You won’t get an honest debate about the impact of migration on public services from the Torygraph!
Schools in Mid Wales would welcome the pupils who are being blamed for overloading schools in other parts of the UK. If there is a problem with places, it is of the Tory government’s making.
This Writer agrees with the economist Jonathan Portes on this issue – migrants more than pay for themselves and any failure to allocate resources is the fault of the Conservative Government.
The Torygraph‘s emphasis on the effect of immigration on public services like schools is a symptom of the failure of previous lines of attack.
Remember when we were told the UK has an “open-door” immigration policy?
There is no open door. The UK has a lower immigrant population than almost any ‘developed’ nation, these immigrants are mostly assessed via a points-based system, only seven per cent are asylum seekers, and only 33 per cent of asylum claims are accepted.
Remember when we were told the immigrant population has access to all the benefits available to UK citizens?
The immigrant population does not have access to a vast majority of the benefits available to UK citizens, the benefits they do receive are nowhere near the same value as those received by UK citizens and they are a third less likely to claim benefits than UK citizens.
So now they’re clogging up our schools.
Know what? Here in Mid Wales we have a surplus of school places and Powys County Council now has a policy of closing schools, leaving many villages without their vital community hub.
If other places have too few places for the number of people wanting to attend, then there is clearly a resource-allocation problem and Mr Portes is doubly right.
It would also make the Torygraph doubly wrong.
The argument that many in the Remain campaign make for continued British membership of the European Union is rooted in the claim that mass immigration is good for Britain.
They do not mention the other effects of mass migration, such as the impact on public services.
The free movement of people from elsewhere in the EU has contributed to significant growth in the number of children that our schools must accommodate and teach.
Parents unable to send their children to their preferred schools or whose offspring are taught in overcrowded classrooms could be forgiven for wondering whether the alleged economic benefits of a liberal migration policy are being reflected in the resources available to the state education system.
This problem is particularly acute in areas where migrant workers have congregated in large numbers: local councils in such places are still not properly compensated by central government for the resultant effect on public services.
Last year’s Conservative manifesto rightly promised a new “Controlling Migration Fund” to ease pressure on services. That promise should be implemented as quickly as possible.
It remains true that those who ask questions about immigration and its effects run the risk of sneers or worse from the BBC and other “liberal” institutions.
Source: Time for an honest debate about the impact of migration on public services
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My experience on the door step during recent canvassing was that if the referendum was mentioned then it was usually by those who want to stop ‘them’ coming here and taking our jobs and services. If I pressed a little harder then it became clear that a lot of the references were to people of different colour ie usually south Asian or Arabic origin so mostly former commonwealth origin or refugees or asylum seekers from the Middle East war zones that ‘we’ didn’t want. I tried to point out that none of this relates to membership of the EU so the argument fell back on ‘we want our freedom back’. Again if I tried to press for exactly what freedoms they meant it was usually about immigration. If I asked them to explain the freedoms further it was about ‘rules’. I usually couldn’t get explanations about what rules so I suggested a few such as not being made to work extremely long and dangerous hours or rules that protect the rights of workers and they would counter with being able to deport people without constraint of human rights legislation. By this time I had usually lost the will to live and beat a retreat with the forlorn advice that they look at the Full Facts website.
Brexit leaders talk about the economic aspects of the leave campaign but the ones who talk about voting leave or supporting UKIP are almost entirely doing so on racist grounds and admit they don’t understand/care about the economics.
I am afraid Mike you and I will have to agree to disagree about immigration. Britain went past the long term sustainable population carrying capacity back around 1840.
There needs to be a plan to get the population down to the sustainable carrying capacity and than means stopping immigration altogether, before nature at some time in the not too distant future does it the hard way.
Tell you what: How about we agree that the arguments are all wrong?
Blaming immigrants is handy, but questions about sustainability would remain, even if they weren’t here.
Actually if you take immigrants and their generally high birthrate out of the equation, the UK population would have been dropping for the last 40 years.
But would it, if immigrants and their generally high birthrate weren’t around?
If this were a science experiment, then doing that would significantly change the nature of the test and may produce significantly different results from those one might expect.
You don’t know what the population would have done in different circumstances and it is wrong to suggest that you do.
Tony Dean is right and you’re now guilty of displaying symptom of the failure of previous lines of attack that you nly seem to recognise in others.
The ‘arguments’ aren’t wrong as this is a maths problem.
If sustainablilty is the issue then accelerating unsustainability only makes matters worse. Populations growing at a mathematically sustainable pace ‘might’ stand a chance of coping – maybe! However, forcing (culturally diverse) populations together at a rate that was never provided for financially can’t result in anything but the inreasing unrest that we’re seeing.
To then try to make that inevitability a ‘Tory’ created problem is intellectually dishonest at best. 3 into 2 does not go – no matter much the ‘stats’ are distorted or which party tries to pretend that it can. Constantly trying to berate (or promote) mathematically unsound policies along party lines is not indicative of someone seeking an ‘honest’ debate.
Why am I making this a ‘Tory-created’ problem? There’s no mention of such in the article!
I said the problem is there and the Tories have worsened it by failing to allocate resources adequately – you touch on that yourself with reference to actions that were “never provided for financially” so I don’t see that you can argue against that.
What “forcing culturally diverse populations together” has to do with money or sustainability is beyond me. The UK was a colonial country and has been throwing diverse populations together for hundreds of years, don’t you know?
If you mean it creates unrest, I don’t think that has anything to do with cultural diversity. Mostly people integrate into society.
As for any maths problem – see my response to Tony Dean.
It’s not a “maths problem” and never has been. Those who only understand economics and statistics on the superficial level see it as a numbers problem. “The population is increasing and people are immigrating so the country must be getting full and resources must be getting used up quicker.” This is oversimplification on a ridiculous scale. The U.K. Has a comparatively low population density when compared with many countries though it is higher than say Australia or Canada to name but 2. Population density is not a measure of wealth or success. Sudan has a low population density and Singapore has a very high density. Which would you rather be like? Immigrants as opposed to asylum seekers or refugees tend to be young well educated and motivated and come looking for work taking jobs that the indigenous population seem to disparage. They pay their taxes and because they tend to be mostly young single and fit do not put a strain on the NHS in the way that our aging indigenous population (me for example) tend to do.
The taxes that our guest workers pay keep the services we value going for the benefit of the indigenous people. So if we kick out these people who come here to work we would paralyse many services etc due to lack of both labour and funds. Most of these European origin guests come to earn money to invest in their future and plan to return to their country of origin at some point in the future, unlike say the UK citizens who have emigrated to retire abroad in the sunnier states where, due to their age they tend to place a greater burden on the host country’s health services and which they enjoy at reduced costs due to their European Health Card.
Further the racist response is to conflate all incomers as immigrants without distinguishing between people who come for different reasons European migrants, commonwealth immigration, asylum seekers, refugees etc all represent different groups who are covered by different laws and regulations. The antis have no interest in understanding this and just talk about ‘them.’
I encourage everyone from all sides of the debate to consult http://www.fullfacts.org to challenge your prejudices.
Mike I am not going to get into a long argument with you about carrying capacity, birth rates, and so on. It is a subject I have studied and researched for over 50 years.
It is impossible to explain in a few pages let alone a few paragraphs.
Currently London on its own is consuming the equivalent of ALL British agricultural production. The current rapid rise in population just is NOT sustainable. The population need to be planned down not up. As time goes by the more urgent that gets. ALL immigration is madness.
So we stop immigration and prepare for the retaliatory ejection of the millions of UK citizens from the countries to which they have emigrated.
The UK remains as crowded.
How does that help?