It was written on 2nd February 2010 for the UKIP policy group on “Jobs, Enterprise and the Economy” for the parliamentary election campaign.
To read the text of a summary or the pdf of the whole paper, please click on the link “Produce and Prosper” which will take you to the paper on the Britain Watch website.
To read the text please click on “Economic Effects of Immigration” which will take you to the paper on the Britain Watch website.
It was written by Prof Stephen Bush from Prosyma Research Ltd and David MacDonald from Hill Path Projects Ltd on 12th August 2009.
To find a summary, a link to the pdf of the full text and a link to the submission on the National Grid site, please click on Secure Energy Strategy which will take you to this page on the Britain Watch website.
Ann Widdecombe’s defence of her proposed system of secure holding centres for all asylum-seekers (letter, January 16th) is sound as far as it goes. It does not, however, take the measure of the truly desperate situation which nearly six years of Labour Government has brought about, starting with the abolition of the primary purpose rule and other reversals of the previous Government’s policy.
Asylum and immigration have been confused, deliberately so in my view, by the supposed labour shortages in the British economy. With 15 million currently unemployed, 155,000 jobs lost in manufacturing last year (Business, January 16th), many thousands currently being made redundant in the IT and financial sectors, and possibly one third of 16-year-olds (around 250,000 per year) according to the Department for Education and Skills ill-equipped to participate fully in the economy, we have in this country not a labour shortage, but a massively unbalanced labour force. The few hundred degree-holders among the hundreds of thousands in the asylum/immigration queue are very unlikely to have the practical skills this country really needs. The overwhelming majority will not even speak English.
A complete moratorium on non-patrial immigration and asylum for, say, five years is the only measure which will allow the backlog of what I estimate to be between 500,000 and a million asylum-seekers and dependants to be cleared.
The Government could also use this five-year breathing space to enact enforceable laws for asylum and immigration drawn up after consultation with the British people, preferably in conformity with a new international convention to replace the outdated 1951 Convention on Refugees, but if necessary without it.
Barbara Roche, the immigration minister, maintains that new primary immigration is needed to overcome technology skill shortages (interview, Jan. 27th). Last Monday the Home Office released data purporting to show that immigration has not placed a net burden on the social services.
It seems clear that the Labour Government is planning on breaking the 30-year-old implicit compact with the British people that there would be no further primary immigration.
As technology develops, there will always be temporary shortages in this skill or that, but these are pretty short-lived as students and their parents respond to market demand.
Currently, computation departments in the universities are awash with aspiring IT professionals. In two or three years’ time, there is likely to be a glut. American data show that, contrary to ministerial assumptions, so-called “high-tech” jobs have accounted for a mere four per cent of new jobs over a 20-year period.
The largest single category of job creation has been for building janitors; even waiters outnumbered computer technicians, systems analysts and computer programmers put together. Left to itself, any shortage will normally be corrected by increasing the price of supply. Currently, British industry attracts only about 50 per cent of British engineering graduates, as many choose to work abroad for higher salaries. If employers are allowed to import people for whom current British salaries represent a fortune, this displacement will continue indefinitely.
The “ethical” dimension to which Mrs Roche referred in her interview should therefore start not with the needs of asylum seekers, but with the frequently expressed wishes of the British people that the demographic make-up of the population of this congested island should not be further changed without their explicit consent. At the same time, employers should be told that imported labour will not be allowed to undermine the market for the products of our own education system.
Your editorial (28th April) points to an apparent contradiction in the responses of the Labour government to the bomb outrages in Brixton and Brick Lane on the one hand and the IRA bombing in Northern Ireland on the other.
The contradiction is only apparent because, unlike ordinary people, left wing politicians adhere to a hierarchy of preference based on race and class which takes precedence over every other feature of human life – achievement, kindness, decency, loyalty.
In any dispute or problem, non-White people come first in this hierarchy. Among White people foreigners come before people of British descent, especially if their countries are governed by left wing politicians, however incompetent or corrupt. Among the native British, people wishing to break up the United Kingdom – Republican Irish in particular – are next in favour. At the bottom of Labour’s preference scale come the English, especially the Protestant southern English middle class, who vie with Ulster Unionists as those for whom the greatest contempt and scorn are reserved.
Thus the left dominated union Unison, which claims to represent 1.5 million people, can pass a resolution which scorns Florence Nightingale precisely because (as was made clear by the resolution’s supporter on Tuesday’s BBC Radio4 PM programme) she was English, Protestant and well-to-do. The fact that in about 20 months she organised the relief of almost unimaginable suffering, that she forced through changes in a way which only a middle or upper class English woman of the day could possible do, that her health was broken in the endeavour, that she devoted the next 50 years of her long life to building the profession of nursing, and that she was the first female member of the Order of Merit – all of which achievement is recognised the world over – is nothing to the class and race obsessed harridans who moved the Unison resolution.
In the light of these left wing preferences, the Labour government’s very different reactions to Brick Lane and Belfast are perfectly explicable.
Mr Hannis in last Friday’s “Chronicle” asserts that my figures on the GCE performance of school leavers are wrong, taking as evidence the oft-quoted Pedley book on comprehensive schools and a recent speech by Lord Butler. I cannot speak for Lord Butler, but unlike Mr Hannis I had before writing looked up the figures in the Department of Education and Science’s official Statistics of Education.
For 1967 (the latest available, 1966 figures are similar) tables 14 and 16 give five or more O-levels or CSE grade 1 as follows: for comprehensive schools 10,320 out of 76,750 leavers, or 13.5 per cent, and for all other maintained schools 86,500 out of 474,620 leavers or 18.2 per cent. Table 18 gives two or more A-levels as follows: for comprehensive schools 5,110 or 6.7 per cent and for all other maintained schools 45,890 or 9.7 per cent. In his book (p. 95) Pedley in fact acknowledges the poor academic performance of comprehensive schools so far and attributes this to the substantial number of newly-formed comprehensive schools. There is clearly something in this, but I have quoted the figures to show that the case for comprehensive schools is not, to say the least, made out and that there are significant pointers against the effectiveness of comprehensive education, particularly from abroad.
Thus in the case of the USA, if Mr Clifton (last Friday) would be satisfied with an academic performance which out of 11 Western countries placed his country bottom by a wide margin (T Husen, International Study of Achievement in Mathematics 1967) and which produced in California only a few teachers apparently able to deal with simple arithmetic (D A Pidgeon, Educational Research 1959), I would not be. In some senses formal academic education in the USA only begins at 18, and in recognition of its comparative failure, some authorities, e.g. Dr Koerner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are actively considering forms of State-maintained selective schooling.
The USA owes its prodigious wealth, not to its formal educational system (it is in fact heavily dependent on the products of European selectively educated talent) but to its great natural resources and to the spirit of enterprise and hard work of its people, neither of which latter attributes is exactly stressed by the comprehensive principle. In fact, in my experience, the spectacle of comprehensively and permissively educated American youth is probably the principal factor in inducing British scientists and engineers and their families to return to this country.
In some parts of the country, where for example there are small numbers of children, comprehensive schools, provided they adhere to scholastic discipline, will probably make the best use of limited educational resources. What the proponents of comprehensive education, aided and abetted by a dictatorial Labour government, will not admit is that academic standards are crucial, and that our selective system has set levels which are outstandingly good by any standards.
Councillor Towner’s remark implying that examinations at 11 to predict the suitability of a child for different forms of education are unreliable is quite untrue. Thus recent large-scale investigations (by e.g. the National Foundation for Education Research) showed an error of about 5 per cent in placing candidates and the errors were confined to borderline cases which could be easily remedied by transfer. In fact many comprehensive schools administer just such tests on admission, for streaming purposes; others however wait a year or two before streaming.
One of the few predictable things in public affairs is that sooner or later a campaign will be started by a clique of Socialist MPs to lower the age of consent. Sure enough, David Kerr, MP, has come forward as the champion of sexual liberty among the under sixteens.
One would have thought that with the whole country awash in a flood of semi-pornographic literature in the form of magazines and cheap paperback novelettes, adolescents need all the protection they can get in order to grow up with a sense of values designed to avoid the chaos in their private lives which the present national obsession with sex, unabated, will undoubtedly bring.
Of course this argument will make no impression on those MPs who, with the tacit support of the Government have forced through a whole series of permissive Acts on capital punishment, abortion, theatre censorship, and now divorce.
Nor can one expect any form of real opposition from the Conservatives, who stand, mute and uncomprehending, in the face of determined attempts to undermine the order and sanity of our society.
Still less can one expect resistance from the Anglican Church who appear to have no definite opinion about anything.
In the present state of moral anarchy, the opinions of MPs on moral issues are as important to the future happiness of our country as are their views on economics and immigration. They should be made to realise that our country is not a plaything to be experimented upon in obedience to some wild social theory or prejudice.
It is to be hoped therefore that Dr Kerr’s constituents, especially those with daughters in their early teens, will be left in no doubt as to his views, in time for them to give a judgment at the next election.
