Migrant Workers Bring Flood And Tidal Wave To UK
“OVER 860 MIGRANTS FLOOD IN EVERY DAY,” announces the Express on its front page. (And that’s just the ones we know about.)”
The parentheses are key to the Express’s story. A visit to the paper’s website reveals no interactive headline in which a woman in a pastel-coloured rain hat purses her lips and loudly whispers the words in brackets.
Reading on we discover that these 860 migrants are all in the UK legally. This means, says the paper, that since 1997, when Labour took power, 2.3 million immigrants have moved to the UK. We learn that during the same period, 715,000 Britons have left.
It looks like we are winning. All talk of a pension crisis, in which the population becomes top heavy and the workers toil to keep grandma alive, can be ended. More immigrants, means more taxpayers, means more money in the big pot. Unless the migrant workers are all aged, an idea undone by the Express’s picture of young men walking along a train line in Calais. The migrant workers could be idle spongers, but nine out of ten waitresses and chambermaids are Polish, so that can’t be it*.
Damien Green, the Shadow immigration Minister, says: “It is clear there are huge pressures on public services because of the sheer scale of the rising population.”
Not to worry, though, because if the new workers are given jobs and can pay into the big pot, then there will be more money to renew public services, which are by definition under strain – if the hospitals were all empty, they’d be shut down; if roads were not full, would we need to maintain them?
Let’s hear it for the powerful and energetic “tidal wave” of humanity…
* Anorak School Of Statistics, Table 2, Bacchus Greek Restaurant, London NW3
** Flood and tidal waves do not ,necessarily, mean that immigrants lead to more flooding…
Posted: 13th, February 2008 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
