Comment

So much for ‘taking back control of our borders’ – most immigrants come from outside the EU

Eastern European workers pack asparagus at Cobrey Farm in Ross-on-Wye
We'll miss the likes of these Eastern European workers when they're gone  Credit:  PETER NICHOLLS/Reuters

Earlier this month, amid all the gathering murk and chaos over Brexit, there emerged one odd little shaft of illumination so significant that it deserved much more attention than it got. This was an Ipsos/Mori poll (oddly enough, commissioned by the BBC), which charted the astonishing reversal in recent years of British attitudes to immigration.

Back in January 2011, this showed that a huge majority of voters, 64 per cent, thought immigration had had a “negative impact” on British life, with only 19 per cent viewing it positively. Ever since then, the two figures have steadily changed places, to the point where the “positives” now stand at 48 per cent and the “negatives” at only 26 per cent.

The two lines actually converged just after the 2016 referendum, although no faction had been more vociferous during the campaign than those most opposed to immigration. But even during the campaign one poll asking which issue ranked highest in deciding people’s voting intention put the economy top after it was chosen by around twice as many people as immigration.

Obviously, there have been various reasons for this dramatic change in attitudes but, undoubtedly, one has been the growing awareness of all the ways in which immigration from the EU has been beneficial to our national life: providing doctors, nurses and other staff to the NHS, allowing care homes and the catering trade to function, supplying plumbers, construction workers and skilled pickers for our fruit farms, tens of thousands working in financial services and the City, and much else. Many of these people have already been leaving, just as we come to realise that they may never be replaced.

One of the findings of Neil MacGregor’s fascinating recent BBC series As Others See Us, based on interviews with people from five countries across the world, was how they all agreed that cosmopolitan London had become the most welcoming and enjoyable city for them to visit in the world; and how much they would regret it if this ceased to be the case.

The greatest irony of all this, of course, is that the largest component in our immigrant population comes not from the EU but from the rest of the world, under rules that have nothing to do with the EU at all.

We have already seen how, since the referendum, immigration from the EU has declined while that from non-EU countries has continued to rise. Brexit will not help us to reduce this in any way. So much for “taking back control of our borders”. We will have lost many of the people who have made this country great.

 

Do children really know anything about climate change? The BBC seems to think so 

Whatever we may think in general about the BBC’s absurdly skewed coverage of all matters relating to energy and climate change, there has been something peculiarly distasteful about its relentless promotion of the “school strikes” and the “children’s crusade” against global warming.

From endless sound-bite interviews, it was clear that the children knew virtually nothing about either the science or politics of climate change. Their faces may be contorted with self-righteous anger, but their heads are merely stuffed with a few little “the end of the world is nigh” slogans, presumably fed to them by the same teachers who urged them to go on these marches where youngsters chanted obscenities against Theresa May, and the Communist hammer-and-sickle flag fluttered above the crowd.

School students protest climate change 
Their faces may be contorted with self-righteous anger, but their heads are merely stuffed with a few little “the end of the world is nigh” slogans Credit:  Guy Smallman/Getty

Oddest of all has been their central battle cry that it is time for our politicians to wake up to the reality of the global “climate emergency” and to “start taking action”. They seem oblivious to the fact that, under the Climate Change Act, our Government boasts it is “leading the world” in eliminating reliance on fossil fuels, and that subsidies for the intermittent “renewable energy” sources intended to replace them will be equivalent over the next five years to £2,500 for every household in the land.

By the time most of these children have grown up – as cooking or heating with gas, or buying anything but electric cars, dependent on those same intermittent “renewables”, are being phased out – they can expect major power blackouts to be a regular feature of their daily lives.

The main reason, lost in their bubble of babyish groupthink, that they and their teachers are not aware of any of this is that it has never been explained to them by the BBC.

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