These days we tend to use money as the sole measuring stick of just about everything.
This isn’t particularly surprising in a nation that increasingly treats religion as a quaint superstition of no relevance to life. However, even these days there are more important things than money – and one fears we’ll soon be served a cruel reminder of it.
In three days Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants will flood into Britain, a development our EU-bound government is unable to prevent. The newspapers, trying to assess the effect of the influx, are full of numbers preceded by the pound sign and neatly arranged in columns.
In the debit column one finds the cost of looking after the new arrivals before they can support themselves, if such a bright prospect is at all on the cards. The column includes the cost of medical care, schooling, accommodation, welfare payments and so forth.
The credit column is stuffed with figures having more to do with hope than expectation. Here one finds the tax riches the ‘A2’ immigrants are going to generate. This shows how mendacious statistics can become in deft hands.
People only generate new tax revenues when they are self-employed, which is to say when they create their own jobs. If they take jobs already existing, they’ll pay more tax only if they’re paid more than the previous holders. This isn’t going to be the case – in all likelihood the A2s will work for peanuts, ousting the more highly paid Poles and other less recent arrivals.
Another hope widely mooted is that our booming economy will create so many jobs that we’ll desperately need Romanians and Bulgarians to take them. Indeed, if you believe HMG’s statistics, we’re well on course to becoming the most dynamic economy in Europe – and tomorrow, as they say in underachieving Germany, the world.
Taking such projections on face value requires more suspension of incredulity than belief in Father Christmas and the tooth fairy. We have a shrinking manufacturing base, promiscuous state spending, an unmanageable – and growing – national debt, and an increasingly illiterate and work-shy population – this at a time when all modern economies are shifting towards highly qualified labour.
So how are we going to outstrip Germany, with all her Brauns, Bayers and BMWs? The best (or, depending on the way you look at it, the worst) we can hope for is yet another housing bubble creating yet another phoney prosperity, which Dave hopes will last until the next election. Whether or not it does, it’ll burst soon enough – leaving us in a worse mess than in 2008.
Meanwhile the arriving A2s will only be able to make the Exchequer richer by selling houses to one another, until they run out of either houses or money to buy them or, most likely, both.
All in all, if we discount statistical larceny, the net effect of the A2 immigration will be negative, hugely so. The pressure it’ll put on our social services, already creaking at the seams, will be even worse.
But really dire will be the costs that can’t be measured in money. Such as social, ethnic, cultural and linguistic cohesion without which no society can survive as such.
Our consecutive governments have been doing their level best to make sure Britain stops being British – which is a sine qua non for the likes of them to be elected.
One good thing one can say about Labour is that at least they admit that this was both their deliberate policy and desired outcome. The Tories are still coy about it, but then they’re in power and hope to cling to it for a few more years.
Britain and other core European countries aren’t designed to be melting pots, and quoting the American example in this context is disingenuous. From its very inception America has had no choice but to act as the stop of last resort for the world’s jetsam.
It’s the only naturally multi-culti society on earth, which presents no hardship, what with an indigenous culture being either non-existent or too recent to count. Even considering that, one would be hard-pressed to hold America up as an example of racial and cultural harmony.
Sporadic racial riots and constant racial tensions in just about every American state spring to mind, but there are subtler signs as well – just witness the unmatched abundance of racial and ethnic slurs the country has contributed to the English language.
Enforcing this sort of thing in ancient, and sublime, cultures means destroying them first and the nations that begat them a close second. This of course is the EU’s purpose: this horrendously immoral concoction depends for its survival on the destruction of every ancient nationhood in Europe.
It says a lot about Britain’s suicidal decadence that we agreed to join this abomination and now lack the courage to leave it. Instead, Dave, Ed and their jolly friends count the pennies, lying all along that the balance will be positive.
It will be disastrous even at the puny level on which this lot operate. Yet where it really matters the damage being done to our country is incalculable.
But not to worry: at least we can sleep peacefully in the knowledge that Nick will become an EU Commissioner and, with any luck, Tony the EU president. This lot can destroy even well-designed organisations – just imagine what they’ll do to something that has no right to exist.