Globalisation and Our Value System
By Joan Bridge-Taylor.at http://bnpideas.com/
People come here to live from all over the world, pushing our population up from about 54 millions in 1997 when Labour came to power to about 61 millions today. This number is projected to rise to 70 million by 2020.
The previous government denied the figures, said that the increase would not happen and, even if it did, we would cope because “we are a civilized country”. The present government makes lots of the right noises about protecting our borders, but in actual fact has done nothing since it took office. Being “civilized” has little to do with the matter.In the real world where the rest of us live, people have to compete for space. The transport system runs at full-to-spill-over capacity at the best of times. When you get in your car the roads are clogged with other traffic. When you stop there is nowhere to park. You can pay a lot of money to get on a train and then have to stand for the whole journey. When there is a bit of snow, or fog or heavy rain, or even heat, transport comes to a complete standstill.
After a week or two without rain we are threatened with water rationing as the system cannot cope with the number of people who now use it. Sewage, built for the 30 million or so people alive in Victorian times, strains to cope with double the numbers today.
Housing is under similar pressure. It is in very short supply. As a result house prices have rocketed beyond the reach of ordinary young working couples. Council housing goes to those in most need – often to immigrants with as many as 12 children and perhaps even several wives. Thousands of pounds per month goes to foreign landlords who let their expensive, central London houses out to foreign nationals at our expense. This is British tax payers hard-earned money going straight out of the country into foreign pockets.
As in housing, so in education: 250,000 students have not found a university place this year. The cost of increasing numbers wanting to study has meant the end of free places and horrendously expensive tuition fees for our own young people. While government funding is cut back, universities give places to profitable foreign students who pay more tuition fees. They can afford to do so because they come here on scholarships funded with the foreign aid we send them.
The health service operates the same way, except that nobody pays. Foreigners are supposed to be billed, but the bills are rarely, if ever, chased up. You donate a body organ to a hospital and find that they have sold it to someone from overseas. The reasons are the same as in education. Hospitals strapped for cash owing to increasing demand make money that way. My own local surgery in a West Country town is experiencing 1,500 new registrations a month at the moment. This means that 750 extra people enter our country each day.
Everybody talks about these problems. Nobody mentions the cause – overpopulation caused by uncontrolled immigration. There are too many of us on this small island. Not just too many of us, but too many who have nothing in common with each other. Look around you in our major cities. Do people live in communal harmony, or in enclosed groups? Do they integrate freely or is there little mixing and little feeling of having much in common? How much mixing and integration goes on? Immigrants often come and go. Understandably, new comers have little loyalty towards us. They are here for their own personal gain. What do they contribute to our communities, or sense of social cohesion? From what I observe, outside of food and restaurants, it is relatively little. Many never even learn to speak the language fluently.
Quite naturally, immigrants come to get something out of us. What they put back in is incidental. If they have a violent temperament or extreme religious views, they take pleasure in robbing our system of welfare benefits and living off us. As gratitude is an extremely difficult emotion to live with they often resent us as they do so.
What do they feel about taking welfare money off the British taxpayer? “It is Allah’s money”, they say. Terrorists-in- training see overburdening the welfare state as one of the ways to bring down the country. After that it will be all the easier to establish a Sharia state. They may be a minority, but they are very influential in setting attitudes and trends.
Many immigrants do not stay permanently. They move on when we no longer serve their purpose, or when they think they can do better somewhere else. Any contribution they make to our economy is merely a side effect of what they get out of us. Many have no loyalty or obligation to us. Millions of pounds are send abroad every day to boost the economies of emerging countries, which will then compete with our own on our money.
Many Bangladeshi people I spoke to in Crawley. West Sussex, recently told me that they were going to Canada as soon as they had the money, work experience and language skills to do so. They use our country to hone those skills while receiving welfare benefits, tax relief, education and health services. Child allowances are paid even if the children do not live in this country. Immigrants also qualify for old age pensions after they leave, depleting our economy and boosting theirs.
We ask nothing of the people who come to live here, not even loyalty. In their investigations into the “underpants bomber” on the plane to Chicago on Christmas Day a few years ago, the Americans publicly stated that British multiculturalism breeds terrorists. The Metropolitan police have said that every terrorist plot, anywhere in the world, has had strong links with London. Look in any newspaper and you will find reports of court cases involving would-be terrorists. There is a new one about every week.
Poor countries suffer immeasurably from the loss of skilled people who come here.
An article in The Maltese Times last November said that until very recently over 75% of newly qualified doctors trained in Malta left to live in Britain. They have now altered their system to stop that – and quite right too. Nepal desperately needs to retain the Gurkhas, their families and their money. Nepal is dirt poor. It needs every bit of help those Gurkhas can give.
You can’t blame anybody for following their own self-interests and moving to where they are best off, but a mix of vastly dissimilar people destroys any sense of community. It robs the country the emigrants leave and it disturbs the countries they move to.
A plentiful supply of cheap immigrant labour suppresses wages for our own workers. British people sit at home on benefits while foreigners do the work they ought to be doing. This robs the British of pride and self-respect. It destroys their morale. It saps the vitality of the nation.
If you don’t believe what I say, ask a man on benefits what he does. He will never confess to sitting at home doing nothing. That is too shameful to him. He will mention a job he used to do and follow it up with how he can’t find work like that now. He knows he is living on taxpayers’ handouts and in his heart he resents it. He is unable to hold is head up high and maintain his self respect, but in many cases he is better off financially staying at home than going to work for low wages. It is a degrading situation to which we thoughtlessly condemn millions of our own people.
This lack of pride and dignity, quite rightly, generates anger and resentment – amongst young men in particular. The government gives the women and children more if they live on their own than if they live with a low earning spouse or partner. Men are degraded and made outcasts by the very system they are paying to support! In the absence of a strong, permanent father, is it any wonder that some rebellious boys form gangs to replace the male bonding, belonging and purpose they have missed out on?
This is the downside to deliberate government policy that nobody will speak about. It is a taboo subject, but the resentment against it simmers. It sometimes shows itself in drunkenness, anti social or criminal gangs or even murders. Pent up resentment with no outlet is a dangerous feeling.
Government, however, does not really believe in community, in mutual support, self-help and nationhood. It believes in growth, profits and globalization. It is globalization, however, which is destroying the glue that holds our value system and our society together. Apart from being a source for tax revenues, the government overlooks the average man or woman. It has its sights set on its place in the world at large.
In an article in The Sunday Times some time ago, Dominic Lawson said that the British government wants to “elevate British foreign policy above the constraints of mere national interest.” It believes that “the objective of our foreign policy should be to advance the entire planet towards a state of grace and enlightenment roughly similar to that existing in Islington or Hampstead.”
The British government has a long standing obsession with being the world leader. In his evidence to the Chilcot Enquiry into the Iraq War, our former ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, said that Tony Blair consistently failed to pursue British interests in his dealings with George Bush. “New Labour believed that in a globalized world, foreign policy could no longer be about anything other than global issues and that Britain should be a leader in promoting global policies”.
Can you imagine Iran, India, America, China or Russia putting British interests before their own? Of course not, so our globalized stance is suicidal to our present economic well being and our future prospects.
With its misguided policies of pushing what it sees as “global issues”, the government ignores British interests. Global harmony is a myth. A belief in it only works if everybody thinks the same way (which they don’t), or if a country has the power to make everybody act as though they think the same way. Britain no longer has this power.
Sadly for Britain, the balance of power has shifted. American power is waning. The BRIC countries ( Brazil, Russia, India and China) are the places where future global policies will be decided. Look at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009. Who decided what the future of global emissions should be? Was it Britain, or was it China, India Russia and America whose viewpoints won out? The major world powers will not be lectured on what their future should be by a country that is now very much in the second rank.
Government policy is no longer about anything other than global issues. They firmly believe that there is no such thing as a national interest and that Britain should be a leader in promoting global policies whether or not it is in this country’s interests to do so. This stance is suicidal to our present economic well being and our future prospects.
Globalisation is not working for British interests on any level. Ten years ago we had the world’s 4th largest economy. We currently lie in 7th place and will be outside the top 10 inside 10 years.
It is tragic to see us sliding downhill, especially when it would be so easy to do things better.
British workers could be given priority for jobs. Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand already operate this policy. It could be against the law for profitable British firms to be deliberately wound down, broken up and sold off in pieces to foreigners. It could be made illegal for pension funds to be robbed by foreign companies.
Take the car industry as an example. English car and van firms go out of business because vehicles can be made cheaper elsewhere. Cheaper for whom? Certainly not cheaper for the taxpayer who has to pay the unemployment benefits of the workers thrown out of a job.
Instead of looking at short term profits, why can’t we build for the future? Why can’t all public services (police, ambulances, government transport departments and so on) be required to drive vehicles made in Britain? That one step alone would have saved our motor industry.
In the 1990s, Devon County Council bought ambulances in America because they were cheaper than those built at home. They then found that the huge vehicles, built for straight American highways, would not negotiate the tight corners in Devon country lanes. They quickly sold them off at a big loss. If short term profit is allowed to be the be all it will very shortly end all. Buying abroad should always be considered second best to supporting our own products. An anything goes attitude will smash the economy and our way of life. The new world leaders do not and will not include us.
In this globalized and free-for-all society, people are told that they can be anything they want and live anyway they want. It is this lack of standards and concern for others that has led to the bankers’ greed. They had the power to do whatever they wanted – and look at the results. They nearly brought down the whole system. As they are still at it, they might yet do so.
We lose more than we gain from globalisation and this struggle for a place among the dominant countries of the world. Why can’t we just accept who we are and what we are?
Let’s look at ourselves honestly, without delusions of grandeur, and rediscover our core values. What about cultivating some pride, fellowship, self-help and community responsibility? Does contentment lie in rushing about trying to earn enough to pay for the next house make-over or desirable gadget, or does it lie in a contented and vibrant communities, security and a sense of belonging?
These are old fashioned values that are rarely spoken about now. Perhaps they are even mostly forgotten. If that is true, what a lot we have lost. We can no longer compete with the biggest and the best, so let’s stop importing people to improve our profitability and grow the economy. Let’s look, instead, at what we already have and the good that we want to preserve. Let’s take pride in our traditional national values. There’s a lot to be proud of.
