Migration has brought ‘zero’ economic benefit to Britain
By Philip Johnston and Robert Winnett
TEN years of record immigration to Britain has produced virtually no economic benefits for the country, a parliamentary inquiry has found. A House of Lords committee, which is due to report next Tuesday, will call into question Government claims that foreign workers add £6 billion each year to the wealth of the nation.
It is expected to say this must be balanced against the increase in population and their use of local services such as health and education, resulting in little benefit per head of the population.
“OUR overall conclusion is that the economic benefits of net immigration to the resident population are small and close to zero in the long run,” the report will say.
The findings of the Lords economics committee threaten to demolish the key argument made by ministers to justify the highest levels of immigration in the country’s history.
The inquiry by the committee, which includes two former chancellors and several former Cabinet ministers, is the first to try to balance the costs and benefits of large-scale immigration.
The population is increasing by more than 190,000 every year, largely as a result of immigration.
Foreign workers now make up 12.5 per cent of the labour force, compared with 7.4 per cent a decade ago. Critics say Labour lost control of the borders, issued too many work permits and should not have opened up the labour market to eastern Europe.
 David Irving comments: |
So it turns out that the Government statisticians forgot to add the costs of extra policing, and the millions of pounds required for translation and interpreting services.
Over half the crime in Cambridgeshire is now committed by immigrants. And will somebody explain how the Romanian gypsies harassing pedestrians in Sloane Street every day are benefiting our economy? They cannot even be arrested and thrown out – they all have carefully-produced EU badges identifying their inviolate status: while I meanwhile am not permitted to travel to Germany, Austria and other countries to visit archives, publishers, and human sources of history.
Note that the cowardly Daily Telegraph carefully omits the “i” word in its headline, immigrants: they maintain the fiction that these are just migrants, as though they are arriving like tourists and shortly moving on, waving their hats and beaming those water-melon smiles we saw in the Pathé newsreels of the 1950s.
Uh, no. They have come to suck Britain dry, like any other immigrants.
If only those gangplank shots could be reversed now: if only we could just press a knob, and film the whole shuffling mob of cheap slave-labour immigrants stepping backwards up into the bowels of the ships they were transported over here in.
These weird editors have a lot to answer for. I remember that in the 1960s and 1970s the Daily Telegraph house style book ordered their writers to use only the word plastics, not plastic, as in “a plastics folder.”
In 1967 that same house style book defined that David Irving was in future to be referred to only as the writer, and not the historian.
I can live with that, but can we native British now live with the mass multi-million immigration that Mr Sanctimonious Blair and his cronies, funded as it now turns out by You Know Whom, have inflicted on us?
It rings hollow now, but as early as January 1961, speaking alongside Sir Oswald Mosley at a University College London debate on the motion “This House would maintain the unrestricted right of Commonwealth citizens to enter this country,” I warned of the increased Tuberculosis level that would result as just one of the side-effects (I did not even mention the guns and narcotics).
How those Lefty students howled then! Now here we have it confirmed in this report.
RIGHT wingers in Britain have been warning of this calamity since the 1950s and have been decried as racists, and evening imprisoned for saying it. It has little or nothing to do with race. It is about Englishness.
On the second day of the Lipstadt Trial, January 12, 2000, I said:
Like most fellow countrymen of my background and vintage, I regret the passing of the Old England.
I sometimes think, my Lord, that if the soldiers and sailors who stormed the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could see what England would be like at the end of this century, they would not have got 50 yards up the beach. I think they would have given up in disgust.
When Lipstadt’s craven, bootlicking counsel asked me in court a few days later what I meant by patriotism, I replied: “Patriotism is literally respecting the country that has been handed to you by your [fore-]fathers, by your parents.” (Day 15, Feb 3, 2000)
He pressed the matter. I now said,
[As] somebody born in England of 1938, with all the values that I grew up in -- grew to respect and admire and love -- I regret what has happened to our country now. Sometimes I wish I could go Heathrow Airport and get on a 747 and take a ten-hour flight and land back in England as it was, as it used to be.
He gave up, but the cowardly press did not, because it was precisely what the British wanted to hear said, and what the journaille was frightened of saying themselves: my words about the Normandy beaches appeared as Quote of the Week in almost every national newspaper, and as Quote of the Month in three if not more Sunday papers.
Head for Heathrow! Since the Barbadians all appear now to be over here, let’s all go there.
A Leftie wrote me a mocking letter, saying had I not realised that the newspapers were making fun of my remarks. Uh, no again; they were not.
| However, ministers say that without large-scale immigration there would have been slower economic growth.
A Whitehall paper produced for the committee said average output growth over the past five years was 2.7 per cent a year and migration contributed an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of this. The Government said this indicated a contribution of £6 billion – or £700,000 a day- from foreign workers. However, the committee’s final report is expected to say the Government should have focused on the impact of immigration on GDP per head, not the economy as a whole. David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford University, said in his evidence to the committee that the Government had excluded costs from crime, security, the race relations process, health “tourism” and imported ailments such as TB. Richard Pearson, a visiting professor at the University of Sussex’s Centre for Migration Research, said: “While migrants have clearly helped alleviate often long-standing skill shortages, they have also filled many low-skilled jobs, often at very low wages. “These migrants are likely to be displacing, and reducing the incentive on employers to recruit and train low-skilled, indigenous workers.”
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