reducing the value of our women
Philippe Legrain describes John Reid’s plans for the Bulgars shortly to be flooding our shores, doing our jobs, claiming our dole, taking our women and reducing the value of our properties thusly:
All Bulgarians and Romanians will be free to travel to Britain without a visa – but only a minority will be able to obtain legal employment. Highly qualified workers and those with specific skills deemed to be in short supply will be allowed to work, as will students (albeit only part-time). So too will the self-employed: builders and plumbers, for instance. But low-skilled workers will only be allowed to seek employment in food processing or farming – and then only until a quota of 19,750 places has been filled. A new Migration Advisory Council will try to second-guess companies’ employment needs – sorry, advise the government on whether more low-skilled workers are needed, and whether they could benefit other sectors.
My powers of constructive criticism are low, but I think I can help out here. A while back, the government proposed that Chinese restaurants no longer be allowed to bring in staff from China and Hong Kong. Instead, their jobs should be filled by Poles. But these Poles also need to eat. So why not get all these Bulgarians and Romanians to open Polish restaurants? It makes about as much sense as designating them by diktat to any other section of the economy. Their catering needs could be met in turn by Croatians or Serbs when they join the EU.
M. Legrain adds that enforcing the regulations would require an “expensive and highly intrusive army of inspectorsâ€Â. Philippe, come on. This is New Labour. This is John Reid. This is the land of community support fedayeen; litter militia; parking ruritanians, each with a pointy hat to call his own. Establishing an expensive and highly intrusive army of inspectors is becoming the whole point of legislation. There is, I bet, an inspectorate somewhere whose sole job is to ensure that all new laws either require an expensive and highly intrusive army of inspectors or increase the expense and intrusiveness of our existing inspectocracy. I suppose that such misunderstandings of the British way of life are what you get when you only allow French people into Britain if they take jobs writing commentaries on immigration policy.
And anyway, an expensive and intrusive army of inspectors will provide jobs for all those Turks when they eventually join the EU and start flooding our properties, reducing the value of our women, claiming our shores…
When I saw that the ‘headline’ was ‘reducing the value of our women’, I thought that this peice was going to be a comment on, how, as migrants from the new EU countries will be limited to certain low-skilled sectors of the economy, sectors that are perhaps dominated by a female labour force, this will have the effect of further reducing the value we assign to work done by women.
Ah.
No particular quibble with your commentary, but must take you up on your use of the word “Bulgars”. Modern day Bulgarians are mostly a mix Slav and Bulgar. Slavs came from northern Europe, whilst Bulgar is the name given to a group of semi-nomadic tribes hailing from the north Black Sea area. Using Bulgar in place of Bulgarian is the equivalent of using Angle for Englishman.