from a despicable taxation agreement which allows them not to be subject to any income tax on what they earn in the UK (which is paid as a 'subsistence allowance'). Needless to say this means that Tata (and all the other big Indian players in this market) can afford to pay their qualified staff thousands of pounds a year less than domestic competitors would have to pay to attract somebody similarly qualified. Not only does this depress wages in the sector for domestic workers, it also acts as in effect a massive competitive edge that is driving domestic companies out of business. We're directly subsidising big Indian multinationals and causing unemployment at home through our dysfunctional ICT system, it's a complete disgrace.

Tier 4 is even worse of course. It works on similar principles to the Tier 2 sponsorship system but the numbers are much,much greater. I believe that at last count there are somewhere in the region of 300,000 new Tier 4 students arriving in Britain every year. Approximately 48% of these (or thereabouts, I'm going from memory) are studying at below degree level in non-accredited colleges.This is the source of a ridiculous amount of abuse. There are thousands of bogus colleges out there, they spring up like mushrooms, get onto the sponsor register with ease and sponsor as many new students through the door as they possibly can before eventually being found out and closed down, when the owners (usually foreign nationals themselves) simply set up a new bogus college. All of this could be ended at a stroke if the rules of Tier 4 were to be changed to simply ban any tier 4 visas for non-accredited colleges or below degree level studies. Easy, quick and it would elminate over 100,000 migrants a year without affecting genuine students or university funding one iota. It's enough to make you wonder why they didn't do something like that 13 years ago instead of the opposite......"

At which point someone mentions the Report of the Migration Advisory Committee, particularly the graph on p96 showing that the vast majority of those applying for further leave to remain "are earning more than £40,000 pa" i.e. are "those nice skilled workers the UK needs so desperately".

"The problem with those figures from the MAC report is the methodology by which they were obtained. It was a small sample of cases that came up for extension. Now, there are 2 glaring issues here. One is that the time this data was sampled there was no easily accessible database of application data to draw from. It wouldn't have been possible to simply look at all applications for extension that came through because that would have been a truly enormous effort and required the recall of every file from deep storage and going through them one by one. I know for a fact that this never occurred, so it must have just been a small sampling exercise, probably involving a select few caseworkers who were asked to retain some data as they were working. Secondly of course, it assumes that the applicants were telling the truth. As I already explained Tier 1, and it's forerunner HSMP, are/were abused on a truly epic scale. All MAC did was look at what they claimed to be earning and assume it was the truth, which is a very dangerous thing to do."

The same commenter comes back with :

As for your point about abuse, the sample was restricted only to those whose FLR application was successful. I trust that you guys at UKBA are all professionals, and can quite easily find out who is telling the truth, and who is not.

"You're far too trusting my friend...

My point earlier about abuse within Tier 1 was meant to illustrate how the rules of the scheme had been written in such a way as to make it very difficult to tackle abuse. like I said, we all know that most of the people who apply claiming to be self-employed are lying to us but there's a limited amount we can do about it because they tick the appropriate boxes and supply the evidence that we stipulate. If all we're asking for as evidence of earnings is a letter from an accountant and unaudited accounts then there's not much we can do about it. How do you verify that information ? Since both forms of evidence came from the same source (the accountant) we could ring them up and ask them to confirm it, but all they say is that it was drawn up based on information supplied by the applicant. Since they're not required to carry out an audit they don;t have to actually physically verify this stuff themselves so it's an easy fee for them. This is just one example among many of how our own policy is written in such as way as to make verification of fake evidence extremely difficult.

It's interesting that you brought up the MAC report actually because one of the inadvertant effects of that report was to make Tier 1 even worse than it already was. One of the key recommendations was to bump up the bandings for earnings, meaning you now have to be earning a lot more money to score the same points than you used to. All this achieved was to drive away a lot of the legitimate applicants. We did used to have quite a lot of people earning 30-35k a year and in the old days this was often enough in combination with a masters degree and being under a certain age. Nowadays that's nowhere near enough, the same age applicant with the same qualification would need to be earning around 55-60k a year to get approved. The result has been that pretty much all we ever see these days is the fraudsters. They don't give a damn what level you set the earnings band at because all their evidence is fake anyway. Tier 1 General in the wake of that MAC report's recommendations is almost entirely comprised of fraudsters and merchant bankers (I'll leave you to make the obvious joke....)"

"Look, what I've described is the current situation with Tier 1 General and it's the reason why it's being scrapped (or it ought to be). It wasn't always quite this bad of course, and over the years quite a lot of talented people with good jobs have had Tier 1 or HSMP visas. However, it most certainly has always suffered from rampant abuse, which has been largely ignored by the higher-ups who set the policy but is an open secret among anybody who actually works at UKBA. You can choose to believe me about that or not, but I'm only sharing my perspective as somebody who knows a helluva lot more about Tier 1, and PBS in general, than anybody else in this thread."