More On Universal Credit - Stable Door Edition

When I wrote about the Universal Credit rules for the self-employed, which will do such damage to the self-employed handyman or the single mum selling her crafts at local fairs, I forgot about another target - the Big Issue Benefits Loophole :

"A Big Issue seller is claiming victory in a landmark case to have her work classed as a proper job and thus be eligible for extra benefits.

Romanian Firuta Vasile was refused housing benefit because a local authority judged that her job selling the magazine "didn't count".

But she has successfully argued that because she bought the Big Issues and sold them at her own profit or loss she was self-employed.

Speaking through an interpreter, Vasile, 27, said she came to the UK in 2007 to look for a job, but could only find work selling the Big Issue."

Romanians and Bulgarians aren't allowed to work here unless they're self-employed. And you'll have noticed the terrible shortage of Big Issue sellers which is crippling British industry. But it sounds as if the Big Issue is their flexible friend :

"The Big Issue exists to offer homeless people and those at risk of homelessness the opportunity to work and earn an income. This is offered irrespective of a person’s background or origin. Earning their own money reduces dependency on hand-outs from the state, charities and the public.. "

Even when the entire raison-d'etre of "earning their own money" is to get "hand-outs from the state" ? It's not surprising that Roma Big Issue sellers are an increasingly common sight.

The good news is that, come October, all this will stop and our self-employed sellers will be assumed to have an income of around £250 pw - whether they have or not.

The bad news is that, come December, the entire populations of Romania and Bulgaria will be free to move to the UK, self-employed or not.  

I do wonder if the aim of our rulers is actually to push immigration to the levels where the Brits will, of their own volition, call for the end of the Welfare State. Maybe that Grant Shapps isn't as stupid as he sounds, only as unpleasant as he sounds.

"I do think that it’s right for the taxpayer at large, who after going out, working hard, paying their taxes, should feel that they’re not having to pay for people who are in receipt of benefits to get a higher effective pay rise than the people actually working. So I think this is an argument about fairness."

As I've said before, benefits are meant to afford a minimum standard of living. Raising them by 1% a year for three years, when inflation on necessities is probably over 5%, will drop them a long way below that standard. Now maybe that standard was set too high. But that's not what he's arguing. He's arguing that it's "fair" that a minimum standard set by Parliament should be reduced because other, better-off people are tightening their belts.

I said he's not stupid. People working and still struggling to pay the electric bill aren't going to be overly sympathetic, to put it mildly. Good politics if lousy humanity.     
 

"What's Wrong With The Left?" Part 296

Andy Newman at Socialist Unity is worried :

"I think there is another underlying problem, in writing about what the left is doing,  because the left really isn’t doing much at the moment which engages with the political mainstream. I will write a longer and more considered article on this, but I am interested in what our readers think. Has the left lost its way?"

Well there's a surprise. What could the matter be, I wonder ? In a week when the statutory consultation period for large-scale redundancy has been reduced from 90 days to 45, and the Agricultural Wages Board ('which permits the fixing of minimum wage rates and terms and conditions for agricultural workers') has been abolished, all with hardly a ripple of opposition, what could a left-winger in the UK possibly find to worry about except US gun control and gay marriage ?

But if Andy doesn't understand what's going on, his commenters can fill him in :

Alan Gibbons : 

"The Tories have been relatively successful at slicing away at public services. There has been no ‘big bang’ provoking a generalised fightback... anti-welfare rhetoric has struck a nerve with some sections of the population. The second national anti-cuts march, while substantial, was smaller than the first...what worries me more, from the perspective of somebody involved as an independent activist in the fight against the cuts and particularly the campaign to save the public library service, is that the Left looks much older, greyer, divided and less confident ..."

You're telling me ... I think this post needs a link.

"The time of salami-slicing in public services seems to be coming to a close and whole areas of public spending may be axed, as shown by Newcastle’s withdrawal from the Arts. The assault on redundancy, the privatisation of the NHS, the proposed onslaught on the teaching unions and accelerating attacks on benefits show a weak government with a fragile mandate going ahead regardless with an offensive strategy."

A slight diversion here - I think some areas of public spending OUGHT to be axed. The dynamic of the last sixty years in local government is

a) central government puts statutory obligation on local government
b) gives them some money to fund it.

Until a local authority gets far more of its money from central government than from local taxation, and this is cancerous to local democracy, because you don't really get what you vote for. As a school governor, for example, I saw our Conservative local authority zealously implementing Labour's hideous "Every Child Matters" agenda, and wondered what the point of a Tory vote was. If central government want something done, they should do it themselves.

So anyway, I wouldn't mind if some of the legislative nagombi (how many diversity consultants) was dropped. Alas, this isn't going to happen any time soon. What's more likely is that the local authority (LA) staff will end up being outsourced to whichever company promises the LA that they can do the same stuff as the council did, with the staff having the same terms and conditions (except pensions - a not inconsiderable point, as LA pensions are index-linked final salary i.e. what you don't see in the private sector any more) - and all at 10-15% less cost ! I invite the reader to imagine at whose expense these savings will come.

I digress.

Nadia Chem - fine old English name, but she talks sense (though should that be "overestimated"?) :

"What has been missed is the reality that the working class might not have the confidence to resist such an offensive. The atrophy of working class organization at workplace and community level cannot be underestimated... the locus of the offensive has been as much in a general attack on living standards as in cuts. This has generated an enormous well of bitterness but little active resistance... the fact that this attack on living standards started under the Labour government from 2006 weakens Labour’s ability to grasp the bitterness."

Mr Newman himself :

"My experience of knocking doors for Labour, is that people are open to a traditional Labour message, but not with any real conviction that labour would be even different, let alone better."       

Trust the people, Andy.

"I fear that much of the left – including the so-called revolutionaries – have actually given up on social change"

I wouldn't say that. We've seen unprecedented social change, and will see more.

BrokenWindow :

"the Left is as atomised as the workers collectively are atrophied. Underpinning this is an absence or failure to theoretically engage in wider debates about globalisation and nation states... most of all it must re-engage with the people it hates the most,the young working class white men and women who have gone to the right."

So there are plenty of people who can see that there's a problem. But in 175-odd comments, no one seems to really know why they're up the Swanee.

"the best thing we could do for the cause is to recruit more people to unions/help install a sense of discipline/participate in community campaigns and start working where people are rather than where we want them to be." 

Of course ! Like good old  Boxer in Animal Farm, "I must work harder" ! If only we were better socialists...

Laban dropped into the comments a quote from the anthropologist Peter Frost (of 'Fair Women, Dark Men') :

"In late capitalism, the elites are no longer restrained by ties of national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves at the expense of their host society. This clash of interests lies at the heart of the globalist project: on the one hand, jobs are outsourced to low-wage countries; on the other, low-wage labor is insourced for jobs that cannot be relocated, such as in the construction and service industries.

This two-way movement redistributes wealth from owners of labor to owners of capital. Business people benefit from access to lower-paid workers and weaker labor and environmental standards. Working people are meanwhile thrown into competition with these other workers. As a result, the top 10% of society is pulling farther and farther ahead of everyone else, and this trend is taking place throughout the developed world. The rich are getting richer … not by making a better product but by making the same product with cheaper and less troublesome inputs of labor."  

I think Mr Frost describes it pretty well. The UK business elite in 1940, as noted in Harold Nicolson's diaries, were prepared to go down in flames rather than see Hitler triumph. But now ... even "conservatives" like Boris Johnson and Michael Heseltine* "are no longer restrained by ties of national identity", let alone businessmen who've seen their incomes soar, both absolutely and relatively. This is why the end of the journey will soon be in sight.
    
Anyway, Andy (or his gofer, I know not) deleted the post in about minutes one. They don't want to know, and that's why they'll continue to get shafted - along with the rest of us.

Andy is at this moment involved in  an industrial dispute between Carillion, an outsourcer, and their many Asian employees - mostly Goan Catholics and I'm sure good people (the details of the dispute make depressing reading - looks like third-world petty corruption is already here).

But you do have to wonder why people from half way round the world are needed to clean Swindon's hospital - especially as Swindon is a place where there are 30 applications for every vacancy in Next.

The answer to Andy's questions are literally staring him in the face - but there's none so blind as those who will not see.

    


* Heseltine gave a famous Spectator interview where, asked if he was worried about Britain being merged into a Greater Europe, replied "who now remembers the Heptarchy (the seven kingdoms of Saxon England)?" 

Told You So

This blog, two years ago :

"... the Gove option will mean that a lot of bright working or lower-middle class kids will look at a potential £60,000 debt and they won't bother - unless they're at Oxbridge or doing a course with a pretty much guaranteed career at the end of it. Outside this small subset of courses, university will be restricted to those whose parents can subsidise them - i.e. the very rich.

That's not all bad - I can see cultural studies departments being disbanded across England and Wales. Economic forces will cut away swathes of courses and institutions, correcting the insane growth of the last 25 years.

But at that kind of cost the idea of education as a good in itself will wither away. Who's going to do archaeology without a private income ?"

And lo, it comes to pass (pay link):

"Nearly one in five degree courses has been scrapped since the trebling of maximum tuition fees to £9,000 as universities concentrate on popular subjects and drop courses that have too few applicants or cost too much to run. Officials figures show a cull of more than 2,600 in the number of courses available to applicants planning to start their degrees in 2013. More than 5,200 courses had already been removed for students beginning this year, the first to face the higher fees.

Some of the courses have been dumped by universities even after prospectuses went online earlier this year, and in some cases after applications had begun. The scrapped courses range from archeology at Birmingham to languages at Salford and London Metropolitan. The number of courses listed by UCAS has fallen from 43,360 to 35,501 in two years"

In all respects (you can read this one) ...

"Students beginning university next year will be only the second cohort to pay at the higher rate of tuition fees, which were increased to a maximum of £9,000 per annum last year – almost treble the previous limit. The fees increase led to a sharp drop in applications last year, but hopes that this was a temporary dip will have been hit by today's figures, which show an even greater proportional fall at this stage compared with last year among British school leavers.

In total 145,000 applications were received for all courses at UK universities by November 19 this year. This compares with more than 180,000 at the same stage in 2010, the year before the introduction of the new fees regime."

I think the new fees have also concentrated some people's minds when it comes to the value of a degree, which was sold to prospective students as "Graduates earn £15K more then non-grads ! You know it makes sense !". Alas, those figures, while true, failed to point out that those figures were based on the relative scarcity back of graduates back in the day, compared to a world where maybe 40% of their age cohort would be grads. It also failed to point out that in a few-graduates world, those grads were likely to be at the top of the intelligence range - and maybe that's why they were high earners. In a many-grads world, average grad intelligence will be lower.

But even for bright people the jobs market is tough. I know people with 2-1s from Russell Group uni's who are working in call centres at £6 an hour.


UPDATE - obviously, the solution to all these woes is to bring in more graduates from overseas. 

Vote Conservative !

For more expensive wine !

"The ban on cheap multi-buy deals will not apply to pubs, clubs and restaurants and is aimed at curbing binge drinking, especially by teenagers "pre-loading" on very cheap alcohol before they go for an evening out."

 I suppose enforcing existing laws on public drunkenness is a ridiculous idea. Far easier to penalise everyone. It's all about rewarding personal responsibility, you know.

I am going to take a weekend off, spend a night or two in France and fill the people-carrier to the gunwales with the more bearable products of Carrefour and Leclerc. About 300 bottles should suffice, and that nice M. Hollande needs the taxes.

(see also "a substance abuse counsellor has been charged with murder and drink-driving after she allegedly stuck a pedestrian and drove for more than two miles with the dying man embedded in the windscreen.")



For concreting over England !

More than 1,500 square miles of open countryside - over twice the area covered by greater London - needs to be built on to meet housing demand, the Government’s planning minister Nick Boles has said.

I suppose stopping letting half a million people a year into the UK is a ridiculous idea. Far easier to ruin the countryside and build on some of the best agricultural land in the world. Who needs food ?




For electricity bills, utility bills and train fares all increasing faster than inflation.

Who needs to keep warm in the winter ? Us Brits can take it ! 





For an India - EU trade deal which would allow 30,000 (above existing numbers) Indian IT staff into the EU  - because there are still one or two UK IT people earning over £30,000! The BBC were plugging it this morning on Radio Four. The Institute of Directors are very keen.

 "CEDEFOP (2010) estimates show a labour shortage of 12 million in the EU in 2020 cutting across all levels of workers."

You may have noticed how few unemployed there are in the EU.

"In 2007, about three million jobs were unfilled in sectors such as information technology (IT) and engineering (EurActive, 2007)."

Must be why IT salaries have gone up so much in the last six years.

(In India for IT staff it's like the 80s in the UK - wage rises three times a year, go to a jobs fair and pick a job from half a dozen offers. A former colleague told me that two years back he'd trained up three or four people so that they could move his job offshore. He trained them in .NET technologies, they went back to India to start supporting "his" applications - and immediately left, armed with their new skills, to work for a competitor! He's still supporting the apps - the company he works for seem a tad 'burned' by the experience.)

Universal Tribulation

One of my hobby-horses (see here, here, here, and here) is the apparent belief among our rulers that allowing mass immigration, from countries where corruption is endemic and a State job is an opportunity for self-enrichment, will have no effect on the culture of the UK.

That was always unlikely - and even more unlikely with a relatively generous welfare state and a default assumption of honesty in claimants. True in 1948 but not true now. The benefits system is open to looting on a grand scale, especially by those with access to forged ID - which means not many Brits but an awful lot of Londoners.

Another hobby-horse is that the law-abiding are penalised for the sins of the lawless. Some hapless electrician with a Stanley knife in his pocket is pulled in because of youths being stabbed on London streets, children can no longer (as I did in youth on a classmate's farm) use an air-rifle unsupervised, I can't buy sodium chlorate weedkiller any more because someone might use it to blow things up.

Which brings me, by a roundabout route, to Ian Duncan Smith's Universal Credit, slated for implementation next year, and replacing Child Tax Credit, Working Families Tax Credit (which people with an income of over 50K could get - thank you Gordon Brown for this last-ditch attempt to encourage welfare dependency) and a number of other benefits.

"When implemented, Universal Credit will drastically affect the low-paid self-employed as well as anyone who makes a tax loss. It is proposed that Universal Credits, like the current Working Tax Credits, will be "limited to those who exceed the 'floor of assumed income'" based on the National Minimum Wage."

What this means is that a host of small businesses - often the "single mum selling her handmade stationery" type, which might make no profit or small profits, will be assumed for benefit purposes to be doing a 40 hour week for £6 an hour - whether they are or not. If you recall, the number of self-employed has mushroomed during this recession .

“A rise in self-employment may, in itself, be a good thing, however previous analysis from the CIPD found that the recent rise was less a sign of a resurgent enterprise culture, and more evidence of a growing army of part-time ‘odd jobbers’ desperate to avoid unemployment.”

Alas, come next summer this is going to go into reverse as large numbers of self-employed close their business down and sign on again. So why is this entrepreneur-friendly (well, wealthy entrepreneurs, anyway) administration stamping on what could be the next Laura Ashley or Party Planners ?

"I think it will cut out a lot of fraud, i am a housing benefit processor and the amount of self employed taxi drivers working 40 hours a week and declare £50 a week earnings is beyond a joke, however i do feel for the genuine people who are struggling, who will be hit by this i think it is unfair. if your not earning this money then your claim should not be based on this amount."

My HMRC spies (aka the DWP website) are quite open about it. Reducing fraud, along with "making work pay" (but not low paid self employed work) is what it's all about. The good guys (and gals) are suffering for the sins of the bad guys.

"Universal Credit will make it much easier to catch fraudsters as it will calculate benefit levels using real-time information linked to the PAYE system. By picking up financial irregularities, such as earnings whilst claiming unemployment benefits, it will remove the main opportunities for fraud and error in the system."

Well, it might, if there weren't 83 million National Insurance numbers in the UK for a working population of 30-million odd. Fraudsters are very resourceful people.

So while I have small sympathy for this self-employed, low income person :

"I am a seriously talented artist but no-one wants to buy art at the moment"

You can't but feel for this couple :

"I am employed 25 hours i have asked my boss to increase my hours but there are no available hours?? we have 2 children under 16,
when my husband lost his job 4yrs ago down to the company going into liquidation etc,etc, he was forced into claiming benefits because after months of looking for work nothing was available, he signed on for jsa but didnt receive any money because of what i earn…. a job was going at a local bus firm term time only, which he applied and got and is still currently there… NOW this is the confusing bit…….. my husband is classed as Self-employed ?? He works for the local company and gets a weekly wage… BUT because the company dont deduct tax and insurance from this wage he is classed as Sub-Contracred-Self employed ... because his work is Term-time this means he only works for approximatly 38 weeks of the year, thus leaving our household with only my income for the other 14 weeks, we do rely on tax credit as a safety net during these 14 weeks, we have both and still are looking for more full-time work but its easier said than done and with 2 small dependant it is difficult….. so how is universal credits going to help my situation if we dont meet there criteria???"

I think the answer is - "it isn't going to help" - and that's a great pity.

Carina Saunders

Here.

She was murdered in the States, but it's another Mary-Anne Leneghan-style killing - they killed her in front of another girl as a demonstration of the penalties for disobedience.

HMRC's Most Wanted

I posted a few years ago (and more on the same theme here) :

We're importing people from a fair few countries where corruption is endemic without any attempt at integration. We're simultaneously beating ourselves up that, say, 39% of the population of Trumpton are from minority x, yet only 2% of the local magistrates are. I don't know what magic the soil of the UK possesses, but our rulers are apparently convinced that the moment you set foot on it all the 'bad' practices of the old country fall off you, leaving only the good bits - you know, the ones that enrich us.

Absent such magical soil, I'd expect that as more magistrates/tax officials/police whatever are appointed from (unintegrated) minority x, so levels of corruption/violence/whatever will depart from those we've experienced in the last 150 years, and move closer to those in country x.

The Telegraph have published HMRC's Most Wanted - the chaps - and they are nearly all chaps - with the biggest unpaid tax bills who've not gone to jail (though note the absence of Vodafone, Google etc) :

Hussain Asad Chohan, 44, believed to be in Dubai. He was convicted at Birmingham Crown Court in his absence and sentenced to 11 years for his part in fraud worth around £200 million, which included importing 2.25 tonnes of tobacco worth £750,000 in duty. Chohan has also been served with a £33 million confiscation order.

Nasser Ahmed, 40, believed to be in Pakistan or Dubai, was convicted at Bristol Crown Court in 2005 for his role in VAT fraud worth around £156 million. He fled before verdicts were given, and was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison in his absence.

Zafar Baidar Chisthi, 33, thought to be in Pakistan, was found guilty at Kingston Crown Court for his part in VAT fraud worth around £150 million. He was sentenced to 11 years for conspiracy to defraud the public purse and one year for perverting the course of justice.

Darsim Abdullah, 42, believed to be in Iraq, was convicted at Guildford Crown Court for being part of a money laundering gang that processed £1 million to £4 million per month. Eleven other members of the gang were convicted or pleaded guilty, but he ran away before sentencing.

Leigang Liang, 38, believed to be in the UK, was convicted at Lewes Crown Court for illegally importing tobacco from China. He was sentenced in his absence to seven years. The estimated cost to the taxpayer of the scam was £2.6 million.

Olutayo Owolabi, 40, believed to be in the UK, was convicted in January 2010 for 27 charges linked to tax credits and money laundering, and sentenced in his absence to nine months in jail. The estimated cost to the taxpayer was £1 million.

Wayne Joseph Hardy, 49, now believed to be in South Africa, was convicted at Ipswich Crown Court for manufacturing tobacco products and not paying duty. He was given three-year sentence in October 2011. The estimated cost to the taxpayer was £1.9 million.

Adam Umerji - aka Shafiq Patel, 34, thought to be in Dubai, was jailed at Liverpool Crown Court for 12 years for VAT fraud and money laundering. The cost to the taxpayer was around £64 million.

Gordon Arthur, 60, believed to be in the United States, suspected of illegally importing cigarettes and alcohol and failing to pay around £15 million in duty. He fled in 2000 and a warrant was issued for his arrest at Maidstone Crown Court in 2002.

Emma Elizabeth Tazey, 38, also believed to be in the United States, is wanted in connection with the same allegations.

John Nugent, 53, thought to be in the United States, was accused of putting in fraudulent claims for duty and VAT worth more than £22 million. A warrant for his arrest was issued at Manchester Crown Court.

Malcolm McGregor McGowan, 60, believed to be in Spain, was found guilty at Sheffield Crown Court in December 2011 of illegally importing cigarettes worth around £16 million into the UK, and was sentenced to four years.

Timur Mehmet, 39, believed to be in Cyprus, is wanted over a £25 million VAT fraud. He was found guilty in absence and sentenced to eight years at Northampton Crown Court.

Vladimir Jeriomin, 34, thought to be in Russia or Lithuania, was part of a gang that made false claims for tax repayments. The estimated cost to the taxpayer was £4.8 million. A warrant was issued for his arrest at Liverpool Crown Court.

Cesare Selvini, 52, thought to be in Switzerland, is wanted for smuggling platinum bars worth around £600,000. A warrant was issued for his arrest at Dover Magistrates' Court in 2005.

Dimitri Gaskov, 27, thought to be in Estonia, allegedly smuggled three million cigarettes into the UK using desktop computers. He fled before trial and an arrest warrant was issued at Ipswich Crown Court.

Mohamed Sami Kaak, 45, thought to be in Tunisia, is wanted for smuggling millions of cigarettes into the UK between March 2005 and September 2006 and evading around £822,000 in duty. He was convicted in his absence at Isleworth Crown Court and jailed for four years.

Rory Martin McGann, 43, believed to be in Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland, is wanted for alleged VAT fraud worth more than £902,000. He was arrested in November 2008 but later fled.

Yehuda Cohen, 35, thought to be in Israel, is wanted over VAT fraud worth around £800,000. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport in March 2011 but later fled while on bail.

Sahil Jain, 30, believed to be in the UK, was arrested over alleged VAT fraud worth around £328,000 but failed to appear at the Old Bailey and a warrant was issued for his arrest on June 8. 

It takes an awful lot of minimum-wage cleaners and retail staff to compensate for these guys - in fact, given that a minimum wage earner in London or with a family will be taking more in housing and other benefits than they're paying in tax, no number will compensate. It'll take an awful lot of deputy managers and management accountants, put it that way.

They've Come Over Here ...

To do the torturing of children to death that the natives just won't do !

(You try getting a local exorcist these days when witchcraft's a problem)

Pity The Poor Employer ...

The standard of school-leavers is so poor that one supermarket has sent back three-quarters of its recruits for "remedial pre-job training" before they start work. Morrisons, Britain's fourth-biggest supermarket with 135,000 employees, found that many of its applicants in Salford, Greater Manchester, lacked even the basic skills needed to stack shelves and serve customers. While some had a poor grasp of maths and English, others lacked simple skills such as turning up on time and making eye contact.

Well - it is Salford. But it was this gloss that struck me.

The warning will fuel concerns that schools are failing to teach the skills necessary for young Britons to find jobs, forcing firms to recruit migrant workers instead.

Now there's no doubt that our education system's been wrecked over the last 40 years, even as exam passes hit record levels. But I seem to recall that in the days before mass immigration, if you wanted to find a better candidate for a post you offered a higher wage - and that usually seemed to work.

My business contacts inform me that this business model is no longer in vogue for jobs at the lower end of the wage scale. Instead the "import someone better and cheaper" model reigns supreme.

But at the top end - say at board level - offering more money - lots and lots more money, the more the better - is still seen as the best way to attract a high-quality candidate. No UK or US bankers seem to think it's a good idea to get in, say, a Chinese CEO, despite the fact that they run the world's largest banks for salaries between 2% and 10% of US levels. Odd, that.






UPDATE - I disagree with young clever-clogs and Grabber look-alike Daniel Knowles when he says that "there are no jobs left for the dim" - there are plenty of them and they're all being done by immigrants. The thing is, no matter what the level of job - even shelf-stacker - the cleverer person's likely to do it better than the not so bright. Only in 'pure' manual jobs like fruit or vegetable picking does the intellectually-challenged employee get a level playing field - and that arduous work is done, if the fields around Bromsgrove and the gangmaster's white vans plying up and down the M5 from Brum are any guide, by an eclectic assortment of third-world chaps - beards and pugris at one end of the field, mustachios and bare heads at the other.

Of course, UK average intelligence would be higher if we hadn't been running a vast scheme, not of eugenics, but of dysgenics, for the last fifty years. Bright and conscientious women have been encouraged to go out and work, the not so bright and feckless have been encouraged with hard cash to stay at home and have lots of babies.

Numbers ...

Telegraph :

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that unemployment was 2.62 million in the three months to September.

The number of non-UK nationals in British employment was 2.56 million, up 147,000 from the same period year earlier.

(That's legal employment of foreign nationals. God knows what the illegal numbers are like ...)

Lazy B***ers

Indie :

Others arrived on foot and piled shopping trolleys high with looted televisions and other electronic goods, a woman who has lived locally for 10 years but did not want to be named said.

A member of staff at The Carphone Warehouse next door said every phone in the shop had been stolen.

The contents of the stock room were spilled across the pavement outside from the smashed in door.

Outside JD sport shop, broken mannequins lay on the ground, plastic legs and torsos scattered here and there.

The front window of Currys electrical store was smashed and smithereens of glass covered the ground outside.

Next door, Argos's door had been smashed in and broken glass covered the floor inside and out after looters apparently raided the stock room.

Discarded flat screen television boxes and other unwanted packaging covered paved areas outside the electronic goods stores.

The looters had evidently removed the products from their boxes to create more space in their shopping trolleys and cars, which were said to number up to 100.

Fragments of glass from the smashed in door of PC World littered the ground.

The scene outside Comet was similar and outside B&Q - one of the few stores that did not appear to have been looted - staff stood uncertainly, waiting to hear from head office whether they would be working today.

If employed white men had been rioting B&Q's power tool section would have been the first to go.

You Couldn't Make It Up ...

One of the results of mass low-skilled immigration into both the UK and US economies has been to depress wages, by the simple mechanism of supply and demand. As Marx put it :

“The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”

So far so bad for those at the sharp end, so far so good for the people who employ them.

But why stop there ? As long as your income's safe - and let's theorise that you're one of the elite - why not expose a few people higher up the economic food chain to the bracing discipline of "if you don't want to do it, there are plenty of other people ...". After all, you don't pay anywhere near as much for cleaners and clerks as you used to. Why can't you cut the cost of your accountants and engineers?

But how do you do lobby for this without saying why? In the case of the low-skilled imported worker, it was easy - they were "doing the jobs the natives just didn't want to do for £5 an hour", but you needn't mention that last bit. They were doing us a favour by coming here at all - we should be grateful - how would the NHS run or City offices get cleaned otherwise?

So what's the narrative to be?

"Tell you what - and this'll kill you - how about social justice?"

"What ?"

"Well, you know how the incomes of the wealthiest have spiralled away while incomes at the bottom stagnated or declined?"

"Do I ! Great, isn't it !"

"Well, lots of people think it's very bad that we're stonkingly rich while some chav serving in Maccies is a tad penurious. There's something called the Gini coefficient ... but I had this thought. All we have to do is deflect attention down a bit - let's say onto something called 'high-income people' - you know - accountants, engineers, IT, scientists, the analysts and bean-counters - we can define who qualifies - and we can argue that their wages - and hence inequality ratios - are kept artificially high by lack of global competition - no, they're "subsidised by their protection" - no one likes a subsidy - "

"I do - I love 'em. Where would we have been without the bailout? "

"Will you let me finish? - and so we should allow far more high-skilled immigration, because that means greater equality - and that means we can do to their terms and conditions what we've already done at the bottom!"

"You, my son, are a ******* genius"

"But it doesn't stop there. You know how mass immigration's depressed wages in lower-paid jobs - the sort young people often do"

"I might have heard something to that effect ... nonsense of course (cough)"

"Well, we can also argue that their lower incomes indicate lower productivity - and that therefore we really need more high-skill immigrants to provide the productivity the natives just don't want to provide"

"Brilliant"

"And there might even be some truth in the bit about productivity. Between ourselves, you know and I know that some of the people who've come over aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer (anyone who says that is a racist, of course, and we'll say it's down to bad teachers) - so it's possible that the 20-somethings really aren't as productive. Either way, it just means we need more high-skill immigrants."

"Awesome. All we have to do is get the ball rolling."

Obviously, the above is just complete fantasy.

At The Globalist, an interview with former Fed chief Alan Greenspan :

Q. How could immigration reform reduce income inequality?

A. “Most of the debate on income inequality correctly focuses on raising the level of low-income individuals. However, it also works by lowering top-level incomes via more competitive immigration. There is much academic research demonstrating that it is the relative position of people in society that fosters views of ‘fairness,’ not one’s absolute status.”

Q. Turning back to the United States, what demographic shift will have major economic implications?

A. “In the United States, we are in the process of seeing the baby boomers — the most productive, highly skilled, educated part of our labor force — retire. They are being replaced by groups of young workers who have regrettably scored rather poorly in international educational match-ups over the last two decades.”

Q. What else points to the inability of young workers to compete?

A. “Most disturbing is that the average income of U.S. households headed by 25-year-olds and younger has been declining relative to the average income of the baby boomer population. This is a reasonably good indication that the productivity of the younger part of our workforce is declining relative to the level of productivity achieved by the retiring baby boomers. This raises some major concerns about the productive skills of our future U.S. labor force.”

Q. Can the U.S. government counter this trend?

A.“Yes, there are options to combat that decline, but contrary to what many people believe, we do very poorly in opening up our borders to skilled immigrants. Our H1-B visa restrictions are a disgrace. Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States. But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow.”

Q. What needs to change with respect to U.S. immigration?

A. “My view is that we should give a green card to every immigrant who gets an advanced degree in the United States. The proportion of those people who will be terrorists is miniscule. That would have a major positive economic impact.”

Victims Of No Appearance - Perps Of No Motive

There’s a trial ongoing of one Delroy Grant, allegedly the ‘Night Stalker’, accused of 18 break-ins and assorted sexual and other assaults on elderly people in South London / Surrey between 1992 and 2009. Police have been looking for the attacker for years - as I recall they'd narrowed down suspects to one area of the Caribbean.

The prosecution admit to being completely puzzled about the attacker's motives - a puzzlement shared by the entire media.

Jonathan Laidlaw QC said the defendant attacked both men and women living across south London. All were vulnerable, single pensioners, mostly in their 80s and living on their own. “What it was that motivated him to carry out sexual offences on the very elderly and what sort of gratification he could possibly have achieved is obviously difficult, if not impossible, to understand”

Now I’m not asking anyone to comment on the actual case or break the sub judice rules, but I am interested in what’s recorded as having actually happened.

Apart from being “men and women living across south London, vulnerable, single pensioners, mostly in their 80s and living on their own”, does anyone know if the victims shared any other characteristics ?

I can’t help thinking that

a) if the victims had been of all races it would have been mentioned in the media coverage. The fact that it isn't may be significant - we may be seeing what Professor Sarah Annes Brown describes as "the initial urge to cover the story up in order to protect sensitivities".

b) that if they were all white it might provide part of the explanation as to motivation, gratification etc of the attacker – irrespective of the outcome of this particular trial.

Any info, anyone ? Were any of the victims non-white ? It may be I'm barking up the wrong tree here, and that Mr Night Stalker stalked and raped in a manner inclusive of all ethnicities, sexualities and degrees of disability. But I've just got a funny feeling we'd have been told, were that the case.





Another case with a Victim Of No (Relevant) Appearance and Perps Of No Motivation was reported in March 2009 - the stabbing of Oliver Hemsley in August 2008, which left the 20 year old permanently paralysed.

Mail - "A student tipped as a star fashion designer of the future has been left paralysed after being stabbed in a random street attack. Oliver Hemsley, then 20, was set upon by a gang of youths as he innocently walked with a flatmate on a summer evening last year. "

Mirror - "Budding fashion designer Oliver Hemsley, 21, was picked at random and stabbed repeatedly by a schoolboy thug as he walked with a girl pal."

Indie - "A brush with death: Why Britain's coolest art and fashion names have rallied around a victim of random knife crime"

There you go. Just one of those random, tragic things. Could have happened to anyone, anywhere.

Johann Hari - for it is he - tells it a bit differently :

"In September 2008, a young gay man called Oliver Hemsley, is walking home from the gay pub the George and Dragon when a gang of young Muslims stabs him eight times, in the back, in the lungs, and in his spinal column. In January 2010, when the thug who did it is convicted, a gang of thirty Muslims storms the George and Dragon in revenge and violently attacks everybody there. "

Well, there's no doubt that the G&D is 'gay-friendly' (this Pink Paper report on the stabbing seems to have been ignored by the MSM), or that one of his attackers was 15 year old Nazrul Islam. Apparently he got 10 years - I presume that means he'll be out in three (the judge called the attack 'motiveless' - and what of the other attackers ?). My only concerns with his tale are that Islam was sentenced in April 2009 and a/c/t Johann the attack on the pub was 9 months later - and even with our media, would an attack like that not be reported at all (can't find it on the Web)? I guess it's just possible, but only just. In the Bradford, Burnley and Oldham riots dozens of pubs were trashed or burned out (oh, my Upper Globe and my Bavaria long ago !) by Muslim youths, and it got zero press coverage - but they were only pubs for working class types, after all. A gay pub in London is quite a different thing. It may well be that Important People, or Friends of Important People, drink there.

I digress. The point, alas, is that for some crimes, either in some areas or by some people, the MSM reports seem to be as much about concealing as revealing what's going on. Were this limited to the local press, I'd suspect the hand of the local Community Cohesion Partnership - but what keeps the nationals - especially the Mail and Telegraph - in line ?

Grooming Goes Mainstream

There's a meme (hate that word) about ideas whose time has come - something like the five stages of grief but different - to the effect that first they ignore it, then deny it, then say it's wicked, and a stage or two more before it moves to general acceptance. Anybody know how it goes?

The issue of 'grooming' of under age girls by predominantly Asian gangs, covered on this blog here, here and here, seems to have gone mainstream, following the publication of a UCL report which, while widely publicised, seems impossible to actually find on the Web.

Now it's even the top story on Woman Sour. Far away are the days, seven years ago, when a Channel Four documentary on the subject was pulled, after pressure from West Yorkshire Police, because it might increase support for the BNP (aka 'increase community tensions'). What was once ignored by polite society, and only spoken of by racist knuckledraggers, is now almost prime-time, earnestly discussed by the great and the good. And now, when arrests are made, even the BBC no longer looks the other way.

But there was a price to pay for all those liberal blind eyes over so many years. It was paid by working-class Yorkshire and Lancashire girls like Emma, interviewed here. The Labour MP Ann Cryer, who's been a long-time campaigner on this issue, getting stick "from leading figures within her own party, not least from the former Labour leadership contender Diane Abbott", said 'Emma's description of her situation is pretty well identical to the situation of girls in Keighley whose mothers came to see me out of desperation, because they just couldn't get any action from West Yorkshire Police or Bradford Social Services'. The same West Yorkshire Police that was suppressing the evidence for political reasons, under its Chief Constable the late Colin Cramphorn, 'a man of liberal sympathies and a Guardian reader for many years'.

Just as 52 people had to die in London before the Labour Party started putting the lives of UK citizens ahead of not being like Norman Tebbit, girls have been raped and abused over a decade* while police, media and social services looked the other way.

On-street Grooming

Recent news reports have highlighted the prosecution of a gangs (sic) of predominantly Pakistani men for the grooming and sexual exploitation of young girls. What's the best way to tackle this appauling (sic) crime without stereotyping and dividing communitites (sic)? We hear again from a young woman groomed by Pakistani teenagers from the age of 12 and then repeatedly raped. Ann Cryer, the former MP for Keighley, who's been speaking out on this issue for many years, and Yusuf Tai from Forward Thinking a group working with varied Muslim communities discuss possible ways to prevent crimes like this happening again.

* maybe a lot longer, if former Detective Superintendent Mick Gradwell is right :

When I came to Blackburn in the 1970s, one of my main issues was the gangs of Asian men outside the old nightclub on top of the shopping centre who were picking up drunk white girls, specifically to abuse them. These were cars full of Asian lads in BMWs and Mercedes, offering lifts home to these young women, leading to incidents of rape and sexual assaults. From the first time I was posted to East Lancashire it has been a problem.

What Jack Straw has said so carefully is true: There is a problem with some members of the Pakistani community targeting young women in this way. In recent years we have seen it specifically with victims aged just 14, 15 or 16-years-old who are out on the streets at night and groomed by predatory gangs. For people to just come out and call Mr Straw racist is wrong.

During the past decade there has been Operation Engage in Blackburn and Operation Awaken in Blackpool as the police has been able to feel more open about the situation. In the past there have been major fears of being seen as racist, especially after the Stephen Lawrence inquiry at the Met police said the force was institutionally racist.

Strike One For The Revolutionary Communist Group

Once upon a time an asylum seeker arrived in the UK from Nigeria with her son, and had her application turned down. Her story was that her husband, chairman of 'a local youth organisation', and daughter had disappeared, and her house had been burned down twice, because of his political views. "The Home Office disbelieved them, advised them to try ‘other parts of Nigeria’ and locked them up at Oakington Detention Centre."

There must be a gap in the story - and she seems to have been a good networker, because she was soon making useful contacts with the asylum industry in Manchester. At a (tax-funded - by the AHRC) performance of a play about asylum (by members of the tax-funded University of Manchester department of Applied Theatre) she met a 25-year old American student :

"I sent a letter to the Home Office on her behalf, urging them to let her and her son stay in the UK in safety."

The main backers of her campaign, however, seem to have been a bunch calling themselves the Revolutionary Communist Group, a smallish spin-off from the old International Socialists most noted for their picketing of Jewish-owned shops.

Now the Revolutionary Communist Group are perfectly entitled to call for the abolition of all immigration controls, and to that end support any and every asylum seeker. After all, their political forebears, Revolutionary Communists of various stripes, slaughtered tens of millions of people in their pursuit of a fairer society. Compared to that, building the New Jerusalem by moving half the population of Africa and the Middle East to the UK seems positively benign.

But what sticks in the craw is when the (then-Guardian owned) Manchester Evening News and the BBC describe such people as 'campaigners' without even mentioning the extreme-left agenda driving the 'campaign'.

Eucharia said: "A lot of my family members have been killed. I do no want to die or lose my son. I want to live here with my son where I will be free from fear."

Campaigners supporting Eucharia and Timeyi held a day of action on Market Street in Manchester city centre and earlier this month staged a campaign meeting at St George's Church, Abbey Hey, to rally local support.

You can see from this link the power of support from St George's, Abbey Hey. It's closed and up for sale.

The good news was that, 900 letters, from how many people is not known, and 2,250 signatures (ditto) later, the Government relented :

Under all this pressure, driven by Eucharia’s determination to fight for her and her son’s life and their right to stay in Britain, the Home Office have given in and granted them indefinite leave to remain. Without this campaign, Eucharia and Timeyi would have been deported long ago, facing the same fate as the 18,280 asylum seekers deported last year.

Throughout, Eucharia and Manchester RCG insisted that the campaign should be political, emphasising the link between racism in Britain and British imperialist exploitation abroad such as in Nigeria.

Can't say the RCG are exactly hiding their agenda, can you ?

And there it may have ended. Ms Jakpa, whose husband and daughter apparently disappeared in Nigeria, gave birth to another child in the UK, and was pregnant with yet another, when she decided to go for a drive.

A woman saved from deportation by a high-profile campaign has been jailed for ten months after killing a child while driving without a licence. Four-year-old Caitlan Fitzhugh, of Coronation Street, Openshaw, was walking hand-in-hand on the pavement with her mum Stacey Strutt when she was hit by a Ford Transit van which mounted the kerb. The van careered into the youngster after being hit by a Ford Focus driven by heavily pregnant Eucharia Jakpa, who had no licence.

Not that a little dead child can remove the aura of saintliness, mind :

Andrew Nuttall, defending, said Mrs Jakpa felt ‘real and heartfelt remorse’, but had originally struggled ‘getting to grips’ with the fact she had taken a life. He admitted she had ‘behaved badly’ by seeking to blame the other driver. But he maintained that the ‘committed Christian’ had understanding of the ‘enormous pain’ felt by Caitlan’s family, since her husband and daughter had been killed in Nigeria.

I don't understand. If she's a 'committed Christian', where have the other child and the pregnancy come from, given that her husband is no longer to be found ? And why did she lie and try to blame the other driver ? Maybe she's not quite as committed as all that - or maybe Andrew Nuttall is just doing for her what Holbein attempted to do for Anne of Cleves.

And most of all, why has she kept schtum about the other people in the car, who ran off at the scene ?

Jakpa was only a provisional licence holder at the time of the crash and police say she has never provided details for her supervising driver. Two passengers who were in the car at the time ran off after the collision and have never been traced.

Sgt Jeff Hollick, from Greater Manchester Police, said: "Stacey may eventually recover from the physical injuries she suffered but there is no doubt the emotional scars left by the loss of her daughter will remain. Jakpa has never revealed to us whether she had a full licence holder guiding her and nor have the two passengers come forward of their own accord to explain their role, so Jakpa carries the full consequences of that collision on her shoulders."

Just an idea. The two who ran off couldn't have been the long-lost husband and daughter, could they ?

How To Trash a Brand

Laban's not a terribly brand-conscious individual unless it's a question of things you can taste and/or smell - and even then the product may change while the label stays the same. Many famous food brands have been bought and sold half a dozen times in the last 30 years, with production moved from factory to factory.

One of Laban's few brands was soap. I'll shower with Tesco's bottom of the range gel (literally about 10p) but for some reason I just love the smell of Pears soap. I know it won't give me the complexion of a young Susan Hampshire, but I like that the product is pretty much unchanged since the Pears company were annoying Millais in Victorian times.
















I'd buy ten or a dozen bars at a throw and stack them in the bottom drawer of the bathroom cupboard, so I'd only get it every year or so. I ran out last month, and went to buy some more. For some reason the stock in the shop smelled a bit odd, so I just took the one bar. They didn't seem to have any of the heftier bath size, either.

The first time I used it I wondered if the same company was making Wright's Coal Tar and there'd been a bit of cross-over on the production line. Wasn't right at all - a phenolic, chemical smell not at all like the delicate aroma I know and love.

Took a look at the packet. "Made In India by Licensed User Hindustan Unilever Ltd". Ah, I get it. It's a slightly dodgy approximation to the real thing made for less sophisticated overseas markets, and the shop's doing some grey importing. I bought some Heinz Salad Cream a week or two back for 46p, made in Amsterdam and with the label in half a dozen Arabic/Asian scripts. Just make sure you get the UK-made stuff next time, Laban.

Gulp. There ain't none no more. That's all there is.

According to Unilever records, Pears Soap was the world's first registered brand and is therefore the world's oldest continuously existing brand...

In October of 2009 the formula for the transparent amber soap was changed significantly. This completely changed the smell and texture of the soap, making it unrecognizable from the earlier product. The new soap is slightly softer in texture, but the most noticeable difference is the scent. The aroma of the classic transparent amber bar, which used to be characterized by a mild, spicy herbal fragrance, is now a very strong smell akin to frankincense, or even insecticide.

Sales must have dropped off a cliff. They really have knacked it (and they can't spell 'Click' on their website, either. I hate Flash intros on a website.). In Morrison's this week it was on sale at 35p as opposed to the usual 55p price. According to the Mail they were going to backtrack on the formula, but by the smell they appear to have instead moved production to Bhopal. What possessed them ? Why fix something that wasn't broke ?

Looks like farewell to Pears - and there's nothing else like it on the pharmacy or supermarket shelf - you have to hit Body Shop or some small specialist. There's a market opening there for someone fast on their feet.

Globalisation In One Country

Jon Cruddas, 2005 :

“… immigration has been used as an informal reserve army of cheap labour. People see this at their workplace, feel it in their pocket and see it in their community – and therefore perceive it as a critical component of their own relative impoverishment. Objectively, the social wage of many of my constituents is in decline. House prices rise inexorably, and public service improvements fail to match local population expansion. At work, their conditions, in real terms, are in decline through the unregulated use of cheap migrant labour.”

Billy Bragg, 2010 :

“Everyone else in London benefits from multiculturalism and cheap labour…”

Karl Marx, 1847 :

“The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”

Commenter Jim on Liberal Conspiracy, 2010 :

“Where I live, there is a meat packing plant that has provided many with stable employment over the decades. Of course, with the large influx of Eastern Europeans they have steadily displaced the locals from this factory and there is a surplus of labour in the area. Employment agencies have descended on the area like vultures and almost completely ‘causalised’ the workforce around West Lothian to the extent that the job centres are littered with zero hour contract jobs.

A friend of mine who has worked in said plant for over thirty years sees young men coming in on the Monday work for three hours, then sent home to sit by the phone in case they are needed during the week.

This was exactly the type of thing the Labour Party was set up to tackle. These conditions, nauseatingly described as ‘modernisation’ show up the failings of the NL ‘project’. Whilst they were swanning about getting middle class men in public sector jobs paternity leave, ordinary working class people watched as their terms and conditions were slashed to Victorian levels. These people (rightly or wrongly) feel immigration undercuts their living standards. Is it right that in this Country that we have reduced people to the condition of day labourers?”

(see also this post)

"No English Workers Have Been Involved In Making These Asda Sausages"

British workers have been turned away from jobs in a local factory – for not speaking Polish. Cooked meat manufacturer Forza AW effectively barred anyone but Poles for applying for jobs on its production line in East Anglia by insisting all staff speak the language fluently. The company claimed it was necessary as all health and safety training was conducted in Polish.

But Forza – a major supplier of Asda supermarkets – was last night accused of anti-British discrimination because of the adverts.

Forza’s advert was sent out via email by East Anglia-based employment agency OSR Recruitment earlier this month.

Headed ‘Immediate factory work available!!!!’ it continued: ‘If you are available or have any friends available, work is starting tomorrow for induction training.

‘Ongoing factory work (meat production) for 4-5 months, shifts are 7am-5pm or 9am-7pm.

‘Transport provided. Applicants must speak Polish. Please call asap!!!!!!’

The advert was signed Katrina Massingham, the company’s ‘industrial team leader’ and it was dispatched to hundreds of potential applicants on the firm’s books.

But wait ! It might just be all an unfortunate error !

A reporter listened in as the 31-year-old man called OSR to ask about the jobs last Tuesday. The first question he was asked was: ‘Are you Polish?’ When he said no, but could speak the language ‘a little’, he was told: ‘Actually, you have to be fluent because the health and safety training is all done in Polish.’ By Friday, however, after The Mail on Sunday rang again several times and got the same response, the company appeared to have second thoughts about the wisdom of the advert.

An OSR employee gave a different version to a Polish-speaking reporter saying: ‘Actually, you don’t have to be Polish, but it helps.’

When another reporter posed as an English applicant, Ms Massingham told him that all the jobs had been filled but that the language requirement was ‘not too important now’.

She added: ‘For some reason the training was in Polish but we’re trying to get them to change it, because it’s a bit silly, really’.

Yesterday, Mr Max Hilliard claimed the advert’s wording was a mistake and due to a ‘breakdown in communications’ between his firm and OSR Recruitment. He said he was unaware of the ‘Must speak Polish’ clause until The Mail on Sunday alerted him to it.

‘In normal circumstances, this ad would have been vetted and the error removed,’ said the 51-year-old, who is Forza’s chief executive and principal shareholder, owning 60 per cent of the company.

‘We employ many English workers as well as Poles and Lithuanians, though I can’t give you exact figures ..."

Phew. Almost thought for a moment there was something to be worried about.

Labour MP - "British workers for all major construction contracts"

Interesting report at leftie blog The Commune on a construction workers demo today :

The protests at the Alsthom office, Peter Mandelson’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Houses of Parliament’s Old Palace Yard were attended by about 100 people, most of whom were unemployed construction workers from power stations in the Midlands and the North. The demo was organised by the GMB after an audit proving that at the Staythorpe power station site in Nottinghamshire, migrant workers were being paid only 500 euros a month – i.e. 1300 euros a month below the industry rate.

This doesn't sound kosher - or indeed halal to me. 500 euros a month is way below UK minimum wage - or does it not apply to people under the Posted Workers Directive ( Wikipedia says it does apply, but gives no citation) ?

I digress.

The union’s placards demanded equal pay for all, and attacked undercutting which meant the subcontractor Somi preferred to use foreign labour rather than local unemployed workers, since it could do so more cheaply and undermine the industry agreement. Speakers at the closing rally repeatedly and clearly expressed solidarity with the Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Greek workers who were being underpaid and demanded that they be paid the industry rate.

Blogger David Broder has a problem here. As a good Marxist internationalist the idea of a nation having interests of its own is self-evidently ridiculous. There is only class and class struggle.

Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. As others far to the left of me have said, a glut of labour lowers wages, and a glut of imported labour lowers indigenous wages. In another Labour MP, Jon Cruddas' words :

“the government tacitly used immigration to help forge the preferred flexible North American labour market. In the service sector, construction and civil engineering, for example, immigration has been used as an informal reserve army of cheap labour. People see this at their workplace, feel it in their pocket and see it in their community - and therefore perceive it as a critical component of their own relative impoverishment.

Objectively, the social wage of many of my constituents is in decline. House prices rise inexorably, and public service improvements fail to match local population expansion. At work, their conditions, in real terms, are in decline through the unregulated use of cheap migrant labour.

Migrant labour is the axis of our whole domestic agenda.

Now there's a lot of PC self-deception here - or possibly cynicism, in the demo speakers' "solidarity with the Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Greek workers who were being underpaid".

"whereas the Daily Star had quoted an Amicus/Unite shop steward to the effect that “All we want for Brit workers is a fair crack of the whip to have first preference on jobs”, and at yesterday’s Cadbury demo Unite’s Jack Dromey had commented that “Our fear is that the Kraft takeover is not in the national interest”, most speakers at the Old Palace Yard rally steered well clear of such sentiments."

Because the speakers - and the workers - know quite well that if the imported workers were paid UK wages, there would no longer be any incentive to import them, cheapness being their USP. In effect, if not in form, the call for "the industry rate" is the call of 'British Jobs For British Workers'. It's just the call that dare not speak its name.

Save for one champion. I know little about John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, a solidly working class constituency covering what was once the Nottinghamshire coalfield. Emboldening is mine.

However, while most speakers stressed that the struggle was over the industry agreement and agencies’ monopoly of recruitment, the New Labour MP John Mann injected his own special venom into proceedings. Mann “had no problem” with ‘British jobs for British workers’ and stressed that there was plenty of land in his constituency to build more power stations. He argued against employing migrant workers who supposedly “don’t pay tax towards the NHS” and put British workers on Jobseekers’ Allowance, decrying this as ‘bad economics’ for Britain.

What ? Here we have the grotesque sight of a Labour MP - a Labour MP, mind you, suggesting that it's bad for Brits to be unemployed while migrants work ? What is the world coming to ?

With an eye on the upcoming General Election, Mann announced that he would be tabling a motion in Parliament to the effect that all major construction projects are carried out by British workers: if anyone had a problem with that, he assured us, he had the “100% backing of all 79,000 men women and children” in his constituency.

I'll keep an eye open for that. He's got an enormous majority - are the BNP giving him a hard time, or his constituents, or both ? Could it be that he's sincere ? Seems to have taken him a long time - he's been an MP for nine years.

While what Mann had said was at odds with the general themes of the rally, he received enthusiastic applause, more than anyone except Hicks’ militant class struggle speech. Whitehurst and Kenny’s speeches were several times interrupted by unemployed workers asking what precisely the union was going to do about the situation, which has left many without work for as long as 9 months. Quite. It seemed as though, just like Hicks’ call for solidarity action and fighting rather than lying down, Mann’s overt and defiant nationalism might also perhaps have appealed to a sense of frustration at the lack of progress made by the GMB and Unite over the last year.

In other words, the workers are noticing that the boilerplate union rhetoric is long on words, short on jobs and wages. They're noticing that :

"the moral and political objections to undercutting "our own people" (a phrase which immediately brands the utterer with the indelible scar of racism) have been totally marginalised and discredited (in this context, rendered almost unsayable - LT). The trades unions, which instinctively understood the objections to cheap 'scab' (non-unionised) labour, now welcome the undercutting of an entire working class."

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. I'll be keeping an interested eye on Mr Mann.

The Breaking of the English Working Class

An experiment. Open this Mark Steyn piece on demography and Christian hoteliers (it turns out the Muslim lady who accused them was a (Christian apostate) convert).

Then put the cursor over the word 'immigrant' or 'immigration - you'll see it's double underlined.

Don't know about you, but where I am, up pops a picture of a middle-aged cleaning lady of indeterminate ethnicity, along with captions 'You have a Powerful Friend' and 'Want to know more about employee rights at work' ? Click the pic and you end up here - at the Directgov Pay and Rights Helpline.

"Not Getting The Minimum Wage of £5.60 an hour ?"

I can understand a desire among our rulers to recruit, say, dentists or real-time software engineers, although I would prefer to train up our own. But we have kept nearly a million on the dole through the 12 years of this government, while importing people to do the bottom-level jobs that pretty much any of us, no matter how uneducated, can do. Why ?

Jon Cruddas pointed out three years back that the govt "tacitly used immigration to help forge the preferred flexible North American labour market. Especially in London, legal and illegal immigration has been central in replenishing the stock of cheap labour across the public and private services, construction and civil engineering."

Immigrant labour "is the axis for the domestic agenda of the Government".

But it still seems crazy to me to leave people unemployed while importing others (thus raising demand for houses, services - not to mention the demographic challenge) to do the jobs the unemployed Brits should be doing. Why ?

The only answers I can think of are

a) the existence of an unemployed underclass keeps a lot of Guardianistas in employment who might otherwise have to get a proper job

b) it would also be a lot of hassle to get some of the Brit underclass back into work - easier to ignore them and get in compliant (for the moment - just like the Windrush generation and the early Muslim immigrants were) incomers.

c) to drive down wages. Without a couple of million low-wage incomers market forces might make a minimum wage unneccessary. As it is, Labour can say 'look what we've done for you'.

d) to split the working class - at which point racial and cultural divisions are actually quite useful. Low-wage workers are hard enough to organise as it is - even harder when they have nowt in common but their employer.


Any (printable) ideas ?