If only the politicians on the radio were able to speak with the honesty of this blog. Only Lib Dems (and Boris Johnson) seem ready to tackle this from the mainstream. In a recent tv debate I thought the Lib Dem man struggled to answer two criticisms of the amnesty policy. Firstly how do you know someone’s been an illegal for ten years and not eight years? Secondly how do you stop other future illegal immigrants being encouraged by the idea that if you can keep yourself hidden for long enough there will be an amnesty.

To me this is one of the strongest reasons for voting Lib Dem. It is also an important indicator of a will to promote humaneness in society, and fight exploitation.

The Lib-Dem amnesty seems a reasonable response to try stop the problem of criminal expolitation and bring the hidden underclass into the mainstream.

The Lab/Con shouts that it will only encourage more illegal immigration also seem fair, unless the lib-dems can back up their amnesty with much tighter border controls and imigration policy for the future.

Another aspect of this is the cases of failed asylum seekers, often from war-zones or stateless people who have been denied any form of leave, but it is impossible for them to be deported or return to their countries. In some cases they have no nationality at all. In other cases, they are simply not able to get the correct documents to return, having not lived in their country of nationality for many years. In yet other cases, they do not want to return to an active warzone and the U.K is not currently able to forcibly deport people to some of these countries which are so dangerous. But rather than ackowledge this reality and grant some kind of at least temporary status the U.K position is currently to refuse them all forms of leave and make them destitute. It is hoped that in so doing they will be forced to take voluntary return. The thing is, if you are, for example, a single woman from Somalia, being destitute in London, is probably a less worse option than being destitute on the streets of Mogadishu. This is a recipe for disaster and leads to whole communities of people in our society with no rights, vunerable to exploitation. In some cases the Home Office seems to accept that people can’t be returned, and provides them with hard-case asylum support on a kind of ongoing indefinate basis without doing anything to regularise their status and allow them to work legally. People have ended up in this situation for years. But the Government of the day can never admit this situation, as it is not politically popular. Sooner or later something will have to be done-so it is good that the Lib Dems have the guts to raise this issue…

If people are coming here ‘illegally’ then surely that indicates that its too difficult for people to come here to meet labour demands.

Immigration really is a place where they Tories ‘free’ market credentials totally fail – you cannot have a free market without free movement of labour.

I’m surprised you can support strong immigration controls- but I suppose its in the interests of your previous profession…

Was this World Bridge outfit in place when you were Ambassador Craig?

WorldBridge Service is a commercial company, working in partnership with the UK Border Agency at British diplomatic missions around the world, …”

http://www.visainfoservices.com/

Look at the fees and I think you need a fortune to phone them.

https://www.visainfoservices.com/Pages/Content.aspx?Tag=VisaFees_PAGE

So reassuring to know that Straw/Milipede et al have commissioned this lot to administer the issuing of UK visas.

http://www.csc.com/public_sector/offerings/16609-identity_management

Part of this nearly $17 billion US corporation with 92,000 employees worldwide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Sciences_Corporation

Craig said, “Every time I see a Tory on television, they are banging on about immigration and putting more people in jail.”

Such actions reveal the fragmentation of the Tory inner circle by the rapidly tightening polls such that image supremo and son of a Hungarian immigrant himself, Localist Steve Hilton’s attempts to win over Cameron from the meticulous planning and criticisms of George Osborne.

For instance Osborne thought that Hilton’s deferred approach to spending cuts would “make us look weak”.

Since Hilton embarked on the “hug a hoodie” Webcameron video blogs and the “Dave” husky-hugging, wind-turbine-installing, concerned-modern-citizen approach which Osborne in private ridiculed as a “stunt,” many Tories regard Hilton as an archetypally Blairite figure with close friends such as Allan and No 10 aide Ben Wegg-Prosser.

It was Hilton who suggested tackling teenage ‘binge drinking’ by telling youngsters they are ‘abnormal’ if they have ‘more than four beers a week’.

£200,000 a year Hilton lives in America and travels to the UK to advise Cameron. He strongly advocates the benefits of moving power locally and involving local church groups as community leaders who apply for money from the ‘Big Society Bank’ to fund, for instance, nursery groups using local church halls so that single mothers can work without apparent government aid. However any formal association of churches is rejected. The idea that there can’t be more than one legitimate institutionally visible church at one given location I believe will not work in an increasingly multi-cultural Britain.

Hilton devised a poster campaign focusing on the Tory leader as a ‘saviour’ and featuring a heavily airbrushed Cameron. He used the wording, “I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS”, but Osborne said it made Cameron look too glib and presumptuous. Yet we witness the even more presumptuous statement of “measuring up the curtains for No.10.”

Hilton has tried hard to destroy the Tory image as a wealthy, self-serving tribe. The Ashcroft “non-dom” affair irritated Hilton. He told Cameron that we had to pull together or fall apart.

We are now witnessing this avalanche of disagreement on the public stage and Hilton is powerless to ‘bring it all together’ before Thurday.

The ‘demon eyes’ of the Blair poster devised by Hilton are now seen by the British public as belonging to Cameron.

While many immigrants are easily capable of assimilation, when it comes to Muslim immigrants, the problem is that they bring Islam and Sharia with them, along with a supremacist and intolerant mindset, making it difficult if not impossible for them to assimilate into British society, instead creating de facto Sharia ghettos. Where did Islam come from and how did it get intolerant and supremacist? Find out by studying Islam’s complete history free online with the Historyscoper at http://go.to/islamhistory

Views like Craig’s, and people with Craig’s knowledge and intelligence, and genuine humanity; even though he is a Liberal (only joking!); are filtered out of political debate in modern Britain. It’s indicative that a mild candidate like Clegg is perceived as “radical” and an alternative, compared to the two other “conservative” leaders, which considering how reactionary they are is hardly surprising.

In reality we now have three conservative parties competing for political power, and if one steps back a bit, the differences between them are cosmetic; style, emphasis, rhetoric.

“There are three alternatives – an amnesty, a Nazi scale round-up and deportation programme…”

The British used to be prone to view the world in terms of wogs, wops, and nignogs on the one hand, and superior white people on the other hand. Now they are prone to see the world in terms of homophobes, sexists, racists, and Nazis on the one hand and superior liberal people on the other hand. Both views are false, silly and dangerous.

To argue that dealing with law breakers according to the law is somehow being Nazi is idiotic.

You are talking rubbish Historyscoper!

We learned from Gordon Brown’s encounter with a very nice elderly lady that Eastern European immigrants are causing our youngsters to be frustrated in their job hunting. Certainly this is the case in Buckinghamshire were Bulgarian and Hungarian immigrants are prepared to work for less than minimum wage.

The majority of Muslims in my area own businesses such as Kebab take-aways, corner shops, restaurants and clothes outlets. Sharia law does not affect my local community and to suggest these people have a supremacist and intolerant mindset is insulting, unjust and insolent.

Ah, Historyscoper, I envy you – how easy it must be for you. Your post is emblematic of the truism that knowledge does not always bring wisdom.

Here’s a good article from today – at its core, saying more-or-less what I was saying yesterday on a previous thread of this weblog:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-scapegoats-for-societys-many-faults-1960889.html

I think the immigration amnesty is one of the major plus-points of voting Lib Dem. It’s a brave platform to put to a xenophobic and europhobic Britain, but the party will have looked at how this translates to support at the polls, and presumably found it positive on balance.

I’m also agreed with the consensus here – that the Tories are showing their nasty colours and that their future spending cuts will be ideological on top of necessary.

But I hear from a friend that the FT has warned that most of us have no idea of the true scale of the economic cutbacks that the next party has in store for us. They are likely to last only one term in office since they will prove hugely unpopular, and the next few years will be marked with Greece-style social unrest.

Given the Lib Dems are in favour of this, rather than the radical taxation required to recoup our losses from the banks and the non-doms, I wonder if voting for them now would provide endorsement of their future cutbacks.

I worry too that they’re too biased in favour of Israel, too pro-nuclear, and their support for PFI and the war in Afghanistan is also regressive. The Morning Star did a good piece on this yesterday.

This isn’t intended to be an anti-Lib Dem piece – just that we may vote for them now to turf out Labour only to find we’ve endorsed a forthcoming right-wing agenda (potentially, in coalition with the Tories).

I am still undecided.

Mass non-white immigration and wars have been the preferred means of elite-managed social engineering practised in first the US then Europe.

Such societal remodelling entrenches the elite power base by eroding each nation’s sovereign status,and entrapping governments and citizens in an infinite cycle of debt slavery and inflation.

For them it’s a win-win situation for us-well we lost the will to live anyway didn’t we?

I mean when the educational progress of Polish children (to name just one migrant group)can overtake their British rivals within the space of a couple of school terms we know our own people now have little capacity to compete.

State education actually handicaps British children who are far more vulnerable to the near ubiquitous negative peer-group pressure that exists in them than migrants.

The binding internal cohesion of family groups thoroughly supportive of education and the possibilities for advancement it can offer no longer exists across wide swathes of the indigenous community in Britain.

While,like many,I feel miffed that I was never consulted re-the merits of the multi-cultural society,and mightily irritated by the PC liberal brigade who insist on the absorptive capacity of our country,I actually welcome all newcomers to our shores.

They will always out-compete the violent drug-addled welfare-dependent work-shy British proletariat and its revolting offspring in any race to better themselves.

My welcome extends to the muslims whose countries we colonized or have made hell-holes by attacking them militarily or economically and to the East Europeans too.I have immense respect for their cultures and their attempts to better themselves by migrating to a new country.

Absorptive capacity of Britain’s or any other host country should be a matter of maximizing the benefits of which there are many and minimizing the costs of immigration.

Thanks for the link Suhayl – the article really struck a chord actually.

I’ve been deeply disappointed with the tone of the debates on immigration during the leaders debates and the campaign in general. To hear a Labour Prime Minister talk proudly of his determination to ‘ban unskilled workers’ from the UK, for instance, truly shocked me. As Craig points out, migrant workers have kept so many sectors of our economy afloat in recent times and enriched our society in so many other ways. Furthermore, as in most of the western world, our population is ageing and we will need more people of working age in coming years – indeed, we may find ourselves competing in the future for migrant labour with our European neighbours.

I don’t think Nick Clegg has gone far enough in trying to counter the xenophobia ingrained in debates about immigration. At least he has recognised the importance of the geographical distribution of population and encouraging people to move to areas where there is excess capacity. The Scottish Government, for example, is actively seeking to increase its population. And, as my Polish girlfriend points out to me, if they want to encourage workers to move to certain parts of the UK, introducing more direct flights from Polish cities to these areas would have a huge impact.

But I think the thrust of Yasmine Alibhai-Brown’s article is spot-on – we like to think of our society as open and fair, while our politicians have devoted so much of their energy debating how we can best keep people, with different religious and social outlooks, out.

Perhaps we can encourage more of our young people to learn other languages, live abroad and open their minds a little? Maybe then will we realise that we have so much to gain from embracing other cultures and respecting other attitudes to life, and so little to fear.

@Alfred – Craig did not suggest that deporting illegal immigrants is wrong in itself. But on this scale, it would be Nazi to do so i.e. it would require a fascist level of state control, surveillance and the wholesale destruction of liberty in order to determine where the immigrants are, to round them up in dawn raids, to intern them in camps, and to deport them.

Jon,

I don’t think the line of reasoning you offer makes much sense. Obviously, the enforcement of law must be conducted lawfully, and in which case, it would not result in the destruction of liberty.

Anyway, you’ve already got a surveillance state. Will the Lib-Dems do away with that? If so, I support them in it.

You can’t just rip about a million people out of the UK. Each person is linked to other people, it’s a network, a society, and everyone is part of it whether they are here legally or otherwise. The problem should never have been permitted to develop, but now that it has, an amnesty is a sensible first step.

Immigration is usually percieved as a one-way process of people arriving and none leaving. I don’t know the figures but this must be nonsense; surely it’s a matter of an imbalance between arrivals and departures.

Alfred,

have a look at the LibDems Freedom Bill:

http://freedom.libdems.org.uk/

There’s a petition (that I’ve signed) – but you’re not a UK subject, are you?

Clark,

Re: Freedom Bill

Thanks very much for the link. There’s a lot to digest there and I will study it at leisure but it seems and excellent idea.

I am a UK citizen, although I have been away so long I no longer have the right to vote. But maybe I can still sign a petition.

Jon,

Jon,

To be more constructive about the treatment of illegal immigrants, I suggest that they be granted a temporary visa if they turn themselves in before a deadline. That would legalize their position, and provide them time to settle their affairs in Britain, make any claim they might have to refugee status and find out how, once they have returned home, they might apply for permanent residence in Britain. In addition, they might be provided with a resettlement allowance.

For those failing to turn themselves in, expulsion would, obviously, follow apprehension quite promptly.

Apparently the LibDems want to raise CGT to 50% which would be a business killer.

For savers like me who receive 0% in interest from the bank, I have been forced to invest in various capital markets and any profits from this will also be taxed at 50%. What a load of tossers.

Alfred wrote:

“To argue that dealing with law breakers according to the law is somehow being Nazi is idiotic.”

Surely the Nazis were in full accordance of the law, in everything that they did?

Alfred,

(I assume that’s your anonymous reply to Jon above)

I don’t think that’ll work.

(1) Depending on the time limit of the temporary visa, there could be little incentive to report in. If you’d lived somewhere for years without detection, why turn yourself in if you’d be deported within months?

(2) Unless uptake was overwhelming (90% or more?) the same logistic problems would hold of locating a huge number of people. Where will you send them? Will those countries accept them?

I really don’t like this “sling ‘em out” approach, and I can’t believe that the Tories are serious – they just think it’s a vote-winner. And it’s unnecessary; people are leaving all the time.

And Alfred,

re. your 12:22 comment; it’s all the recent laws that are directly responsible for a huge loss of liberty.

“Surely the Nazis were in full accordance of the law, in everything that they did?”

No. Nazism was the rule of men (or one man) not laws. Hitler ruled by decree. He did whatever he liked, including mass murder.

There was no law to justify the Blood Purge of 1934 (7,000 victims, including Ernst Rohm, head of the Brown Shirts), and certainly no law to justify the extermination of Jews. There is not even a paper trail on the extermination of Jews.

Easy round them up and ship them home its as easy as that. 95% of all these criminals and it is still and always has been a criminal offence to enter the country illegally or to remain without leave. Are here for economic reasons. I would like to live in a mansion but it dosnt entitle me to go to the nearest mansion and move in with the current occupants. If we give an amnesty. You will let hundreds of thousands of people into the country who we dont know who they are or what they have done previously who obviously are not worried about flouting the law. It will encourage more people to flock into the country in the hope of the next amnsety. All these people and there is at least 500000 of them would then be entitled to bring in wifes husbands and children. This would bump it up to 1500000 where would they all live how could we school all the children how could we treat all the illnesses. I am a realist most of these criminals are using false identities how would they prove they had been in the UK for 10years? Would they pay for the process or would they get it free so all the persons who have paid thousands of pounds to go through the process legally get a refund? And those genuine persons who have tried lawfully to get a visa to marry or settle in the UK but were refused for some silly technicality will they now be allowed to come. Why should criminals be rewarded and those who obey the law be penalised? The process of administering the application would be huge and cost millions the UKBA would be swamped with applications processing would take years and in the meantime other illegals would be neglected whilst all resources would be diverted to the new target of the amnesty. People realise a huge percentage of persons coming to the UK havnt gone back for the last 10 years. Hundreds of thousands of back logged asylum seekers are in the system due to political interference stopping UK Borders doing their job. I am warning you all go down the amnesty route and you will unleash a beast.

And dont insult me by comparing me with a Nazi that is the last resort of the desperate and ignorant. Keeping our borders secure and maintaining our borders and upholding and enforcing the law is not being a Nazi its just sensible. If you have left your door open deliberately for 10 years letting anyone in then you sell the house dont be surprised if the new owners kick the squatters out.

Jack decided otherwise last night. Although there was a gathering it was announced that food would not be served as that would be against the electoral law.

Yhay meant that our informing of the police has had an effect yesterday and that they thought otherwise.

It also meant that we were better informed than the police and on the ball.

lets hope that this draws a line under the practises that have marked out so many campaings.

Thanks again for Craigs foresight and help in these matters. Today and tommorrow the largest amount of postal votes will arrive and we will be alert to the intrecacies of the process.

Some ballot papers are reissued, something we are not allowed to scrutinise apparently. We can’t ask as to who the spoiled ballot papers belonged to, nor can we see how many extra have been sent to them as a replacement, a massive loophole in the postal vote arrangements large parties can exploit.

All I can find out is the overall numbers sent out.

We had a chap come up to us who lives in Little Harwell, he had 4 polling cards come through his door under the same name and the person does not even live there any more, we will find out more today.

What no Holocaust paper trail….are you in denial,Alfred?

May I remind people that Holocaust denial is an indictable offence in many European states.

Exactly what lessons can be learned from Nazi resettlement policies for Jews and Slavs is not clear.Probably it’s akin to studying the Gulag and attempting draw lessons from that.

According to Edwin Black (The Transfer Agreement) the Nazi-Zionist collaboration that resettled German Jews in Palestine during the 1930s laid the economic and political foundations for the the state of Israel.

It was the US and UK who sought to stem the flow of Jews to Palestine in this period.

On the Holocaust paper trail-curiously enough,though Hannah Arendt devoted a whole chapter of Eichmann in Jerusalem to the Wansee Conference whence the Final Solution supposedly was organized by Heydrich with Eichmann in attendance-she cited no evidence to support the idea that the Nazis had decided on any extermination policy at this point.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt stated that Eichmann was actually not an anti-semite.Many sources likewise have noted Eichamnn’s fluency in Hebrew,his willingness to exchange Jews for money and war

materiel.Still others have insisted that Eichmann was Jewish himself.

In the thousands of pages re-WW2 in the biographies of Eisenhower,Churchill and De Gaulle no mention of a Holocaust against the Jews is mentioned.

No paper trail there either.

Holocaust propaganda was in no small way a product of Soviet post-WW2 PR which dovetailed neatly with Anglo-American accounts about their having fought the “good war”.

“They will always out-compete the violent drug-addled welfare-dependent work-shy British proletariat and its revolting offspring in any race to better themselves.”

Gosh that’s so…Nick Griffin.He also despises the white working class:

http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/the-real-bnp/the-BNP-in-their-own-words.php

And that’s what really pisses me off about the BNP. They openly despise the people they claim to represent. Like Daily Mail journalists, in fact. Those poor, largely decent & peaceful people, suckered and sold down the river, again.

@Albert, my line of reasoning was mainly to explain what Craig meant, rather than adding anything new to the debate. But it happens that it is my view also that an amnesty is the only way to deal with this. You seem to support the current deportations without any extra loss of liberty – but what do you think the Border Agency and its predecessors has been doing since the advent of economic migration? The whole point of discussing the amnesty is that given the current balance of police power, finding where overstaying visitors are faster, in order to deport them, is not possible.

I do think that quite a lot of the debate – not just from the BNP – has thought that we’re presently not doing anything to remove visit overstayers. “Just deport them” is what we’re *trying* to do at the moment, and it’s not working.

@Steve, no-one is calling you a Nazi for discussing immigration, and no-one is calling you a Nazi for wanting overstayers deported. As I explained to Albert, what was meant by this comment was that in order to deport all 0.5-1.0m overstayers, a huge increase in police powers would be required, to the extent that the police would start looking like jackbooted thugs, and not officers bound by the laws of the state.

> “Easy round them up and ship them home its as easy as that.”

The comments I made above are a reasonable reply to your opening remarks – we are doing that already. But “rounding them up” needs to know where to look, it needs to involve a legal process that is fair to both sides, and it needs to have countries willing to receive these persons.

I can’t see how the Lib Dem amnesty would encourage an increased level of illegal immigration. People need to have been in the UK for a number of years, and they are only proposing to do the amnesty once. People therefore won’t be able to visit the UK, overstay, and then claim amnesty retrospectively, as they would have to have documented history of being in the country for some years, and would be deported if their documentation turns out to be fabricated.

There is a paradox here, to be sure. One the one hand, people such as yourself are keen to see the deportation of immigrants without permission to remain. On the other hand, often the same political grouping holds the ‘law-abiding taxpayer’ in great esteem, positing that they are daily under threat from a great crowd of unwashed ne’erdowells. But the wonderful part is that the illegal immigrants, most of whom are working, could be turned into law-abiding taxpayers. This gives us some great advantages:

* an army of people willing to undertake community service across the country to apologise for their misdemeanour;

* 0.5-1.0 million people who can all become taxpayers

* a substantial boost to the economy when it is most required

* a huge dent in the ability of law-breaking companies and criminal gangs to exploit a vulnerable group.

The only other thing I would offer is – if you were a manual worker in an area in the world where there was no work, would you not want to come to the UK to work? Between breaking British immigration law and not providing for your family, which would you choose?

Slightly off-topic: I learnt the word “regularise” this week.

‘But the wonderful part is that the illegal immigrants, most of whom are working, could be turned into law-abiding taxpayers’.

Jon- you are talking thru your hat. You assume that visa overstayers by definition pay no taxes. That assumes that the DWP (which issues NI numbers) works in co-operation with the Home Office & Borders Agency, which certainly isn’t the case. My wife is a legal non EU immigrant, and was able to get legitimate work very easily using a temporary NI number, based on her date of birth. The interview she attended for a full NI number was perfunctory, to say the least- one of the other immigrants there that day was trying to get a permanent NI number by using an expired Jamaican passport. I saw no evidence that the DWP employees cared about this in the slightest. Like lowly graded civil servants everywhere, they have targets to meet, and shopping visa overstayers to the Borders Agency certainly wasn’t one of them.

‘Foreign Students’ (most of whom, as Craig points out, attend visa mills, not genuine colleges) are allowed to work up to 16 hours a week, so the DWP is obliged to issue NI numbers to them. Thereafter, that NI number can be used in perpetuity, either by the original owner of it, or by a friend or relative impersonating them.

The idea that ‘regularising’ illegals will significantly increase tax & NI receipts is complete rubbish. What will increase however is the outlay on the full range of welfare benefits, some of which are at present too ‘risky’ for illegals to claim, as doing so is more likely to put them on the state’s defective radar.

Craig does make several good points about the near impossibility of deporting large numbers of illegals, about the collapse of effective visa application handling in embassies and consulates abroad, and about NuLab’s complicity in turning a blind eye to overstayers from the ‘new commonwealth’, who constitute a useful vote bank in some areas(look at Hazel Blears!). But I would disagree with him over the desirability of a general amnesty. Given that the countries ‘exporting’ migrants here benefit from their remittances, amnesties should ideally be country -specific, and should be given in return for tangible benefits accruing to the UK.For example, at present, China refuses to accept the return of Chinese nationals convicted of offences in the UK, on the basis that the offenders may be ‘overseas Chinese’. An amnesty for Chinese overstayers of long standing, and no criminal record, could thus be tied to an undertaking by the PRC to accept in return, and without question, the UK’s deportation of convicted criminals of Chinese nationality.

What I miss from Mark’s comment is Craig’s insight that ‘illegal immigrants’ form the backbone of our cleaning, food preparation and childcare services; not to mention our cockle picking industry.

What I further miss is the knowledge that benefits in this country are pathetic and the system punitive. Anyone sane, including an ‘illegal immigrant’, would prefer to work.

‘Ah, but there aren’t enough jobs for them, these days’ people cry. But there are plenty of jobs. We do not have enough teachers, nurses, doctors, road sweepers or carers. What they mean is that ‘we do not have enough money to pay more people to do these jobs’.

Not only does this mean a reliance on underpaid, exploited workers for our basic services, it is patently untrue. The money is there. It is just being sucked out of communities by war, corporations and banks.

In the meantime fiddle around suggesting how we can deport more people, by all means. The government has already claimed it’s deporting one person every six minutes (I think they must have meant ‘hours’).

Finally I know of two previously ‘illegal immigrants’, one from Brazil, and one from Burma. Both came here without English; one started work as a cleaner, the other as a fruit packer. One is now a psychologist and the other a professional care worker. People who talk about ‘illegal immigrants’ without compassion or understanding are being forced to wear a very narrow and painful pair of spectacles. By whom, I wonder.

“What I miss from Mark’s comment is Craig’s insight that ‘illegal immigrants’ form the backbone of our cleaning, food preparation and childcare services; not to mention our cockle picking industry.”

Ah, I fear you overstate slightly. The cocklepickers died because they didn’t have the local knowledge you need to survive out on the quicksands. Poor exploited sods.

People in situations like that are the victims, and getting all aerated about how toughly to deal with them is a distraction. We should go for the people that make the profits on their work, and their fear. Tough on Mafia, tough on the causes of Mafia …

Freeborn,

The absence of a paper trail is no evidence of the absence of a crime.

Criminals do not normally create a paper trail the better to ensure their own conviction.

Even David Irving, convicted Holocaust denier, acknowledges that several million Jews were executed on the Western front: a conclusion he bases on intercepts of German radio communications that were decrypted by Turing’s group at Bletchley Park. In this, his current assessment is in line with that of Jewish Holocaust scholar, the late Raul Hilberg.

A problem with Holocaust denial laws, apart from the fact that they infringe a basic democratic freedom, is that they encourage Holocaust denial. For if the occurrence of the Holocaust is supported by valid historical evidence, what need is there to outlaw denial? If the evidence is plain and uncontroversial, denialists will be seen for what they are, deluded fools.

But perhaps the creation of Holocaust deniers is the point of Holocaust denial laws, in which case such laws are doubly vile: they infringe liberty and induce false belief.

Steve, be mellow. Remember The White Ship and The Mountains of Madness.

Btw, I assume you are a different person from ‘Stevie’ and the two ‘Stephens’, who also post hereabouts from time-to-time. Are you the chap who wanted to have a Lincolnshire sausage fry-up? Or was that someone else again?

Anyway, whether or not you’re into herby sausages… the world is a complicated place and people, even more so. Dig it.

Technicolour-

Two points; firstly, not all UK benefits are ‘pathetic’, as you state. The deal here for non citizens is far better than in France, for instance- as the denizens of Sangatte know full well. There are legal immigrants (and some Brits with large families) living in the same part of London as Craig whose monthly income from Local Housing Allowance alone is well in excess of the average monthly UK income . The reimbursements allowable for rent payments incurred by welfare recipients in the UK are unparalled elsewhere in Europe.

Secondly, I’m not lacking in compassion for all illegal immigrants- and I’m not wearing ‘Daily Mail’ style blinkers either, as you imply. However countries, like individuals, are likely to ruin themselves if they dispense their compassion indiscrimately. And an amnesty applicable to every foreigner who has stuck it out here for 10 years sans a criminal record strikes me as inherently indiscriminate.

“the denizens of sangatte’

shame, poster. do some research?

Illegals appear to be easy to exploit due to economic desperation. Not that I support the minimum wage, as it is price fixing and antithesis to a free market. Nor do I like welfare, it doesn’t work at least in my limited experience.

I suspect many of the professionals made unemployed during the recent economic debacle will disagree about the attitude of natives to jobs expressed in the post here. There is a minority of dumb idiots propped up by the benefit system, but that has its price – being the state’s bitch.

However it is disingenous to tar all of a group with the same brush. Things like this:

http://i41.tinypic.com/10pmw3o.jpg

and this:

http://i40.tinypic.com/2ds3gio.jpg

both taken during the recent recession, suggest there is more to the job market than Craig and co appear to acknowledge.

Anecdotally the queues for jobs outside new retail stores reminded me of Depression-era bread lines. It isn’t a joke for those of us that aren’t eligible for welfare…

Nearly every one of 1.67m jobs created since 1997 is reported to have gone to a foreigner:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1264333/GENERAL-ELECTION-2010-Under-Labour-nearly-UK-jobs-taken-foreigners.html#ixzz0n12eM4Fw

which may explain why there seems to be no one of non-European origin in the queue of job seekers shown in the pictures to which Sam has provided links.

The implication is that among those seeking work, nearly all immigrants have succeeded, whereas, as we know, eight million Brits have not. Does that mean that the native population is discriminated against because they are underqualified, because they are overqualified or what?

But in any case the existence of an army of the unemployed and the partly employed amounting to 20% of the workforce at a time when immigration has been allowed out of control is testimony to the staggering ineptitude of the Blair-Brown government. If Labor win a single seat tomorrow it will be one more than they deserve.

Hello Alfred,

You get a lot of replies, and must consider yourself very much up against it, and you have my sympathy on that score. I’ve been in such environments myself, and it is difficult. Hats off to you for staying around.

With that in mind, I entirely understand that you might have missed a reply above which I should have stated more clearly, and I will attempt to do so below.

You wrote:

“To argue that dealing with law breakers according to the law is somehow being Nazi is idiotic.”

Surely you are familiar with the fact that nothing the Nazis did to the Jews was actually illegal. Laws were codified, and generously interpreted by the legal system to make sure whatever took place was (arguably, maybe, but still arguably) legal.

In the same manner, John Wu and Alberto Gonzales assured the Bush regime that that there was nothing wrong with torture, up to and including crushing the testicles of the child of a “suspect” in front of him, in order to get him to talk.

We’ve had much on this blog about Lord Goldsmith and his assurance about the legality of the Iraq adventure.

All legal. So why should Mr. Murray be “idiotic” to talk about Nazis while the government is still remaining in the framework of the law, as you imply he is?

Being a Nazi while remaining within the law is exactly how they got their agenda acted upon, and anyone who knows anything about regimes, history and extremism in politics should find that totally obvious. “Idiotic” indeed!

Glenn,

I probably characterized Craig’s assertion as “idiotic” because he had characterized what I had said as “pathetic,” although I’ve got over that now.

Re: Nazi rule, it is correct to say that Hitler ruled by decree, i.e., Nazi Germany had a government of men not laws. True, Hitler’s power to rule by decree was the result of a legal change, i.e., the “Enabling Act”. But once that Act was in place, Hitler could do what he pleased. If his actions were dependent on legislation, it was legislation by a rubber stamp legislature, although I did not believe that any rubber stamp was used before the night of the long knives (1934) or the deportation and execution of Jews. But I would be interested to know if I am wrong.

If Craig believes that Cameron would seek to rule by decree I would characterize that as, well, um… paranoid, anyhow.

But I agree that rendition, torture, and assassination appear to have been adopted by the US without explicit legal justification, although I may be wrong. The Patriot Act may have served the same function as the Nazi Enabling Act – I have little knowledge of these matters.

While Blair may have been mis-informed about the legality of the Iraq war, it seems to me that his action in launching the war was legal under the British Parliamentary tradition, since there was no motion of non-confidence.

But perhaps I am unduly sanguine about Cameron. I know almost nothing about him. He seems, as someone said, a person your mother would like, but rather lacking in force of personality.

However, I actually approve of the fact that he was educated at Eton and Oxford, just like William Ewart Gladstone. Whether the ethical traditions of those establishments today are as they were in the 19th century, I have no idea. But one would hope that Cameron’s privileged background and excellent education have imbued him with respect for Parliamentary tradition, or the British Constitution, if you like, and a strong sense of duty integrity.

But perhaps we will find that he is as anxious as Tony Blair to please the people who can make him richer than he already is after he leaves office.

A slogan for today: ‘Cameron is Jedward’.

Oh damn, that’ll get him even more vacuous votes, won’t it.

Glenn, I think you may agree that it’s stimulating and intellectually pleasurable to engage in discourse with Alfred, largely because of his erudition and because he tends to avoid tossing out personal insults, so even if one disagrees with some of his basic premises, there’s no need for him to feel up against it.

Alfred, I find that it’s best to be wary of quoting from The Daily Mail about specifically ‘immigrants’. They don’t have a very good record on the subject, either in terms of veracity or in terms of good faith. They do publish some good material on a variety of other subjects, so I’m not condemning them out of hand, by any means, but on ‘immigrants’ they’re a deeply compromised source.

May to compare the liberal and compassionate laws relating to immigration and the human rights act to those laws made by hitler to kill jews is ridiculous. The laws are very fair and not draconian at all with so many loop holes and opportunities to appeal they are more or less pointless. You are seeing things through rose coloured specs people who enter the UK illegally or overstay are criminals. And to stay and work they are committing further offences signing false statements, Having false documents, Obtaining goods by deception. It is an escalating spiral. You should see how hard it is to get a bank account these days? Persons who have such disregard for the law then find it very easy to justify other minor law infringements. Hitler was a brutal tyrant and to compare anyone who has genuine concern for the law and immigration numbers is wrong and a typical NuLabour smear and distraction technique. I agree totally that it wont make a penny for anyone and will cost us money for all the reasons mentioned before. I appreciate that it sounds cruel to restrict immigration and stop people entering the UK or deport illegals but London is full to bursting point and do we really want are green belt suburds built on to accomodate the world. If you have travelled widely other than on package holidays then you will know that other than America everyone wants to come to the UK you dont get thousands qeueing outside other EU embassies sleeping rough for days. UK is seen as a soft touch and an amnesty would just act as a further magnet for more

Full to bursting-point…? Have you eaten too many sausages, Steve.

Oh, everybody’s said everything there is to be said. What’s the point? But here goes.

My (Pakistani) cousin, who has been to visit us six times over the past decade or more was refused a visa because (a single woman, living at home looking afetr her parents) she doesn’t have enough dosh in the bank. She’s always gone back on-time, has never overstayed, has never done anything illegal.

My sister-in-law’s (Indian) brother (who has never done anything illegal) got a visa to visit England to see his suddenly terminally-ill father. He had all the appropriate papers and yet was detained deliberately and needlessly at Heathrow for five hours, while his father slipped into unconsciousness. Such stores are legion. Please don’t tell me this is compassionate.

On the tactical level, Craig’s right, it needs sorted so that it works properly.

On th strategic level, the distorted nature of the global economy and the systemic reliance of our economies on the generation of war needs addressed.

Finally, I’m afraid this is what has happened in history, over centuries. It is NOT just the UK! Think about Syria, absorbing millions of Iraqi refugees who were made refugees by our government(s). How many did ‘we’ take? A handfull. Even translators for the Army couldn’t get in, and instead were murdered as collaborators in Iraq by anti-occupation forces. Think about Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, who took millions of refugees during the 1980s-1990s, refugees of our wars with the Soviets. Many of these refugees remain in those countries; in Pakistan as a cohort they’ve done rather well!

Our state’s actions have resulted in the the generation of millions of refugees/ asylum-seekers.

I’m afraid the results are clear.

The world is at bursting-point.

The moral of the story? People are not sausages.

Mark: re housing benefit – yes there’s an ongoing scam by many private landlords (many of whom own multiple houses) to charge up to double the going rate for a flat when they know the person’s going to be on benefits. More exploitation. The answer is, as Richard says, to deal with the exploiters.

@Steve – sigh – I am happy to talk things over with you, but you’ve repeated your complaint about the Nazi comparison apparently without reading my response to it at [May 4, 2010 12:00 PM].

Whether the laws are draconion at present is another matter. And whilst I am not sure whether they are or not, I am firmly of the view that their implementation is draconion: Craig will tell you that Uzbekistan is regarded by the Home Offfice as a safe location for repatriation of asylum seekers, for example. And children are separated from their parents, and essentially thrown into jail – evidence links are available on the net if you want them. The status quo is not compassionate.

In any case, we were talking specifically about the “deport them all” policy, not the status quo. I don’t see how it can be facilitated without requiring new police powers to knock in the front doors of people living in multi-cultural neighbourhoods, en masse. Your second generation Asian and Far Eastern naturalised communities are not going to thank you for supporting that; I suspect they’re quite partial to their front doors, just as I am mine.

PS. The art of paragraphing helps the readers eyes from going out of focus

‘Draconian’? Women asylum seekers in Yarls Wood Detention Centre recently went on hunger strike for 5 weeks. That’s how bad the conditions are.

Suhayl,

You said,

“I find that it’s best to be wary of quoting from The Daily Mail about specifically ‘immigrants’. They don’t have a very good record on the subject, either in terms of veracity or in terms of good faith.”

My quote from the Mail was this:

“Nearly every one of 1.67m jobs created since 1997 is reported to have gone to a foreigner”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1264333/GENERAL-ELECTION-2010-Under-Labour-nearly-UK-jobs-taken-foreigners.html#ixzz0n12eM4Fw

Here’s Andrew Neil’s interpretation:

Thursday’s exchange on the Daily Politics with Home Office Minister Phil Woolas has generated some controversy so, in the calm of the aftermath, I have looked again at his response.

“Using figures from the Labour Force Survey compiled by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) I put to him a finding from the latest survey available (Q3, 2009): that employment among those of working age (16-64) has risen by almost 1.7m since 1997 (what politicians like to describe as 1.7m extra jobs “created” — the exact figure for the rise in employment is 1.67m); but that the number of foreign-born workers in the labour force has increased by over 1.64m.

This doesn’t mean that all the additional jobs have gone to the foreign-born; but it does mean that the rise in employment among the indigenous population (of all races, colours and creeds) since 1997 has been de minimus, since the rise in overall employment has almost been matched by an increase in the foreign-born labour force. So it is hard to argue that the rise in employment since 1997 has meant, to coin a phrase, “British jobs for British workers”.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/dailypolitics/andrewneil/2010/04/immigration_ministers_figures.html?page=17

Not exactly how the Mail puts it, but the point remains. New jobs in Britain have gone overwhelmingly to foreign-born workers, most of whom can be described as immigrants, while 20% (currently) of the British workforce is unemployed or underemployed.

So there is chronic systemic unemployment in the British workforce. This is Thatcher’s/ capitalism’s ‘lumpenprol’ legacy, not that of immigrants. Immigrants actually create net jobs. They buy things, they expand businesses, they open businesses, they provide jobs for British people. The Daily Mail’s (and Andrew Neil is a very bad example of a journalist) is disingenuous in presenting ‘facts and figures’. It’s as though there were a picture and they show you only the cloud in the far right-hand corner, not the flowers, the buildings, the people, the blue sky. And they say, “Look! There’s a cloud. Since that cloud appeared, 10 billion immigrants have come to Britain. This proves that clouds are a product of immigration.”

People are not out of work (I’m not talking just about the current recession, but more generally) because of immigrants, they’re out of work largely because of a cruddy economic system that has failed several generations of British people.

Alfred, do a handstand. The world appears different, no?

Suhayl Saadi: Yes, I agree very much – Alfred is worth talking to precisely because he doesn’t immediately descend into petty insults and bickering. In fact, it takes him a good few prods to even start going there. So one can actually talk about the subject matter without each side trying its hand at a more polished form of the usual brush-off of one’s personally dismissed political view.