Our drug-addled louts are the REAL reason we need migrants
This Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
As we grapple yet again with the problem of our wide-open borders, it is time we realised that there is another reason for this country’s huge migration problem.
When I visited the Lincolnshire town of Boston a few years ago, to look at the revolution inflicted on it by mass immigration, I also noted the presence of knots of home-grown British louts and the existence of a smart and costly ‘resource centre’, offering tax-funded advice on how to inject illegal drugs. This plainly had something to do with the problem.
At the last count, there were in this country at least 790,000 young people aged between 16 and 24 who were ‘not in education, employment or training’. I suspect that there are plenty more in this miserable category over the age of 24. Bear in mind that all politically important statistics are massaged in some way to conceal the ghastly truth.
It is the jobs that such people used to do which are being done by migrants. As the liberal Left ceaselessly and rather stupidly point out, much of what goes on around us, from the NHS to the picking of fruit, the care of the elderly and the running of all those coffee shops, depends on migrant labour. They seem to think this is because the migrants are so nice, as many of them indeed are.
BUT migrants don’t work for the NHS or Starbucks out of charity. They do it, perfectly reasonably, for money. Why don’t British people do these jobs? Why do our nurses have to come from Africa? There are three reasons, which no government dares do anything about.
The first is the collapse of the old-fashioned family, in which the young learned how to behave. This is worst among the poor.
Children who have never known a father’s authority, who arrived at school in nappies, have never shared a meal around a table, can barely read and who speak a sort of mumbled teen patois rather than English, are not going to be any employer’s dream.
Forcing them to apply for jobs they don’t really want, from employers who really don’t want them and who would much prefer someone from Portugal or Poland, doesn’t actually solve this.
The next is our shameful state school system, whose teachers are often themselves ill-educated. The system strives in vain to teach an academic curriculum to young men and women who really need vocational instruction, because we cannot admit that not all boys and girls need or want the same sort of schools. At the end of this process, the victims are forced into debt to attend university courses far inferior to old-fashioned vocational training.
And the third is our welfare system, which responds to failure and misbehaviour by indulging it – a policy which ends by using tax revenues to teach criminals to take illegal drugs ‘safely’, and by handing them substitute drugs, so they can stupefy themselves legally instead.
All these subjects lie outside the issues that ambitious career politicians are allowed to address. To do so, you would have to breach the modern taboos of sexism and egalitarianism. And you would have to do something even more heretical – argue that people are responsible for their own actions.
Do any of these things and an army of media thought-police will come after you. Always assuming you aren’t forced to stand down as an MP, you will never get anywhere near office or power.
We are in the grip of a soft totalitarianism which is no less deadly for being soft. Instead of threatening people with prison for having the wrong opinions, it threatens them with unemployment.
If we actually had labour camps and midnight arrests, and state censors sitting in newspaper offices and TV studios, people might notice what was going on. As it is, they just wonder why everything gets worse and worse and nobody does anything about it.
This Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
As we grapple yet again with the problem of our wide-open borders, it is time we realised that there is another reason for this country’s huge migration problem.
When I visited the Lincolnshire town of Boston a few years ago, to look at the revolution inflicted on it by mass immigration, I also noted the presence of knots of home-grown British louts and the existence of a smart and costly ‘resource centre’, offering tax-funded advice on how to inject illegal drugs. This plainly had something to do with the problem.
At the last count, there were in this country at least 790,000 young people aged between 16 and 24 who were ‘not in education, employment or training’. I suspect that there are plenty more in this miserable category over the age of 24. Bear in mind that all politically important statistics are massaged in some way to conceal the ghastly truth.
It is the jobs that such people used to do which are being done by migrants. As the liberal Left ceaselessly and rather stupidly point out, much of what goes on around us, from the NHS to the picking of fruit, the care of the elderly and the running of all those coffee shops, depends on migrant labour. They seem to think this is because the migrants are so nice, as many of them indeed are.
BUT migrants don’t work for the NHS or Starbucks out of charity. They do it, perfectly reasonably, for money. Why don’t British people do these jobs? Why do our nurses have to come from Africa? There are three reasons, which no government dares do anything about.
The first is the collapse of the old-fashioned family, in which the young learned how to behave. This is worst among the poor.
Children who have never known a father’s authority, who arrived at school in nappies, have never shared a meal around a table, can barely read and who speak a sort of mumbled teen patois rather than English, are not going to be any employer’s dream.
Forcing them to apply for jobs they don’t really want, from employers who really don’t want them and who would much prefer someone from Portugal or Poland, doesn’t actually solve this.
The next is our shameful state school system, whose teachers are often themselves ill-educated. The system strives in vain to teach an academic curriculum to young men and women who really need vocational instruction, because we cannot admit that not all boys and girls need or want the same sort of schools. At the end of this process, the victims are forced into debt to attend university courses far inferior to old-fashioned vocational training.
And the third is our welfare system, which responds to failure and misbehaviour by indulging it – a policy which ends by using tax revenues to teach criminals to take illegal drugs ‘safely’, and by handing them substitute drugs, so they can stupefy themselves legally instead.
All these subjects lie outside the issues that ambitious career politicians are allowed to address. To do so, you would have to breach the modern taboos of sexism and egalitarianism. And you would have to do something even more heretical – argue that people are responsible for their own actions.
Do any of these things and an army of media thought-police will come after you. Always assuming you aren’t forced to stand down as an MP, you will never get anywhere near office or power.
We are in the grip of a soft totalitarianism which is no less deadly for being soft. Instead of threatening people with prison for having the wrong opinions, it threatens them with unemployment.
If we actually had labour camps and midnight arrests, and state censors sitting in newspaper offices and TV studios, people might notice what was going on. As it is, they just wonder why everything gets worse and worse and nobody does anything about it.
