Sunday 26 October 2014

Immigration is a good thing. So there.

It's a contentious topic and one fueled with misconceptions and outright lies from certain corners of the media and political sphere. The general public are worried, no doubt due to politicians using words like "under siege" to describe the changing population of the UK. UKIP would have us believe that Britain is set to become a distant memory, while Eastern European migrants take over and we all start speaking Polish or Romanian or Bulgarian, or some mangled mixture of all three - but crucially with no trace of Engerlish remaining.


I'm being hyperbolic, of course, and I don't mean to come across as flippant. When you do start to research the facts and figures behind UKIP's claims, you quickly realise how absurdly laughable they are.

What stops them being seen for the joke they are, sadly, is the tacit endorsement of their fallacious claims by the Labour and Conservative parties, who have responded to their rise in support NOT by deconstructing their rhetoric and promoting a more accurate picture to the electorate, but instead by competing in a race to the bottom on who can come out with the most hardline policy on immigration.

What IS the real picture of immigration then? What does the population of the UK truly look like at the moment? I talk to people a lot about this issue, and the same themes come up again and again. People believe that there are more and more non-UK born families across the country. People believe that British workers are being sidelined for employment in favour of lower-paid migrant workers. People believe that migrant families are prioritised for social housing and that the housing shortage is due to increased demand from non-UK born households. People really believe that the strain on the NHS is down to demand from "health tourism" and a higher than ever immigrant population. 

Where have all these beliefs come from? When I go out, for example, to collect my children from school, there's a definite mix of nationalities and ethnicity, but still an overwhelming majority of white British families. When I go out shopping, I see the same thing. Yes, there is diversity, but it's nothing like the "swamping" that some would have us believe. 

I've said before that this anti-immigration rhetoric forms part of a wider smokescreen designed to keep the electorate enraged about a total non-issue while the genuinely damaging problem - i.e. the carefully cultivated wealth inequality - goes unchallenged. While we waste time debating immigration issues, we are not talking about the economic crisis, or how the UK is in more debt now than before the coalition government took control; we are not talking about about how the European economy is MORE fragile now than in 2007; we are not asking where the £46billion taxpayers' bailout given to RBS has gone; we are not throwing every fibre of our being into protecting our NHS from privatisation, or even into understanding what privatisation means; we are not vilifying the government for the callous welfare reforms that have seen over 1million people turn to foodbanks, and incalculable numbers of disabled people die within weeks of having their lifeline benefits stopped

There are genuine problems with the UK at the moment; real issues that must be addressed. But immigration is nothing, nothing like the thumping great threat that UKIP, the Conservatives and the rest would have you believe.

Let's take a look at some numbers.


University College London, in collaboration with the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, last year published a paper titled "The Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the UK". Their research uncovered some astonishing findings:
  • The net fiscal balance of overall immigration to the UK between 2001 and 2011 amounts to a positive net contribution of about £25 billion.
  • Recent immigrants are 45% less likely to receive state benefits or tax credits than UK-born citizens.
  • By sharing the cost of fixed public expenditures (such as defence), which account for 23% of total public expenditure, immigrants reduce the financial burden of these fixed public obligations for natives.
Is your mind blown? Mine isn't, because I had suspected for some time that immigration is not only positive for the UK, but actually necessary for our economic survival. "Now then", I hear you murmur, "if this is all true, why don't the government just admit it?". Well that is a very good question, and I wish I knew the definitive answer. You don't need to look very hard for evidence that the government are not only aware, but actively trying to conceal the real picture of immigration to the UK - earlier this year, they came under fire for blocking the publication of a report which would have blown open all their reasoning for tightening up EU migration!

"But there ARE more of them!!"

Yes. Yes there are more "of them" than there were last year, and the year before that. Specifically, net migration (that is, the total number of people coming into the UK minus the number of those leaving) for the year ending March 2014 was 243,000 compared to 175,000 in the previous 12 months.

"That's a huge jump! Bloody Farage is right!!"

Hold your horses! Never take numbers out of context. Let's look at the bigger picture...

Total immigration in the year up to December 2010 was 575,000, while in the year up to December 2012, it fell to 497,000. As emigration from the UK has hovered between 316,000 and 350,000 per year, a clearer picture starts to emerge. In terms of population percentage, the net migration figures are not fluctuating all that much - certainly not enough to justify the outrage meted out by the noisy right-wingers. 

Here's a little graph for you:

I didn't make this. I'm not THAT much of a spreadsheet whizz. This came from the Office for National Statistics, August 2014 report on migration.


It's right there in black and white (and green and blue and pink). The picture of immigration in and out of the UK over the last decade really hasn't changed all that much.

So back to these problems facing the UK today; the housing crisis, the strain on the NHS, low-paid jobs. I'm going to elaborate on each of these topics in subsequent posts, but let me just say that not one of these problems is caused by immigration.

Housing

The housing crisis in the UK is a mess. Briefly, between the government selling off 2.5million council houses through the Thatcherite "Right to Buy" scheme and not replenishing the stock with new builds, we now have 1.7million people on council house waiting lists across England alone with nowhere to put them. Alongside that, soaring house prices and mortgage rates have been exacerbated by the rise in houses being used as commodities for investment rather than homes, making it more difficult than ever for first time buyers to afford a home. Meanwhile the private rental sector has exploded, now accounting for more than 13% of housing across the UK but with soaring rent, no long term security for tenants and the ever-increasing instances of homelessness caused by tenants finding themselves at the end of one tenancy but unable to afford the myriad fees of another.

Without private rent caps, the immediate introduction of more social housing and a drastic overhaul of the definition of "affordable housing", the housing crisis will not get any better. Immigration has not caused this, the government's appalling mismanagement has. Capping or reducing immigration will not alleviate it. Only sensible, proactive intervention from the government will. 

NHS

The coalition government's attack on the NHS is scandalous. The model, very simply, works like this: slash the budgets --> services decline --> "outsourcing" is heralded as the knight in shining armour --> wham! We have sleepwalked into a privatised health care system.


Source: Another Angry Voice
Do you remember David Cameron's pledge to not expose the NHS to pointless restructing? I do. And yet the abysmal Health and Social Care Act (2012) has brought about the biggest top-down reorganisation of the NHS in living history, not to mention removing between £60-£80billion of funding from the now-abolished Primary Care Trusts and giving it instead to Clinical Commissioning Groups, who are a prime source of entry for private companies to gain health provider contracts. Crucially, this move was not in the Conservative or Liberal Democrats' manifesto, so the public never had the opportunity to vote against such massive changes to the functioning of the NHS.


I will blog in more detail about the true cause of the NHS crisis, but you can read more here for now: Twelve Things You Should Know About the Tories and the NHS

Once again, waiting time for GP appointments, hospital closures and downgrading, waiting lists for treatment - none of it has been caused by immigration. ALL of it has been caused by massive government budget cuts. Capping immigration will not relieve the situation; only reversing privatisation and investing back into our hospitals and health services can restore the NHS to its rightful state. Incidentally, did you know that 26% of NHS doctors are non-UK born? Our lives, quite literally, have depended on immigration.

Employment


And we roundly return to the "dey terk er jerbs!!" argument. Anecdotally, I've heard this a thousand times over. British workers are turned away while the jobs are given to migrant workers who will accept a lower wage.

Firstly, this is largely a myth. In the few instances where this has happened, why does the migrant worker shoulder the blame instead of the unscrupulous and exploitative employer? Why aren't we stamping our feet and demanding the immediate implementation of a Living Wage for all employees, regardless of their country of origin? 

Back to the myth-busting. There is a 52 page government-commissioned report from the Migration Advisory Committee which you can read for yourself here. Briefly, the report found that the impact on wages from the flow of migrant workers was minimal, and there was only a weak - but not causal - correlation between the two. It also identified that there are specific areas of the country where migrant communities are more concentrated and so the perception of the impact of immigration will obviously be skewed. 

Plainly, there is no evidence to support claims that migrant workers are harmful to British employment prospects. Where exploitation by employers occurs, this must be dealt with by enforcing existing legislation about pay and introducing a Living Wage for all workers in the UK. Immigration in and out of itself, has not driven down wages. Capping immigration will not result in a pay rise for UK-born workers. Only decisive action by the government to recognise the current massive pay gap and support employers to pay proper wages can relieve this.


Considering that this will rank amonst one of my more epic blog posts, I really only have scratched the surface of the massive and intricate topic of immigration. I haven't even begun to talk about asylum seekers, illegal immigration, or the actual practicalities of any kind of immigration cap, but if I try now my fingers will fall off, and if you have to read more of my opinions, I suspect your eyes will mutiny.

I hope that I have successfully unravelled some of the commonly held myths around immigration and at the very least prompted you to question some of the claims made by the likes of UKIP and the Conservatives. I leave you with this image from Another Angry Voice:





Further reading:

Office for National Statistics (including all Quarterly Migration Reports): International Migration
Keith Taylor MEP in The New Statesman: "I'm ashamed of our government's stance on immigration"
Crisis Policy Briefing: Housing - the Private Rented Sector
Migration Advisory Committee: Migrants in Low Skilled Work

Monday 13 October 2014

Tories. Tories EVERYWHERE.


Irritated; annoyed; exasperated; vexed; irked; raging; maddened; incensed; splenetic. Just some of the words one could use to describe my current mood after reading that the Green Party will be omitted from the upcoming pre-election televised debates while Nigel Farage has been welcome with open arms. 

Pffffft.

With over 20,000 members in England & Wales alone - an increase of 45% this year! - three elected MEPs, a peer in the House of Lords, London Assembly member AND an elected MP, not to mention polling level with the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party are hardly marginal. Neither are we a single issue party focusing only on environmental issues, though securing media coverage for our social justice policies is no mean feat.

Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and UKIP are all different sides of the same coin. The same old establishment faces, totally disconnected from ordinary people and the reality of life in the UK today, with policies engineered to satisfy wealthy party donors. Tories in blue, Tories in red, Tories in yellow and Tories in purple. They might have different party names, but there's barely any distinguishing between them anymore. For the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to schedule debates between the four white male wealthy party leaders and to leave out the Green Party's female leader - the only mainstream voice of the left -  demonstrates precisely what an uphill battle we face if we want to relieve government of its corrupted self-serving infestation.

It's not just about telling people what our policies are. How can we expect the public to back something like the Citizen's Income without first unravelling all the myths about modern day poverty and the welfare state? How do we realistically expect them to trust us about our immigration policy while they're being force-fed a inflated figures and biased analysis of the current state of things? People are backing UKIP because they feel that is the party who reflect their needs, but those needs are based on the pervasive manipulation of the truth spread by right-wing governments and a sock-puppeted mainstream media. 

For the sake of democracy, we have to fight to have political parties represented fairly in the media - and I don't just mean the Green Party; I'm talking about the SNP and Plaid Cymru too. How much of UKIP's success can be attributed to the media love-in from the past year and the resulting self-fulfilling prophecy?

I would like to set a challenge for the British media; swap the Greens and UKIP round in your level of exposure. Spend the next 7 months talking about the Green Party as frequently and fervently as you have UKIP, and give the kippers the same flimsy coverage the Greens have had. Let's see what impact THAT makes on the election, eh? If media coverage hasn't influenced election outcomes, as you've insisted, you have nothing to lose and UKIP's "success" will continue unabated.

For the rest of us, there are numerous petitions floating round about the media and the Green Party. Sign as many of them as you can; let's keep up the pressure and demand some decent coverage.

BBC Complaints online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complain-online/

N.B. The initial publication of this post contained the phrase "limp-wristed", which I have now edited out. I apologise unreservedly for any offence caused and will take greater care in future to avoid using such insensitive wording.



Friday 3 October 2014

Big Brother is Watching You

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..." - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four


This week, my reactions to the news have been brought to you by the letters W, T, F. The period after the Conservative Party conference was never going to be anything other than stressful, as numerous plots to make our lives ever more miserable were gleefully unfurled while Iain Duncan Smith literally fist-pumped the air with joy:

From: Another Angry Voice

If there's a Tory I dislike even more than Iain Duncan Smith, however, it's Theresa May. They're all reprehensible, morally-bankrupt filth in my honest opinion, but May's unwavering assault on human rights legislation just cranks up my loathing another notch.  

A year ago, I read her pledge to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which came just a couple of weeks after the country was outraged at the detention of David Miranda under spurious interpretation of the Terrorism Act (2000). To be detained for nine hours, prohibited from accessing legal representation, compelled to answer all questions asked of you and having your personal effects confiscated - when you have done nothing wrong and given no indication of wrongdoing - surely constitutes a breach of human rights. Yet the incident was ruled lawful by the Home Office, and now the Tories want to bring in yet more legislation that systematically dismantles our basic expectations of human rights, under the banner of "fighting extremism and terrorism".

It sounds a noble cause. Nobody likes terrorists. Extremism, as we've seen with ISIS/ISIL and Al Qaeda, is very dangerous indeed. But we are fools if we believe that this is the extent of the Tories' interpretation of extremism.

Just three months ago, news broke that Green Party members, Jenny Jones (Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb) - and Councillor Ian Driver, had been added to a database of "domestic extremists" despite neither having a criminal record. Along with thousands of other political activists, their right to lawful protest had been reclassified as "extremism" and used to justify the storage of personal details and photographs on secret police databases around the country. 

One of my earliest blog series looked at Human Rights and Human Wrongs, in which I explored (at length!) the logic behind my view that we must always observe the basic human rights of everyone, even the most abhorrent criminals. You can read parts one, two and three here (get comfy first). Essentially, human rights are absolute and inalienable; one does not "earn" them, nor can one have them revoked. That philosophy is fundamental to protecting the human rights of me, you and every other ordinary nice person. The minute we start deconstructing the human rights of people deemed to be unworthy of them, we are on a very slippery slope which threatens anyone with a predilection to challenge the status-quo.

If Baroness Jenny Jones can be labelled a "domestic extremist" for her political activity, so can I and so can you. My husband jokes that if I'm not on some CIA watchlist by now, he'd be very surprised, but there may well be an element of truth in that. After all the definitions of extremism, and the legislation that criminalises them, are constructed by the people whose interests are best served by censoring dissent and preserving the social state which keeps them in government. 

We have also heard this week that Theresa May plans to implement "Extremist Disruption Orders", which will see people banned from speaking at public events, taking part in protests, having to submit to the police in advance any publication on the web, social media or in print, and having social media closely monitored. This is not limited to those preaching hate or radicalising young Muslims; David Cameron has said that this will look at "the full spectrum of extremism" and those who threaten to "overthrow democracy". I would be intrigued to hear more of Cameron's definition of democracy, given that he acts as Prime Minister in a country where two-thirds of voters voted for someone else. 

The past five years of Tory governance have seen inequality increase, child poverty go through the roof, untold numbers of suicides in the wake of callous benefit sanctions and ATOS "work capability" assessment, UK debt increase, NHS services privatised, social services cut, care homes closed - the list goes on and on and on. If you are anything other than wealthy in the UK right now, life is pretty scary and set to get much worse if the Tories are re-elected next May. I consider it my moral duty to devote time and energy into getting them out of government and fighting for a decent standard of life for everyone in the UK. Theresa May and David Cameron would probably call me a domestic extremist for that view and for my role in countless campaigns to overthrow the Tories, which puts people like me right in the firing line for all this anti-human rights rhetoric. 

Do not trust that this policy is simply about fighting terrorism in the form of violent aggressors. It is very much about enshrining the right of politicians to censor those who would speak out against their war on the poor.




Further reading and websites: