I make no claim over the accuracy of the statistics, and I neither endorse or refute her personal conclusions. The report is long and detailed, so it will be published in sections over the next week or so. I have put statistical information in blue font. The remainder are Mrs Gillick's own views. YOUR VIEWS ARE WELCOME, both for and against, and you can make them known via the contact form at the bottom of the blog, or via Twitter - https://twitter.com/wisbechevenmore
FUNDING THE IMPACT
In March 2009 Hazel Blears, the
Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, set up the Migration
Impacts Fund (MIF)9 to
help public bodies cope with the mass immigration insisted on by the
Government. A total of £70m was made available, financed (so they said) by a
compulsory £50 levy on immigration application fees. Funding was allocated to
local projects which "....would bring benefits to the settled
community as well as the migrants".
The MIF was axed in October 2010 by the
incoming Coalition Government on the grounds that "....local authorities
themselves are in the best position to decide how to address the impacts of
migration on their communities".
Three years later, in 2012,
the Coalition opened up its own pot of gold, the Rogue Landlords Fund,10 this time presumably to assist public
services cope with the additional 200,000 migrants from Romania and Bulgaria
discovered already living here, and whose inflow rose by a further 61,000
during 2013-14.
6.
MIGRATION IMPACTS FUND
But what a generous honey-pot the MIF was, with any number of bureaucratic fingers dipping into taxpayer's pockets for projects in Cambridgeshire and Fenland, none of which incidentally brought any "benefits to the settled community". Here's how £1.343 million was spent from the Fund. 11
CAMBRIDGESHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL (2009-10)
To help Police/Health services with emergency accommodation and casework support.......£370,025
To combat migrant overcrowding and exploitation...£140,000
CAMBRIDGESHIRE POLICE (2009-10)
Three multilingual PCSOs, to reduce
police interpretation and translation costs.....£213,714
The production of a DVD training aid to assist staff who use
interpreters....£30,000
Enhanced road safety education to migrant
road users.....£20,000
Specialist police for domestic abuse and
sexual violence in migrant communities...£139,514
FENLAND
COUNCIL (2009/11)
To employ an additional Private Sector
Housing Officer......£57,383
Rogue Landlord's Fund to tackle exploitation of
migrant workers (20013/14).......£179,000
THOMAS CLARKSON
ACADEMY (2009-10)
To recruit multi-disciplinary staff to address pressures on services and families...£193,500
SLAV'S LABOURS LOST
But what of the migrants' home countries? Will the mass exodus of
their young people, mostly to the UK, create prosperity and social justice in
Eastern Europe? Poland, for instance, is a large country with a low birth rate.
Since it joined the EU in 2004 its population of around 38 million has been
deprived not only of 2,300 doctors, but three
million able-bodied young workers, dealing a major body-blow to its
construction and heavy industries. And even though its economy is being
scaffolded by massive subsidies from Brussels, and benefits to some extent from
the remittances sent home by its expatriate workers, this cannot compensate
Poland in the long-run for the loss of so much of its skilled manpower.
Meanwhile the importation of masses of unskilled labour from neighbouring
countries even poorer than itself, has depressed Polish wage levels still
further.
Now consider the Baltic
states, with Lithuania losing at least a million of its young men and women
(they already make up the bulk of migrants in Fenland), and this from a country
smaller than Ireland, with a population of less than 4 million and one of the lowest birthrates in the world. Little Latvia is half as small
again. How can any of these ex-Soviet nations feasibly survive such a
devastating depletion of their own 'prime seed corn' ?
Did Fenland Council ever
consider this bigger European picture in its Migrant Population Strategy? Well,
yes it did; but only insofar as the future of Eastern European economies might
impact on the success of Fenland businesses:
'The
extent to which (attracting migrant workers) can be sustained will invariably depend on
conditions and circumstances prevailing in labour exporting countries.....A
significant determinant of future patterns of labour migration to the UK will
be the economic fortunes of labour exporting countries, especially the European
Economic Area countries. In this context, a major unknown is the future
economic conditions that are likely to prevail in the newest EU member States' 12
In other words, we'll be all right
Jack........just so long as their
economies aren't.
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