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Minimum Wages, Immigration, Culture and Education.

Net migration to the UK has run at hundreds of thousands a year for decades, of which about a quarter since 2004 has been “A8 countries”, Poland, the Baltic states, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary, another quarter from ‘Core EU’ and the rest from non-EU countries, mainly India, Pakistan and West Africa. 13% of the population of the UK was born overseas, of whom over 2/3rds are non-EU migrants. This is an unprecedented migration to the rich world from the poor, and It’s not clear from this EU migration is the underlying problem. The Poles will integrate fast, and leave imprints on the culture like a higher incidence of catholicism, bigos (a stew of meat and Sauerkraut) and some hard-to-spell surnames. They’re often better educated than the natives, and work harder.

In general the view I’ve taken over the years is that minimum wages are a bad thing, arguing that they are mainly paid for by the people who otherwise wouldn’t get a job at all. Only a job can lead to a better job, and if people are unemployed for a long time, they often become unemployable. So by this logic, keeping unemployment down should in the long-run be better for the poorest.

But, there is a trade off. When I grew up, late ’80s and ’90s, I cannot recall seeing cars washed by hand. When my father wasn’t exploiting child labour by getting me and my brother to do a rubbish, half-arsed job for which we expected to be paid handsomely, we went to see the “blue Dougals” at the petrol station. The UK as a wealthy country, had substituted Capital for Labour, and cars were washed by big machines at every petrol station. But a team of a dozen hard-working and cheerful eastern Europeans can set up a car-wash, do inside and out for very little capital outlay – a jet washer, and some sponges, so when the EU accession countries citizens moved to seek work, this is what many did. The car wash machines were gradually removed and replaced by people. This is the opposite of progress.

Labour substituted for capital

Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture.

Europe’s wealth, it’s vitality, its progress didn’t spring from European individual or cultural superiority. It started when half the population was wiped out by Yersinia pestis in the 14th Century. There was a certain amount of luck – the same event increased the power of the landowner in Rice states and in pre-feudal societies farther East, but in Northwestern Europe, this created a shortage of Labour, and the peasants rose up a generation afterwards to demand higher wages from their lords. When this happened in Italy, the energy was put into sculpture of the nude male form, and was called “the Renaissance”. When wages rise, it makes sense to build machines rather than employ labour, which has a virtuous feedback loop: skilled people running the machines drive up production, and become richer, which creates an incentive for further innovation. More widespread desire for, and access to education is grease in the wheels of this, the motor of progress that led to the industrial revolution.

The opening up of America, a nation with a perpetual and long-lasting shortage of labour not only added another motor to that European culture of innovation which grew up after the Black Death, but also absorbed the excess labour of Europe. While there is a labour shortage, immigration can be managed, though immigrants in large numbers have nowhere, ever been welcomed by the people they move to. Even when the people are kith and kin, the ‘Scots Irish’ (in reality, families originally from Northern England and the Scottish Borders) were moved on by the Germans and English who’d already settled the East coast. They ended up in Appalachia.

It’s clear, then in the short run and in aggregate, wages aren’t “driven down” by migration in a market economy. Part of that, in modern times may be due to the minimum wage, which protects some of the people most vulnerable to substitution, but also the ‘lump of Labour fallacy’. Immigrants, especially young workers with families bring demand as well as supply and these things more-or-less balance. They aren’t “taking our jobs” but they are changing the nature of jobs available. And the vast supply of excess labour from the subcontinent, Africa and the poorer bits of Europe is not exactly an incentive to invest in productivity-enhancing machines, as the car-wash example shows. The mass immigration from the poor world has the potential to stall the western motor of innovation and may contribute to wages not rising as far as they might, especially for the lowest skilled workers.

The UK has a problem with productivity. UK employers have got good at employing the excess Labour of a serious chunk of the world, UK wages have been flat for a decade, and these things are linked. So the Chancellor is hiking the minimum wage in the hope of good headlines, and to incentivise investment to drive productivity. So. What effect will this have on immigration? Will it draw more migrants to the UK hoping for higher wages, like European immigration to the USA, or will it price low-skilled immigration out of the Labour market, and allow the motor of progress to continue?

Splits that used to be geographic – some countries were rich, and others poor and the movement between the two was rare, is moving to one where there are still two countries, it’s just the divide is social, educational, and cultural. You have a global, liberal, free market culture, which values education and novelty. And you have national, small ‘c’ conservatives who just want their own culture, don’t care about education all that much, won’t move to find a job, expect to be looked after who stay put and resent incomers. And the latter are disproportionately annoyed about foreigners moving into “their” neighbourhoods while it’s the former who have more to fear in the short term from highly skilled competition, minimum wages see to that. And if minimum wages rise far enough, low skilled workers will not be able to get jobs and they will stop coming to the UK. The problem is, the lowest skilled people are often native. The cost of a raised minimum wage will be borne by those least able to cope.

If we are to avoid society fracturing permanently into Morlocks and Eloi we do need to manage migration, to keep that motor humming. We cannot let the world come at will. But there was no need to pull up the drawbridge against EU migrants who always looked like collateral damage to me.

It’s not all about economic self-interest, nor is it wholly naked in-group preference (what educated, open minded people call “bigotry”). It is the interplay between the two. Ultimately the stagnation of UK wages over the last 10 years isn’t due to migration, but the recovery from a balance-sheet recession of 2007-9. It’s the feeling of ennui caused by a decade of stagnation which has caused the anti-immigration nonsense, the rather blameless Poles have just become a Piñata and for a population that was persuaded to lash out at the EU when they really wanted to lash out at “the Muslims”. The tragedy is all this happened just as we were getting back to normal.

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On Germany’s “Morality”

Germany’s population is falling, German women are breeding below replacement rates and so they have 1.7m empty homes. Thus offering to house 800,000 Syrians is a great deal easier for Germany than it is for the UK, which has net migration of more than 300,000 last year, plus something of a baby-boom (now tailing off). Germany can, and indeed needs, more immigrants. The UK does not. Syrian immigrants solve a problem for Germany – low housing prices, declining population and economic drift in many regions. The very same people in the UK would merely add to pressure on housing, and do little to boost an already strong economy.

Build more houses you say? The UK is building at capacity, there’s a shortage of Bricks and Brickies, and we’re not keeping up.

So there you go. It’s handy when morality solves a problem for you. Cheap too.

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Dead Children in the Mediterranean

The independent leads today with harrowing photographs of a small boy, maybe two years old, face-down in the surf having drowned. You will see this image shared on social media, along with impassioned pleas to “do something”, as if opening Europe’s borders to the 10m Syrians who are currently displaced is a viable option.

You will hear it said that this is all because of the 2003 war in Iraq. Perhaps that is a part of it. But perhaps a premature withdrawal before Iraq was able to look after its own security is more to blame. But actually this is a small part of the problem. People are fleeing Syria, where the west didn’t intervene to topple a poison-gas using dictator (Assad, gassed people around Damascus in 2013) to one where we did (Saddam Hussein gassed Kurds in Halabja in 1988).

The origins of the Civil war in Syria are not due to the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, but more down to the self-immolation of a market trader called Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia in December 2010, an event credited with starting the “Arab spring” whereby the populations of several countries, including Syria rose up in an attempt to overthrow their dictatorial leaders. As ever, economics played a part. The rising oil price back then made fuel subsidies unaffordable to non-oil exporting leaders such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Syria’s Bashar Al Assad. Removing the fuel subsidies created an environment where the previously content middle classes of Damascus and Cairo decided to throw their lot in with the usual malcontents, the Muslim Brotherhoods and less savory organisations who saw their chance.

But you will see the lazy assertion that the Syrian civil war is “our fault” because of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And certainly the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi later became ISIS/ISIL/IS under Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was facilitated by the lawlessness of post-US withdrawal Iraq and the incompetence of the Governments.

But ultimately, this is the long-running sore sectarian sore of the middle-east, that various dictators have sat upon, with varying degrees of success, with or without help from outside powers, since the 9th century.

The problem, those showing the photo of the dead child on the beach would have you believe, is that “we” caused the problem. “We” did not. The problem isn’t that Europe is too “callous”, and that the problem would go away if everyone was as achingly moral as they were. There are 10m people displaced around Syria’s borders. The brunt is Borne by Turkey Lebanon and Jordan. Iraq too is taking its share. It’s just in the UNHCR camps, well run, by the way, there’s no work. It’s a boring, depressing, but safe existence. There is food and water, from which shit is separated. It is quite understandable that people seek a better life in Europe.

Europe is spending billions, helping people in the camps. That people want to come is understandable. But the idea we’re doing nothing to help them, or have an obligation to let them in, is more about the virtue-signalling of the person saying it, that the real moral position. Worse than the vacuous moral posturing, is the complete lack of agency you give to the people in this situation. Millions are waiting patiently in the camps, or in Beirut or Amman to return to their homes should peace return to Syria. Yet some decide to put their children in the hands of people smugglers and unseaworthy vessels and unventilated trucks. These people bear the responsibility for the dead children far more than the “Cameron” whom countless memes exhort to “do more”.

 The very people most likely to share these self-aggrandising, shroud-waving memes on social media, are the same ones who’re ostentatiously anti-war. Perhaps if any politician in the west is responsible for the success of ISIS it’s Ed Miliband who successfully vetoed international military action in 2013, wholly for domestic political concerns in order to wrong-foot the Prime Minister. Perhaps if we’d started supporting reasonable groups in the Anti-Assad forces in 2013 (or earlier, my view it was already by then 18 months too late), IS may not have got such a foothold. Or maybe not. We will never know.

Not “our” fault, those dead kids. We do have an obligation to help Syrians and we are doing so through UNHCR, but that’s not the same as playing host to the entire population. The solution in Syria is military. If you want to blame a British politician, blame Ed Miliband. An American one? Barack Obama who brought the Troops home from Iraq prematurely, before Iraq could look after its own security. But ultimately blaming politicians in the west for the complete failure of the middle east is futile.

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Immigration: Some is good, More isn’t Necessarily Better

The reason the UK is attracting migrants from all over the world is, thanks to our Empires, our Language is the word language. Migrants are more likely to speak English than French (which is why Algerians and Senegalese tend to stay in France). There are a huge number of people from all over the world already living here, so migrants can plug into existing communities.

Thanks to the invention of free-market, liberal democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, and especially since the rejection of Socialism in 1979, the UK has a vibrant and diverse economy, that can absorb near-enough everyone who wants to come and play. The UK is richer than Poland, and despite Labour’s best efforts, remains a better place to live than Eritrea. We have secure property rights, which means foreign oligarchs can stow their looted wealth in the form of London property, where the likes of Putin cannot confiscate it.

The UK is a prosperous country, with an open economy, secure property rights and a relatively liberal society. British people are tolerant of immigrants and the UK enjoys good community relations.

We do not have ID cards, and the police cannot stop you on a whim. Thus “illegal” immigrants find it easy to find work in the grey economy. Because we have a relatively generous welfare state, there are a lot of jobs – fruit picking, cleaning, domestic labour, care etc out of which the UK-born have priced themselves. The prize – indefinite leave to remain – is within reach of almost anyone who can get here, and work undetected for long enough.

That is why people cling to the axles of lorries to leave France, and it is mostly something of which we can be proud.

People, self organising in Calais, for the right to cling to the axle of a Britain-bound Lorry.

Immigration is good. It does not follow that more is better. That tolerant and open society requires that the majority in it are born, and steeped in it from birth. The main fear the native population has from immigration is communities – the Bradford Pakistanis for example who come to dominate an area, and then cease to integrate. Integration into mainstream British life is vital, if that open society is to be maintained. The Ugandan asians and the Afro-Caribbeans who came over in the 50s and 60s have integrated. Sikhs and Hindus do. Arabs and Eastern Europeans do. Nigerians do.

Despite our success in integration, we cannot take the millions waiting to cross the mediterranean, though in practice we do end up taking most of those camped at Calais. In making it hard to come (sales of wetsuits, and the discovery of corpses in Holland and Norway are indicative of the risks people are willing to take) we limit the number prepared to try.

We cannot allow too many people brutalised by war, ignorant of how to survive in a liberal society to come, lest they are tempted create their own ghettos like Bradford. Too many people, and the incentive to learn English properly, and the imperative to integrate that comes with it, is lost. And it is the Ghettos that people object to, not immigration. It’s not race, it’s the compatibility of culture and the rate of change of a society; a rate of change that many of the people neither asked for, nor want. When a majority of children in the local school are not British, people question the change: Is this for the best?

So. Net migration to the UK is running at 1-200,000 a year. We add two million people every decade or so. This is why the UK is climbing the charts of National GDP, not falling. We’ve even got Germany in our sights. UK to be the 4th Largest economy (US$ Nominal terms) on earth in the not too distant future. Immigration is at such a level that the UK has halted its relative decline. Whatever the economic benefits, there are limits to immigration consistent with a liberal, tolerant and free society, especially from countries without a tolerant, liberal and free culture.

Labour, in office openly sought to “rub the right’s nose in diversity”, hoping immigrants would vote labour in perpetuity. The risk comes when the electorate never bought into the plan. When it was suggested there were limits to migration, people were told they were “racist”. The idiot poujadism of UKIP was the result: leading to the return of openly Nativist politics to the mainstream of British politics. The contempt Labour have shown for the electorate on this issue, is one of the main reasons they are facing oblivion now. The mixing up of Migrants with refugees and asylum seekers to suggest “we” have a moral duty to take people, is just continuing this ignoble tradition of contempt.

People want to stem migration of illiterate spouses from Pakistan, but these people are coming to join relatives already here. People want to limit Lithuanian bricklayers, or Polish plumbers but these people are covered by EU free movement of people (and in any case are vital to dealing with the shortage of housing…). We and the EU need to do much more to stem the flow, humanely, of very poor people from Africa, Afghanistan and Syria, and this includes aid and intervention to put their countries back together. So this leaves skilled migrants from outside the EU such as Nigerian doctors, Malawian nurses or Chinese people coming here to study, all of whom are particularly helpful to the UK economy, if there is to be any reduction in the number of Net Migrants.

It’s all counter-productive. Cameron deserves blame for setting a silly target on a whim, and Labour deserves blame for encouraging the boil to fester for a decade and creating the problem of legitimacy immigration now faces. Any attempts to control immigration mean putting bureaucrats in control of whom a Bradford Pakistani can marry, or whether a Somali can work as a Taxi driver. It’s going to throw up hard cases and inhumanity, as any bureaucratic system inevitably must. This sticks in my libertarian craw. There are going to be Canadians and Australians not granted leave to remain despite holding down decent jobs and living with British people. And all this because of silly targets, and the failure of some communities to integrate. We cannot stem the immigration people do have a problem with, so we’re abusing immigrants who’re going to accept our norms and be accepted.

We cannot take them all. The right-on left should stop the sanctimonious moral preening of pretending we can. We cannot stop them all coming. The idiot right should stop demonising people who’re mostly just trying desperately for a better life for themselves and their families.

We are lucky to have been born here. Part of our duty is to protect the legacy of good governance and social harmony we’re bequeathed. This legacy needs protecting from immigrants who won’t ever share our values, if too many come at once as well as from idiotic populists on the right, dog-whistling to racists and from left-wing extremists who hate our society and way of life, and who wish to see it swamped to spite an falsely concious electorate which repeatedly failed to vote socialism. Net migration is running at 1-200,000 a year. We can cope with that, just. Especially if they come from a variety of places, both terrible and less terrible. But not much more than that, really.

There you have it: An unsatisfying fudge, like so much of the democratic politics that have created the society immigrants are prepared to risk so much to join. Much more fun to read a moral absolute – a Guardian editorial telling you how brave and noble the immigrants are, or the Daily Mail’s dehumanising sub-fascist rhetoric. But the extreme position is almost always wrong, and the unsatisfying fudge of democracy works, despite appearances.

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The Calais Migrant Crisis

Thousands of people are camped at Calais, and are trying to board lorries as they cross the English channel on the Eurostar or Ferries. Most of these people are from Somalia, Eritrea, Syria and Afghanistan. The tone of the debate is ghastly. On the one hand you have UKIP and the Tabloids suggesting “sending in the Army”, describing the people pouring into Europe over the mediterranean hoping to reach Northern Europe “cockroaches“. This is just grotesque lack of concern for a dehumanised outgroup of desperate people. On the other, you have people saying “let them all in”, which is just vapid moral posturing.

They aren’t coming because our benefits system is a soft-touch. They’d probably find the French system easier. They’re trying to cross the Channel because of the Language – they’re more likely to have some English than French, and they believe (rightly) it will be easier to find work in the UK than in France.

We cannot let the millions (yes, millions) who’d come, were the UK to open its borders, settle at will. Why not? Because to let such a huge number in would be disruptive to the society the migrants want to join. Liberal, free-market democracy is a fragile thing, and if you let millions, with a limited grasp of English, brutalised by war, and completely unprepared to cope in a sophisticated market economy, you risk destroying the thing that brought them here in the first place. Government has a duty to the people who’re born here, to manage the flow of people so that it minimises the disruption to society and culture. People feel “swamped” by the flow in certain parts of the country as it is, by people who are pretty similar. The country can absorb lots of people, and doing so will be good for the country, but it cannot be a free-for-all. The differentials in wealth between the UK and Somalia (for example) are just too great, and travel too easy for people to move at will. Lovely though the thought of a world without borders is, borders remain an unfortunate necessity.
Free movement for Poles and Czechs isn’t a problem because they share most of our cultural assumptions, come from up-and-coming countries limiting the ‘push’, and are sufficiently educated to find work in the UK. Yet even the few hundred thousand Central and Eastern Europeans who’ve moved here are vastly controversial. The number of potential migrants from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia and North Africa is an order of magnitude greater. Poles are pretty well educated, and find work easily. This is not true of most Somalis and Eritreans. There isn’t enough low-skilled work for our own British-born morons, without importing desperate africans to compete with them for what little there is. Poles haven’t been brutalised by decades of war, and so don’t tend to form violent Criminal gangs. Somalis do. And so forth. If you pretend to not see a difference between a Polish graduate, and a Somali goatherd because it troubles your left-wing, right-on moral bubble then you need to grow up. Immigration is a good thing. It doesn’t follow that more is always better.
But then we cannot let people die of hunger and cold in “jungle camps” outside calais. Nor can we let them drown in the Mediterranean. So what are the destination countries to do? First admit the problem around Calais, whilst acute, is as nothing to that on Lesbos or Lampedusa. The Greek and Italian authorities are swamped by the tide of humanity moving north over the sea. This is a whole-Europe issue, and it requires a European solution. Unfortunately that means confining and processing migrants, and repatriating those who fail to gain the right to enter. It means shouldering our share of the burden. This needs to be robust, but humane and if there’s to be anything like a solution, rather than booting the problem into the long grass, it will probably involve a vast migrant camp or camps, built and administered by the EU, on a mediterranean island, or somewhere on the North African coast.
This is an issue with no easy answers. But if your solution involves shooting migrants, or, on the other hand, letting them all in, you’re not part of a serious attempt to solve the problem.
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On the African Boat People and Katie Hopkins.

My CV reads a lot like that of Katie Hopkins. We both went to RMA Sandhurst. We both dropped out close to commissioning, and both on medical grounds. We both then became polemicist commentators: her on TV, me on here. She made a living out of it, I didn’t though. The Strapline of this Blog is “moderate opinions, immoderately put”. For much of what Hopkins says is genuine, realpolitik sense spoken in a way morons can understand it. And she winds all the right people up, sort of like a skinny, female Jeremy Clarkson, without the wit.

Then Hopkins referred to the people crammed onto fishing boats trying to cross the Mediterranean sea to get to Europe, as “Cockroaches” and there she and I part company. That such things are said and thought shouldn’t surprise anyone. That they are printed in a national paper, though, should. That they were yesterday was shocking, to the extent I don’t recognise my country. Hopkins as one who wanted once to be an officer in the British Army, and in the Corps to which she applied, should know better. Much better. Such rhetoric from a bully pulpit such as a Sun Column is how pogroms start. Germany went from Civilised to Nazis in a little under a decade. It could never happen here? I’m not so sure now.

So, Katie Hopkins put herself way, way beyond the pale to me yesterday. She will be forever tainted with those callous, dehumanising words. Ultimately, I’m a libertarian, and believe in the fellowship of man, and feel enormous sympathy with those driven by poverty, to seek a better life. I believe borders are an affront to human dignity, but they are often an unfortunate necessity, when there’s a precious example of freedom and good government to which adding too many ill-educated migrants brought up in war-zones would risk. Without the example of the West, the experiment in free-market liberal democracy could be snuffed out to everyone’s long-term dis-benefit. Europe cannot accept thousands upon thousands of people from Africa and the Middle east, nor should we be expected to, simply because we are rich, though we should, like the enlargement project seek to extend the principle of free movement, slowly, surely and incrementally to countries which share our values.

Given that the Northern European countries who’re the ultimate destination of the migrants, cannot and will not accept everyone who wants to make Europe home we must try to stop them coming. But nor can we let people drown at sea. It was noticed during the previous ‘Mare Nostrum’ rescue operation that the traffickers would simply get into EU territorial waters, send a mayday signal, and scuttle the boat, the rescue ensuring their charges made it safely to land. EU Navies were being used as a leg in the Journey. It was thought denying the Traffickers the use of this leg would stop the flow. It did not.

So what should be done?

Big picture: we need to work with the Governments, however corrupt and vile, where the migrants come from. The less vile the regimes, the less hopeless the economies, the fewer refugees and migrants will be tempted to leave and make their way to Europe. UKIP and their poujadiste allies in Europe are wholly wrong on Foreign Aid to suggest that budgetary and technical support to governments is “wasted”. No-one though should expect rapid results.

One of the reasons for the current tide is the instability in Libya. One of the things Gadaffi* did for us was to stop the boats. (I am not sure letting them drown at sea is much worse than the methods he used… but ‘out of sight out of mind’ is the key principle of international humanitarianism…). Western governments, France and the UK especially are partially culpable for helping topple the regime, but not committing the resources for stability. But the culpability is limited. Qaddafi* was going to be toppled anyway, the current chaos was probably inevitable, and the UK and France probably averted a massacre in Benghazi. Nevertheless, the Libyan authorities need help to secure the country. This will require an appetite for an Iraq sized counter-insurgency for a decade, but Britain and France. Yup… this is unlikely to be popular.

An attempt to stem the ‘push’ from the homelands will be slow. So we need to make the journey less likely to be successful. We need to police the waters, turning back the migrant ships to their ports of origin on the North African coast. This will require investment in Naval and Aviation capacity from the whole EU and their maintenance on station for decades hence, and being comfortable with the use of force. I’m not holding my breath there either.

The good news is for humanity, the forces needed to police the sea lanes in the Mediterranean will also be capable and on station to rescue migrants whose boats sink. There is no need to turn the guns on the people in the boats, nor is there a need to be callous about their survival in the water. We are better than that.  If there are people in need of rescue, however, the rescue at present means the traffickers and the migrant has won. They’re in the EU, and there are plenty of people able and willing to play the system to make sure they are never returned from whence they came. So we need somewhere where the rules can be applied a little more quick and dirty.

What the EU needs is somewhere rescued boat people can go to be processed by the Bureaucracy. And unfortunately this means a camp, somewhere outside the EU. This is the Australian approach, they have camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea where migrants who don’t make it to Australia are sent, to be returned home. It’s likely, if this is a goer, an enclave will need to be taken from Libya, with or without the host Government’s permission. This would require the EU to contemplate the long-term use of Hard Power, and this being legislated for EU-wide and under the fire of the Human Rights lawyers. Nope, I’m not holding my breath there either.

Make no mistake. This is a horrible problem, dehumanising for all concerned. But given the unwillingness of Europe to accept people, the journey must be made as difficult, as humanly possible without making it inhumane. No-one comes out of this looking or feeling good. And those who accept some of the necessary steps above, will baulk at the others: A UKIPper despises the foreign aid and unified EU action, like a Green will abhor the necessity of Extra-territorial camps and capable Naval flotillas pointing guns at people.

This is what will work to stop the flow of migrants without letting them die at sea in their thousands. But this is not what will happen. This is why the African boat people are not being mentioned by politicians on the stump. Any soundbite on this subject, will be an anathema to one or other section of the electorate. There are no votes to be won in sorting this mess out, only votes to be lost.

*I never spell it the same way twice.

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Cameron’s European Immigration Gamble.

When Jean Claude Juncker was “elected” EU Commission president, he indicated he’d be happy to work with Cameron to renegotiate some powers. The one ‘Red Line’ he would not give is the free movement of people, enshrined in the Treaty of Rome.

There’s an unpleasant xenophobia in British politics at the moment, where immigration is seen as a terrible thing, the worst thing, rather than an answer to the question “who’s going to pay for your pension?”. Most people, the left hand tail of the bell curve, who are considering voting UKIP are horrified by stories in the papers of schools where 75% of children speak a different language. Not knowing what the “availability heuristic” is, UKIPpers then go on to consider this near-universal. Over half of children in inner london schools are by some measure children of immigrants. Is that because that’s the level of immigration, or because British people tend not to try to bring up infants in central London?

There is no doubt the foreign born population of the UK has expanded rapidly to around 12%. By far the biggest inflow is a half a million Poles who arrived between 2001 and 2011. Immigration from the Indian subcontinent continues at a steady trickle, tens of thousands a year. There’s remarkably little evidence that wages have been driven down by this movement of people, though the claim is often made, evidence has come from individual industries, but certainly doesn’t represent a widespread picture. If you believed the rhetoric, the 147,000 who came from Pakistan represented the majority. But the numbers are dwarfed by the Poles, whom no-one can accuse of scrounging, and who’re often spoken of in a positive light, before a tirade against “the muslims”.

Low skilled work is losing its value, and so low skilled workers are facing stagnating wages world wide, not just in the UK. It’s just comforting to those who are suffering the effects of globalisation and automation to blame the polish blokes on the building site, rather than impersonal economic forces and the relentless march of technology. Throwing up barriers to the Poles coming here won’t help Poland get richer, or improve the standard of living of British-born workers. It’s an act of spite, that demeans this country, and should be resisted.

Cameron for his part has staked a “solution” to European migration as part of his negotiating strategy. I cannot see how this could possibly benefit him, except in the narrow, tactical sense in so far as it gives some answer which the army of Conservative activists can give to on the doorstep, while to the voters of Rochester and Strood consider whether or not to vote for Mark Reckless. The free movement of people is so fundamental to the EU project that it cannot be offered as a bribe to keep the UK in. So Cameron is going to face a humiliating climbdown at some point. Being cynical, He probably expects to do this some time in 2015, after the election. Will it be enough?

UKIP cannot be appeased. They are a protest. They are angry, and giving them the policies they “want” won’t win them over. They will simply find something else to be angry about. Though it’s not said openly, anti-muslim sentiment is being mixed with anti-immigration rhetoric, to overcome the relatively positive image of the largest new immigrant communities, the poles have in the minds of much of the electorate. The people who’re considering voting UKIP don’t by and large, hate the poles. But they are becoming much more open in their dislike of Muslims. And UKIP is not afraid to allow the misconceptions, the disinformation and the outright lies to continue. Sometimes they get caught saying something outright racist. Most of the time UKIP keep the right side of outright bigotry, and let the xenophobic mood music do the work. This is “dog-whistle” politics.

It’s not policies UKIPpers want, it’s leadership they’re craving from Politicians. And on immigration at least, Cameron has failed the test. Having already made one promise, to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands, which he couldn’t deliver, is now doubling down. The political class, insofar as such a thing exists, has failed the test by failing to lay out why free movement of people, within the EU and from elsewhere will benefit everybody. The logic behind free trade – division of labour, comparative advantage and so forth is as true for where people live as it is for what we buy. In failing to point out where the electorate is wrong, as they are on immigration, politicians are failing in a duty to the people in a representative democracy.

Cameron’s gamble may pay off. But he either knows it cannot be delivered, in which case he’s lying, or thinks it can, in which case he’s putting political advantage ahead of the good of the country. Neither paints the Prime minister in a good light.

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