OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES, one of Wisbech's most ardent campaigners has been Victoria Gillick. She came to nationwide attention when she challenged the rights of doctors to give confidential contraceptive advice to teenage girls without bringing parents into the loop.
She spoke at the controversial public meeting over immigration a couple of years ago. Now she has painstakingly compiled a report on how she sees immigration affecting Wisbech and the surrounding area. The information and statistics contained in the report are, she says, all via Freedom of Information requests.
She has asked me to host the report on this blog, and I am happy to do so, but 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
PART ONE OF THE FOILING CABINET REPORT
DATA ACQUIRED THROUGH
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUESTS
What's going on in Fenland?
Impoverishment
Very
flat, the Fens. Sea-bed flat in fact, being the drained and reclaimed marshland
encircling the southern and eastern sides of the Wash. Transformed over the
centuries into super-fertile farmland, the Fens stretch in a wide arc from the
Norfolk port of King's Lynn, southwards to Cambridge, across to Peterborough
and up to Boston in Lincolnshire. The district known as
Fenland lies in the north-west corner of
Cambridgeshire, abutting Norfolk and Lincolnshire and encompassing twenty-nine
villages and the four market towns of Wisbech, March, Chatteris and
Whittlesey.
So much for the geography.
This Bulletin, however, is about Fenland's history: its recent, troubling
history, which truth to say, differs only in scale to what's been happening all
over the country: Government engendered, business orientated, taxpayer funded impoverishment.
Fenland's troubles began, as
so many untoward outcomes have begun, with the European Union stipulating unfettered movement of peoples
between Member States. Our government eagerly complied and our public
authorities obligingly cooperated. At the receiving end.....Joe Public,
ignored, neglected and vilified. We shall therefore start with a brief look at
the impact on Fenland as a whole, followed by a more detailed scrutiny of one
of its market towns: Wisbech.
CONTENTS
Page
FENLAND
Demographic trends 1981-2001
............................ 2
East European immigration
................................... 3
'Migrant Population Strategy'
2007....................... 4/5
'Migration Impacts Fund'
...................................... 5/6
The migrants' home countries
.............................. 6
WISBECH
Background
............................................................ 7
Population & age
structure ..................................... 8
Local numbers .......................................................
9
School
population.................................................. 10
Healthcare (GPs and Hospital)
.............................. 11
Accommodation
................................................... 12
Social Housing
...................................................... 12
Wages
.................................................................... 13
Unemployment
..................................................... 14
Alcohol
................................................................. 15
Crime
.................................................................... 16
Costing
the UK & the County ............................... 17
Costing the District
................................................ 18
Impoverishing Wisbech
..........................................19
References
2.
FENLAND
Fenland grows and prepares food
for the nation, its farms and food-processing factories always needing extra
horny-handed workers during the hectic harvest months. Hiring additional
seasonal labour, whether local people, students, traveller families or
foreigners on work permits, has thus been part and parcel of Fenland's yearly
cycle for generations.
Between 1981-2001 Fenland's indigenous
population swelled by over sixteen thousand souls, rising from 67,175 to 83,549.1 During those twenty years, however, the age structure in
the area had seen a decline in the number of younger people, and a corresponding
increase in older ones:
1981-2001
* Under-20s decreased ...... 28.0 - 24%
* 20-29s decreased.............12.4 - 10.3%
* 30-39s rose..................... 13.8 - 14.6%
* 40-59s rose..................... 23.8 - 26.7%
* Over-60s rose................. 22.0 -
24.5%,
This demographic change was not unique to Fenland, but was part of
a national trend consequent on low birth rates in the 1970s and '80s. To maintain
stable population growth a country needs a birth rate of 2.1 children. The
post-war baby-boom of 1946-47 had a rate of around 2.4 children which led to
another, smaller, baby-bulge twenty years later. Parliament, persuaded by birth
control lobbyists that Britain was on the brink of a catastrophic population
explosion, sought to head-off the disaster by legalising abortion in 1967 and
making contraception available on the NHS
in 1973. The upshot was a mega Baby-Bust as annual birth rates plummeted
to 1.7 children, the lowest level ever recorded in Britain.2 By 1984 the number of children aged 0-15 was
almost two million fewer than in 1971, resulting in thousands of school
closures during the following decade.
In 1988 government advisers alerted the business world to the stark
fact that by 1995 the number of 18-21 year-olds would have fallen by 1.2
million.3 Most employers nevertheless ignored the warnings,
preferring instead to blame their labour problems on young people themselves,
publicly lambasting "the youth of today" as lazy, incompetent,
work-shy slackers. How stupid is that?
As ever, the Government then
made matters worse by scrapping Student Maintenance Grants, traditionally
topped-up by holiday and weekend jobs, in favour of bank-run Loan Schemes.
Thereafter most students chose simply to ratchet-up their huge bank debt all
year round.
By the turn of the Millennium there was indeed a dramatic fall in 15-29 year-olds, with
Fenland suffering a drop of almost 1,800
in this critical age group. The labour shortage did have one beneficial effect
however, for it obliged notoriously tight-fisted Fen farmers and factory bosses
to pay their workforce a decent living wage for a change: more than double the Minimum Wage.
Then out of the blue, early
in the new Century, something unprecedented happened in Fenland.
It all began in 2002 when
Brussels granted EU membership to eight East
European nations. Most of the other big beasts in Europe (Germany, France,
Spain, Italy) put a 7-year block on migrants from Eastern Europe pouring across
their borders in search of jobs and homes. But British industry, being ever
mindful that cheap immigrant labour was the quick way to easy profits, couldn't
wait to have them here, and persuaded the Government to post a more or less
open invitation to the new Member States, saying in effect: "Come one,
come all.....our economy needs YOU!"
The entreaty was all but
irresistible, thanks to a previous ruling from the European Court of Human
Rights, which in 1985 declared that anyone entitled to live in another country
was also entitled to bring every other member of their extended family with
them.
3.
The outcome was predictable;
nay, it was intentional. By 2003
thousands of Portuguese families suddenly began arriving in Britain, emigrating
here because (they said) they had been ousted from their agricultural jobs back
home by a sudden incoming wave of Polish workers. Very soon, however, the
Polish tide changed direction and began sweeping over Britain instead, inundating
Fenland farms and factories in particular. Following fast in its wake came an
even bigger tsunami of Lithuanians, Latvians and ethnic Russians. At least a million were in the UK by 2006. Nor
were these newcomers arriving only as temporary seasonal workers. A large and
growing proportion intended to settle here......permanently.
Fen farmers and factory bosses
were ecstatic. Landlords and gangmasters couldn't believe their luck.
Mini-wages were back again for everyone......plus multi-lets at maxi-rents for
the foreigners. Lovely big bucks and
loud hoorahs all round.
Only one nasty fly in the ointment: the
hefty government increases in Fenland's Business Rates, which have risen 63% in
the last ten years, from around £14 million to almost £23 million by 2013.
INVISIBLE IMMIGRANTS
The Office of National Statistics (ONS) hasn't a clue how many people are living in the UK nowadays.
Its 2011 Census recorded over one
million residents were from Eastern
Europe, but in April 2014 it finally
admitted to underestimating their numbers by a massive 350,000.4
Meanwhile the Census for
Fenland had the population increasing to 95,262,
of which a mere 4,439 were East European nationals, including 665
migrant children and pensioners. This
hopelessly inaccurate head count also occurred in the two migrant-heavy
districts of Lincolnshire, with Boston said to have only 6,839 East Europeans,
and Spalding just 5,241.5
In short, most of the East European workers had simply ignored the Census altogether. The trouble was, these wholly
erroneous ONS statistics are still being used by Cambridgeshire officials to
formulate all their policies and funding for Fenland. [See Page 8: 'Uncounted
migrants']
COMMUNITIES BALKANISED
Generally speaking, when
immigrants are relatively few in number they will make an effort to blend into
the landscape by adopting the language and culture of the host community. But
East Europeans in Fenland were legion and increasing year on year, and
consequently felt neither the need nor the desire to speak English and
integrate. Being employed en masse in
fields and factories, and then lodged together in shared houses, each different
Teutonic/Slavic nationality sticking closely with its own, served to Balkanise
the newcomers still more. Before long the Poles and Lithuanians had established
numerous cafés, shops and supermarkets in Fenland, employing their own people
to sell their own imported food in their own language. The Polish migrants were
further segregated by being granted separate church services, conducted by
their own priests in their own native tongue. Meanwhile Lithuanians acquired a
couple of Wisbech pubs, one of whose licensees was ordered by the police to
remove a somewhat hostile notice from its windows: 'No British here'.
By 2006 the strain of living
among so many uncommunicative foreigners was beginning to tell on the Fenland
populace, particularly in Wisbech where most of the food processing and
packaging industries were based, and three-quarters of the migrants were
living.6 Here, not only were local workplaces becoming filled with
East Europeans, but whole neighbourhoods as well.
Something had to be done. But
what, and how.....and by whom?
4.
TO BE CONTINUED
