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At this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, Birmingham City Council had an exuberantly floriferous display celebrating the Windrush generation. It is a reminder (to non-gardeners at least) that many of the plants we think of as essential to the British garden come from the farthest reaches of the world. A gentle – and quintessentially British – pastime (often unkindly seen as an activity best suited for the limbo between retirement and death) owes its beauty and variety to imports from China, South Africa, Turkey and South America.
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And while you're all here, can I recommend my latest video: What Causes Trade Deficits?
My wife says it's my best video yet. Please watch, subscribe, and share
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pKS2TCd_3c
Also, I did manage to get some heroin/smack references in there.
On topic, it's an interesting thread header Cyclefree but the odds of Sajid Javid succeeding where every Home Secretary since Asquith in 1895 has failed seem to me to be - shall we say - long.
Bit sleepy/mildly pestilent but seems a good article.
Speaking of articles (although the 'good' bit is open to dispute) my post-race ramble about the Monaco Grand Procession is up here:
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/monaco-post-race-analysis-2018.html
Edited extra bit: my F1 bet for the race has been resettled. I'll check a bit later, see if it's a winner or voided. I'm going to guess voided. Quick response from Ladbrokes, though, regardless of the action taken.
FPT - while Brits share the concerns of their fellow Europeans about control of Immigration, they are much more positive about its impact than any of our European peers:
https://twitter.com/azeem/status/1000735631843131393
Whether this survives any 'open and generous' EU immigration offer from the government (in return for nothing as the EU will promptly bank it and move on to its next demand) remains to be seen...
https://twitter.com/leonardocarella/status/1000972171693514752
What has Mr Meeks been saying to them?
Very much the position adopted in the case of the Windrush generation, now the enormity of the official position is becoming clear.
Then the last two paragraphs compress a huge amount of tendentious argument into a few sentences. What, in a world that is becoming steadily more mobile, is the national interest? Why do people who are otherwise very laissez-faire feel that they should micromanage supply of people? Call me a cynic but I question whether a Home Office that thought it a good idea on any level to destroy landing cards is going to be particularly astute at judging exactly what types of IT professionals are needed by Old Street start-ups. Yet that is what points systems and like rubbish will require of it.
Britain is already unilaterally getting out of one major international obligation. Unilaterally withdrawing from the Refugee Convention would confirm Britain's status as a problem child state (and for what? Britain takes in trivial numbers of asylum seekers compared with many states around the world).
The single most important thing to realise about immigration control is that it is very difficult, even for an island. Working out the level of control that is desirable is never going to be easy and it's improbable that a consensus will be forged between underskilled workers who see an attack on their earnings power and employers eager to improve the quantity and quality of potential workers. Britain has till recently benefited from immigrants who are on average considerably better educated than the domestic workforce and who by and large have integrated reasonably enough. It is not obvious that the overall balance currently being struck is a bad one. The new tone, however, is awful.
As Britain pulls up the drawbridge (at a time of a buoyant labour market), we can expect labour shortages in the short term and the offshoring of sectors in the medium term. That sounds most unlikely to be in the national interest. But the hard-headed decisions that are actually required are ones which no one is trying to explain to the public.
Far easier to scare the public with untrue claims of hordes of Turks being poised to descend on Britain.
The result is that even if we improve our productivity and skills it becomes increasingly difficult to have a positive trade balance because so much of our success is exported in rent/profits. In that scenario, very familiar in Latin America for example, improving the standard of living of the locals becomes very difficult resulting, ironically, in yet more pressure to increase consumption.
In short I think it is wrong to state that trade balances are merely cyclical and are not something for governments to worry about. We lived on our foreign investments, many from the previous century, for a very long time. But if the UK is to offer its citizens a higher standard of living in this century trade is important, not just as a measure of our competitiveness (the Trump idea) but because we are impoverishing our future selves.
"However, despite these overall trends just one in five say they have become more positive about immigration since the Brexit vote and one in four say they have become more negative."
https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/attitudes-towards-immigration-after-windrush
In accordance with scientific principles, I tried posting my own comment and it seemed to go through fine. The problem could be at your end. Perhaps worth giving it another crack [the problem may have been from my end but temporary].
You missed the nuance - "In a normal, cyclical, economy" I said - one of my next videos (after I handle oil) is going to be about why we no longer see natural cycles in the way we used to.
Basically, I think I'm going to argue for Bretton Woods II (which, btw, might be a wonderful way for Eurozone countries to escape their trap in a controlled manner).
(One symptom is the increasing foreign ownership of our our utilities.)
Similarly if we don’t have some sort of points system for other sorts of migrants what should we have? A free for all? And if not that, what?
Frightening people about Turks is wrong. But people do have justifiable concerns about large scale immigration of Muslims - see, for instance, concerns expressed in Germany and France and in Eastern Europe - and it is not enough of an answer to those concerns to say “racist” or to point out that some posters were wrong and alarmist.
I agree that the tone is wrong and that what we are currently doing is likely to be the wrong way around, putting people we want off and doing nothing to address the concerns of those worried about societal change.
I wish I knew what the answers were. But those who deplore the current mess need to be wary, IMO, of giving the impression that nothing should be done at all to control immigration. That is not a tenable position.
Anyway thanks for the comments.
One owns something income producing, and one benefits from the dividend, rent or interest stream.
There is nothing unique or special about utilities, except to remember that the reason why foreigners own these assets is because governments since the Major administration of 1992-95 have prioritized consumption over saving.
We also seem to want poor people to do jobs we would rather not such as picking vegetables or wiping our pensioner's arses for them in care homes.
This is a difficult balance. What the last 20 years or so have taught us is that importing labour or skills depresses the price that the indigenous labour can charge thus further reducing future supply of those skills. There are times when it is better to accept the inconvenience of short term shortages to improve longer term skill bases. Many of our trades are an example of this.
Finally, a key aspect that led to the B vote is that we need to look at immigration holistically. That is, we don't want to simply look at whether there is a high demand for labour but whether we have the housing, schools, doctors, infrastructure etc to cope with large increases in population without materially and adversely affecting our social environment. It is an unfortunate fact that the more rapidly growing areas of our country where the demand for additional labour is strongest are very full already and attempts to redistribute that growth have almost completely failed.
FOM, combined with open access by a significant number of much poorer countries really was a catastrophic approach which resulted in none of our interests being met. We imported far too many people, we suppressed demand for local skills, we degraded the quality of our environment by overcrowding and we reduced the incentive to train locals. The fact that that imported labour was employed for the most part really isn't the point. The consequences were and are adverse for the majority of our population. Almost any domestically focussed policy will be better than that.
Do you think something like Bretton Woods would be negotiable today, given the power dynamics in the West (with rising populism and Trump) and the growing power of China and India? It could be argued that the ERM which led to the Euro was an attempt at Bretton Woods II, and we are seeing in Italy now how that’s working out.
Because this one of these areas where it's very easy to *assume* facts, and then fit the narrative around them.
The Refugee Convention was drawn up in the wake of the Second World War. The signatories will have been keenly aware of the potential number of asylum seekers. Britain doesn’t take many. I agree that some other countries have more ground for complaint. This is not a priority for Britain though.
Britain’s current system works tolerably well in the round, attracting high quality immigrants on average. It is much the weakest where the state gets involved in judging the quality. Expanding that role for the state looks daft. Part of the problem is the implied suggestion accepted by many unquestioningly that Britain doesn’t currently control immigration. It does.
Detention: but then there is wailing about the awful conditions. Or should rejected asylum seekers be allowed to stay in the expectation that they will turn up at the airport when it is their turn to be deported? (Abbott’s ludicrously naive recent suggestion?)
I think that's a little harsh. I think 1997 marks the turning point for the world: before then, most (albeit not all) countries ran close to zero on a ten year moving average current account basis.
They all had their ups, and they all had their downs.
But after 1997, that began to break down.
The wider points are that the ideological basis for privatisation was nonsense, it was just a magic money tree, and it worsens our balance of payments as dividends flow abroad.
A logical analysis, but politicians are not logical. Often they will support policies they want to be correct despite the lack of evidence, or often when all the evidence is to the contrary. They will then deny any error.
"Not many Poles will come. not many Rumanians will come," despite wafting honey in front of faces. Jezza will always believe that only Trotsky-style socialism can work. Venezuela failed? Therefore it can't be true socialism.
And it's not restricted to the left, the right are just as bad.
So politics in institutionally wrong-ist. A well-meaning idiot, a real activist working for what they believe in are not saints, they are usually part of the problem. A separation into extremes may be good politics (we're always good and right, the others are always bad and wrong) verges on infantile, but it's what we get. On this, the Guardian is on a par with the Daily Mail.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could say "We tried communism but it fell foul of human nature" or "Capitalism brought us out a feudal system but it might be unsuited to modern and a fairer life without more checks and balances."
No chance.
It's the wisest move for any husband to officially subscribe to the fact that you should "agree with your wife."
Unofficially is another matter ....
I find it hard to believe there are that many of either group who exist.
Certainly none in govt.
The first step should be to define what the problem is, if there is one.
The govt has defined the problem as: net migration is over 100k.
That's a dumb definition and has led to a number of related messes like Windrush, ridiculous home office fees, the lunacy of trying to actively harm one of our largest export industries etc.
Repealing the 1967 protocol wouldcertainly reduce the figures now.
Credit agencies and financial institutions effectively blocked the appointment of a hard Eurosceptic finance minister, so the populists have declined to form a government. President will probably appoint a technocrat, further boosting the populists.
"An unemployed and unemployable know-it-all, impervious to logic, who knows someone at the BBC who's easily impressed by rants rather than facts."
Why?
And why isn't the ideological basis for nationalisation equally nonsense, given its colourful history of failures?
an IMF technocrat leaves him very little room for argument
I suppose the question is: does Britain control immigration effectively? And does it talk about the issue in a way which is sensible? Even if you think the answer to the first is yes - and many may disagree - the answer to the second is no. And that, IMO, leads to political problems.
Perhaps naively I think that if you can talk about a subject calmly and sensibly it makes it easier to get broad agreement on a policy.
I doubt Italians give a toss for the health of the german and French banking sectors
It just requires an unpleasant Government willing to do nasty things .... err, like in Hungary.
The level of discomfort inflicted would have to be extreme to deter people who are willing to walk across the Sahara.
By the end of this Century, Africa will nearly catch up with Asia in terms of poppulation. As recently as 2000 it was the same population as Europe.
https://twitter.com/neurosocialself/status/995626906010583040?s=19
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44276216
Your Med-inspired conclusions on Brexit are hotly anticipated.
Mrs JackW and I are being feted for the day by the admiring masses of Auchentennach (a day out with relatives) so I wish PBers an enjoyable bank holiday.
And your argument is wrong: a utility or whatever owned by *the* state is subject to a heck of a lot of internal pressures, e.g. from unions, the treasury and headlines. A utility or whatever owned by *another* state has much less latitude for nonsense based on headlines and electoral cycles in the 'external' country.
You make it sound like a Young LibDems back-packing holiday to North Africa.
They don't walk -- they pay to use camels or trucks or LandRovers and they pay for protection.
Even if they had the physical stamina and the resources, walkers would be at the mercy of the many armed and dangerous militias and traffickers.
Thank you, as always, for the interesting and well-argued piece, Cyclefree. I actually had to out down my pearls (beloved of all liberals apparently) to read it.
There's not much with which I disagree. I see the full effects of the current policy up close and personal on a daily basis in East Ham. If the expectation is that all those who come here should share your values, there's some measure of success. Most migrants want the full fruits of capitalism as they see it - a nice phone, a nice car, plenty of gadgets for the flat or small room which is all they can afford. Indeed, they embrace capitalism in a way some British people do no longer.
Yes, there are those who seek to advance materially through means other than legitimate employment and the beggars and panhandlers are a nuisance but they know in Newham (the most God fearing part of the whole country based on the 2011 Census) they can rely on the Christian charity of others to keep the plastic cup nicely topped up with small change. As for the Albanian crime gangs and the drug dealers, that's a consequence the under-resourced and under-funded (thanks Boris) Met struggles to fight.
Even if all who came here were skilled workers with jobs the infrastructure has totally failed to keep pace with the numbers. The medical services are creaking - I found out via an FOI request the numbers registering at my local GP have risen 50% in three years. The tubes are impossibly crowded morning and evening and a frantic programme of school building has been needed to keep pace with the new waves of children coming through.
If immigration is seen purely in economic terms, it's a success, fairly modest I think but a success nonetheless. This is the argument put up by the Right - all that matters is economic growth so in the end we are simply economic units, drones if you like, who work and consume to keep the leviathan that is the British economy crawling forward. Economic growth justifies anything and everything including an open door immigration policy to provide cheap labour and a Single Market to "help" business.
Perhaps considering immigration and its impacts from other angles might be a start. Is the only measure that matters economic growth ? Do the less easily quantifiable measures have any relevance ? Has the creation of a new generation of slum in terms of overcrowded dwellings, been a good thing ?
REMAIN lost because they presented the arguments purely in economic terms and assumed that if people believed economic growth and prosperity was all that mattered, they would vote accordingly. Yet for many the "price" of that growth, anaemic as it was and is, in terms of the changes in their communities and their daily experience of life in "their" country, was no longer worth paying. "It's the economy, stupid" no longer worked.
The economy is meant to represent the financial well-being of us all, but one problem is that the media and politicians tend to focus on numbers like GDP rather than what is meant to underline those numbers.
If GDP is growing then we are getting financially better off right? Well no. Not if GDP per capita is stagnating but immigration is growing GDP just because there's more people even though individually we're not better off. Or not if the growth is concentrated in a few locations/groups.
If you are in the latter camp, the blandishments of Team Corbyn may be attractive but that's another debate for another time. The argument that the Single Market and free movement within the EU has contributed to economic prosperity won't resonate if you aren't experiencing that prosperity and if the economic argument fails, other arguments will take their place.
Partly, that's down to lots of people being sufficiently well -off to have non-economic concerns; but also, the opposite, lots of people feeling they have no stake in the system.
Rants and facts and all that.
Imagine Jezza getting a majority cobbled together with the SNP and Lib Dem’s etc after weeks of haggling, and then HMQ saying “sorry you can’t have that McDonnell as Chancellor because he’s said some really negative things about capitalism. I’m going to appoint Patrick Minford instead”. There would be uproar, and rightly so.
What a grade A example of “you can vote any way you like as long as it’s in favour of the EU”. The President may well be technically in his rights but we can all see this stinks. It will surely also be counterproductive big time. If there are new elections 5 Star et al can surely just scream from the roff tops “see, were were right all along, in fact they’re even worse than we said”.
So let’s assume we are back in the same place post elections and the President still says no. Pitchfork time?
It isn't true to say we haven't had a problem with excessive migration of marginal economic benefit in the past; bogus universities, sham marriages, family "reunions", speculative free movement of those without any job offer ending up in UK streets and parks, and attempts to storm the gates at Calais all fell into that category, and were backdoors into the system.
Personally, a well-thought through system of work permits by economic sector ought to do the trick, together with temporary professional visiting visas, and better monitoring/ enforcement. The key thing here is people feeling they have control, where they can pull the levers and tweak the dials if they have to. Therefore, just saying "free movement works" really doesn't cut it at all.
Personally, my view is the greater the level of control they have, the more relaxed about immigration they will be, but it's hard to disagree there isn't a competence question within the Home Office that runs against that, however.
Looks a little long. On the other hand, means tying up money for a while at odds that aren't enormous.
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1000974309983211521
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1000977826051514368
This is what stokes voter anger against the EU and euro, and makes it all far more likely it will actually happen.
When I read things like that it makes me cross on their behalf, and I start crowing for a tungsten-tipped Brexit.