The Major government tried to appease its EU critics in 1995 by abolishing the need for people leaving the UK to show their passports, a requirement which has only just been reinstated. Over the next 10 years uncontrolled admission to this country has been extended by the Blair government to an additional 10 countries of Eastern Europe with a combined population of 98 Million occupying 363,000 square miles and an average in 2004 of GDP per head of 4,500 US$ (UK 61 Million sitting on a quarter of this land but with GDP of 35,000 US$).
There is thus on these figures no economic balance to be obtained until all the mobile, predominantly young, people have left Eastern Europe and moved to the West, mainly one may guess to Britain.
It is therefore no surprise to anyone outside the Home Office that hundreds of thousands per year – probably well over a million in total – nobody knows – have entered Britain from Eastern Europe since 1 May 2004. Alongside this flood, is the non-EU flow, much of it subject to some form of work permit it is true, but ticking up nonetheless at the rate of over 100,000 per annum, i.e. a town about the size of Dover or Tunbridge Wells every year and not counting dependents.
However nice and good as most undoubtedly are, they occupy physical space which is already in desperately short supply in the second most densely populated country in Europe, twenty-five times the density in the rest of the Anglo-Saxon countries, and fifty times that in Russia.
And then besides is the continuing flow of asylum seekers, running at 24,000 in 2006 (excluding dependents) which number has reduced by 9% from 2005. But even here controls are not working. 80% are refused leave to stay, yet removals in 2005 and 2006 were less than 70% of the annual flow, not keeping pace with current refusal rates, let alone making impact on the huge numbers refused entry in the 90s and later and who have simply stayed illegally in the country.
Paralysed by the PC gas, councils in Slough, London, Kent who have borne the brunt of these huge inflows cannot bring themselves to ask the government to stop the flow and withdraw benefits to newcomers, but only put their hands out for more “resources”, i.e. ask the government to levy more taxes on the rest of the population.
I doubt if in all history one can find another example in which more effort has been expended by a government to provide both material and legal benefits to immigrants. Even a Labourite like Margaret Hodge, is quoted in the Observer on Sunday as complaining that, I quote, “an immigrant family is often given greater entitlement to community resources (she means housing) than a settled British one”.
And here numbers and examples are all-important. When the USA – an avowedly immigrant country throughout the 19th Century with 30 times the area of the UK, 60 times that of England, first passed an Emergency Quota Act (in 1921) it imposed a limit of 357,000 per annum for a population then of 106 Million, a quota later reduced under the National Origins Act to 150,000 per annum or 1.4 per thousand of the resident population.
This compares with the current (only estimated) admission rate into the UK of 400,000 plus, or 7 per thousand, i.e. nearly 1% of the native population PER YEAR, five times the USA rate, into a country (ourselves) with barely 3% of the land area of the USA. Allowing for emigration of native British of 150,000 per year we are left with a net inflow of 250,000 which corresponds broadly to 25 square miles (say 5 miles x 5) of new urban area, of new concrete that is to say, and this is PER YEAR.
What is to be done?
The UK, with its generous benefits guaranteeing newcomers a standard of life (even without a job) better than in their native countries (with a job), the English language, absurdly elaborate appeals structures for protecting illegals, and indeed its legendary kindness to foreigners, is a magnet for people from virtually all countries outside the Anglosphere and the countries of Northern Europe.
Indeed we resemble nothing so much as a store in the New Year Sales where the attractiveness of the goods and their price has brought pandemonium to the opening, so many people trying to get in that the management is forced to close the doors until those in the store can be properly served and order restored.
And that, Ladies and Gentlemen is precisely what Britain should do.