Do try a bit of Deep Thought, Michael

There was an interesting contrast today between my personal mailbox and Twitter, the one full of mainly supportive comments about my appearance on the BBC’s ‘Question Time’ and the other seething with loathing. Well, both are obviously selective  and there’s no great surprise there.

 

Nor is there much surprise about the Twitter Mob (never out of the top drawer, intellectually) seeing some sort of contradiction in my condemning the recent mass immigration into this country, and recommending those young enough to do so to emigrate from this country while they still can.

 

 (Why the urgency? The accelerating depreciation of the Pound Sterling will make relocation increasingly difficult. The current inflation rate, alleged to be around 3% a year but probably higher in reality,  plus the almost complete suppression of interest, means that in 15 years or so the value of any savings or property you have will be nearly halved, or at least much diminished in realisable saleable value. I am by no means sure that property prices, outside the immediate London commuter belt or even within it, can sustain their current levels either.  In many desirable destination countries, these effects will not be matched. Emigration without some savings and the ability to buy or rent a home while seeking work is pretty hard, and (see below) not to be encouraged in most cases. It’s also the case that British educational qualifications , once respected, will increasingly be seen for what they are, devalued paper).

 

But I was disappointed when my old acquaintance Michael Rosen, whom I remember as an ornament of the radical movement at Oxford (I was a townie, he a student) in the late 1960s, and whom I have always rather liked as a person,   tweeted as follows ; ‘Peter Hitchens #bbcqt : deep thinker said, UK ruined because of immigration,therefore people should leave. (ie become an immigrant!)’

 

Oh, come on, Michael.  Do act like the grown-up you are.  You might try thinking a little more deeply than this shallow crowd-pleasing jeering. First of all, I was careful, as I always am, to use the specific phrase ‘Mass Immigration’ . Why? Because immigration on the scale encouraged by New Labour  (see many articles featuring the amazing revelations of the former Blairite apparatchik Andrew Neather ,for example http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/neather-andrew/ ) and not seriously hampered by the Cameroons, cannot be properly absorbed.

 

Nothing on this scale has happened in this country before. Even before it began, we were already having grave problems integrating our Muslim minorities, especially in the Pennine towns, and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans has transformed many areas and overloaded many public services (of the kind that people such as Mr Rosen are keen on) . Accusations of racial bigotry against those who are worried by this would be false anyway. But the fact that the migrants are predominantly pinko-grey Europeans makes it impossible to claim that objections to this migration are motivated by irrational skin-based dislike, a lie that has been useful in the past in heading off any objections to large-scale arrivals. The difference is (as it always has been) to do with language and culture. And the real question has always been – shall the arrivals adapt themselves to us, or shall we adapt ourselves to them?

 

 

For those who don’t much like this country anyway, the choice is plain. They will demand multiculturalism because they see it as a useful tool for dismantling the British monoculture, conservative, Christian, monarchist, puritanical, which they wish to get rid of and have wanted to get rid of for decades. For those who do like this country, it’s equally plain. Immigration must be kept to levels small enough to ensure that the migrants are encouraged to integrate and to become British, the best way of ensuring harmony and of maintaining the British nation state, the largest form of social and political  organisation in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish. This is the real quarrel and, when it is stated in this way, it is hard for the revolutionaries to win it. That is why they almost always seek to smear their opponents as bigots. 

 

 

It is also material. Many migrants are, thanks to their position,  willing to work for far less than the locals, and to live in much more basic conditions while they do so. This, inevitably, has the greatest impact on those working for low wages, the sort of people Mr Rosen seemed to be worried about back in those Sixties days. Of course Mr Neather and people like him see great advantages in this pool of labour.

 

He explained how immigration had been ‘highly positive’ for ‘middle-class Londoners’. He wrote: ‘It’s not simply a question of foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners – although frankly it’s hard to see how the capital could function without them.’

He was even franker: ‘But this wave of immigration has enriched us much more than that. A large part of London’s attraction is its cosmopolitan nature.

It is so much more international now than, say, 15 years ago, and so much more heterogeneous than most of the provinces, that it’s pretty much unimaginable for us to go back.’

 

I suspect that is true. Our borders are held wide open by our EU membership, and will shortly be even more open, as more ‘accession’ countries join the EU, and as the EU becomes increasingly unable to patrol its Mediterranean coastline, or its porous border with Turkey.

 

So the left have won. The country has been transformed. Those who loved it as it was have lost the country they loved. They must either live in a place which is no longer the country they grew up in, and adapt with varying degrees of willingness to a different world, or seek their fortunes elsewhere. Since the new multicultural Britain is also a low-wage nation, heavily crowded in its most prosperous area, plagued with poor schools, bad and expensive transport, failing medical services, rising living costs, rising levels of casual violence and disorder (masked by fiddled government figures which fool only the rich and insulated)   and increasing government incompetence, any young person must , it seems to me,  at least consider the possibility of moving elsewhere.

 

Why should this be contradictory? Nothing in the above passage involved any condemnation of *migrants* as such. Who blames them for seeking to better themselves by coming here (even though many of them are bound to be disappointed)?  Certainly not I. I have never written a word of criticism of them, and hope I never shall.  Having lived abroad, in rather comfortable circumstances, and uprooted my life to do so (with far more help and ease than most of them could dream of) I have at least some inkling of the courage and determination they must have needed.  It is the people who have encouraged them to come, without having any idea how to handle the changes they bring, who draw my wrath.

 

Were I to migrate to any other country, I would adapt myself to its laws and customs, learn its language as well as I could, and ensure that my children did so too.  I hope I would continue to remember my old home, and see to it that my children knew of their heritage, but I would recognise that, by accepting the protection of a differnet state and its laws, I owed that state my undivided loyalty, and a duty to become as fully integrated as possible, as soon as possible. I  would see it as my duty to do so, and would be amazed and disappointed if my new host country did not insist on this. 

 

I would expect them to apply serious immigration laws and checks, and would abide patiently by them. I would expect to start at the bottom of whatever trade or profession I followed (this is why I say that only the young are really free to do this).  I would be amazed if (for instance) Canada suddenly announced that any British person could immediately go to live and work in Canada, provided he or she could get there.

 

Now, can anyone – having read the above -  tell me what is the contradiction between opposing mass immigration into this country, and advocating emigration to other countries?  It’s only there if you don’t think, Michael.