Excellent article here on Enoch Powell’s famous and accurate "River of Blood" speech made 40 years ago. The political left and those gutless shills on the right such as the Cameronians all misrepresent  both what Powell said and also what he meant in that speech.

"They start by saying Powell was a racist, which is a deliberate lie. They then say that anyone who mentions immigration will now be tarred with that brush, which must therefore be a lie as well. This is convenient for those who have betrayed the people of this country by imposing an immigrant community so large upon it that it struggles to integrate – and, indeed, who have betrayed many of those immigrants too.."

Heffer gets this one 100% correct.  He concludes…

"Powell was the greatest Conservative thinker in political life in living memory. He foresaw what were then unimaginable tensions caused by forcibly altering the character of a country. We should remember him tomorrow with enhanced respect. For he was right."

You’ll remember earlier this week the liberal media seizing on selected  "leaks" from a Police report into the impact immigration was having on UK crime.

In essence, they all trumpeted the idea that the hundreds of thousands from Eastern Europe and beyond who have come here are no more criminally inclined than the natives. At the time I disputed this and now it comes to pass that we were being spoon-fed LIES by the liberal media.

The police report when published in full ACTUALLY makes it clear that there has been a "huge surge" in organised crime caused by this unprecedented immigration!  Further, Mike Fuller the (black) Chief Constable of Kent has advised Government that there has been  a 33% increase in violent crime due to migration surges in his area. A Whitehall memo reveals that 80-85% of all cash machine theft was carried out by – Romanian gangs? Who’d have thought that, eh? In London last year a third of all those charged with criminal offences were foreign. Romanians and Lithuanians topped the crime poll. Around a third of all sex offences and 50% of all frauds in London are carried out by those who come from abroad. Last September, the government itself revealed that it was anxious about 45,000 potential criminals coming from Romania and Bulgaria. Oddly enough, crime has FALLEN in Romania over the past year or so – can you guess why?

Look, I accept that many foreign people are law-abiding but the fact is that the tsunami of uncontrolled immigration HAS created a major problem for our police forces, at a tremendous cost. The multiculturalist elite in the media prefer to pretend otherwise, hence the outrageous spinning that took place earlier this week. Thanks to the multiculturalists, Britain has become a preferred destination for the criminal class – and if they originate in the EU, there is NOTHING to prohibit them coming in and thieving in our land.

Yesterday the liberal media was abuzz with the " news" that despite "one million" eastern europeans surging into the UK, there was no significant increase in crime. Hurray for the multiculti agenda and to hell with with those of us who say otherwise. However all was NOT as it seemed with yesterday’s spinning of the report before it was published.

"A  chief constable led calls for a cash boost to fight the "significant challenges" of migrant crime committed by eastern Europeans. Julie Spence, the head of Cambridgeshire Police, made the call as an official report from the Association of Chief Police Officers warned of a "huge surge" in organised crime caused by their influx."

..and then the report states..

"EU migration has brought with it a huge surge in the exploitation of migrants and organised crime. EU accession migrants are continuing to present challenges across a range of policing activity, including minor public order, increased violence and drink-related offences. Notable changes in crime patterns include extortion, ‘dipping’ [pickpocketing], human trafficking and a growing sex trade. Smaller police forces in rural areas, where hundreds of thousands of eastern European migrants congregate to work on farms, are facing "the biggest challenges".

So – nothing to see here, just move along -  pay no attention to the facts.. 

What a hoot. The influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe into Britain has not fuelled a rise in crime, according to a police study. This "study" which turns out to be anectodal accounts by "detectives and community officers" is further undermined by the rather inconvenient fact that the nationality of criminals is not required information. Goods news for all those law-abiding Romanians and Bulgarians, right?

Useful insight here from the BBC of all places of just how open to abuse the British citizenship test is. Since 2005, most foreign nationals applying for British citizenship have to prove both proficiency in the English language and a knowledge of British culture before their application is successful. But it appears that there are people out there who are prepared to take the test on behalf of others, for the right fee, of course. As one of these culprits puts it,

"With Chinese people, it’s not easy for them to tell," he explained. "Normally, they can’t tell the difference so we try our best to avoid going into those test centres where there’s an examiner who’s from the Philippines. Because they are from Asia, it’s easier for them to tell the difference."

Utterly cynical, criminal and absolutely predictable – so what has government done to counter it?

Excellent article here from Jeff Randal on the folly of the proposed "Eco-towns" – the wrong answer to the wrong question.

 "It’s the oldest trick in the dodgy salesman’s book. If the public isn’t buying what’s in store, simply rebrand unwanted goods with trendy labels designed to create an impression of must-have merchandise. In the new-media boom of the late 1990s, old-technology companies baffled us into believing that they had a vision for the future by adopting an internet suffix, eg, a toilet-roll manufacturer became Loopaper.com.

 

More recently, under pressure from the forces of political correctness, many troubled companies are trying to appear caring, inclusive and green. Never mind that the fundamental business is rooted in pollution or warfare: the addition of a buzzword changes perceptions. So, household bleach is renamed Organic Cleansing Fluid and – hey presto! – it flies off the shelves.

After a fourth consecutive election defeat in 1992, Labour finally cottoned on to the power of rebranding and has been at it ever since. The party machinery has developed a mastery of language distortion to achieve goals that it knows would be rejected by the electorate were they set out in plain English. Labour became New Labour. The red flag had already been swapped for the red rose. Tony Blair never dismantled our civic institutions: he "modernised" them. Gordon Brown did not sign up for a European constitution: it was just "a treaty".

The Government’s latest fraud, a work in progress, was unveiled yesterday with a shortlist of 15 locations for new towns in England. Ministers will pick 10, with five to be built by 2016 and the other half completed by 2020. But these will not be just any old towns, they will be "eco-towns" and therefore, in Labour-speak, undeniably a good thing. By stamping "eco" on their plans, ministers expect, indeed demand, universal approval. Woe betide those who reject them; you will be accused of ruining the planet.

Then to  cut to the chase..

"This is the real issue, not the Government’s bogus bleating about a need for "affordable" housing (code for subsidised). The immigration boom did not happen by accident. It was not, as my colleague Simon Heffer pointed out on Wednesday, the result of incompetence. There has been a deliberate and coldly calculated effort to transform Britain into a Labour-voting multi-cultural melting pot.

For years, ministers have peddled falsehoods to give credibility to their dangerous social experiment. They insisted that importing lots of poor people would somehow make us rich. They claimed also that these new arrivals would solve our pensions shortfalls and soak up job vacancies.

 

Flogging us eco-towns won’t deal with the fundamental problem, namely the fact that a nation that wilfully operates ithout borders sets in chain a series of disasters of which a housing shortage is but one. Building eco-towns over the cracks will achieve nothing.

Migration may increase the size of the national cake, but it also increases the number of people who are entitled to a slice of this cake. — Bob Rowthorn, professor of economics at Cambridge University

Back in October of last year, Professor Rowthorn pointed out that mass migration has actually lowered per capita GDP – or output per individual worker — in the UK since 1998.

Now a House of Lords committee is coming to the same conclusion. From Saturday’s Telegraph (cheers, Darren!):

"Our overall conclusion is that the economic benefits of net immigration to the resident population are small and close to zero in the long run," the report will say….

The inquiry by the committee, which includes two former chancellors and several former Cabinet ministers, is the first to try to balance the costs and benefits of large-scale immigration….

I’ve been arguing for a while now that we need to balance the costs and benefits here in the Republic, too. In any discussion on immigration to this country, immigration advocates point to the economy and claim that we wouldn’t have had such a booming economy without them (although it’s probably more likely that our monetary policy — i.e. floating the Irish currency between 1993 and 2001 — created the Celtic Tiger).

Alternatively, many argue that the taxes that (legal) immigrants pay must put the RoI in the black as far as immigration goes since many of the immigrants from Eastern Europe (especially Poland) have not brought families with them and so they are not so much of an expense on the national budget. Perhaps not — but we do not know for sure since no one (as far as I know) has done a financial reckoning such as the UK studies described above.

The 2006 Irish Census tells us that roughly one-third of Polish people in the country are, in fact, married — and that 7.5 per cent of Polish people in the country are between the ages of 0-14. (Keep in mind that the census wildly underestimates the number of Polish immigrants in this country — the government believes there are at least ca. three times as many as the census figures.) So, the Polish community is consuming the national cake as well as contributing to it.

Furthermore, €90 million in child benefits have gone to the children of immigrants back in their home countries — 80 per cent of these claims were made by Polish immigrants. So, while the families of many immigrants may not be here in body, many are virtually here and need to be factored in when calculating the costs of mass immigration to the Rep of Ireland.

In addition to the economic costs, we should not forget the social costs to both the RoI and the UK (and every other country that is currently experiencing mass immigration). From Harvard political scientist, Robert Putnam:

…in the presence of diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.

The Rep of Ireland needs to calculate both the financial input and the costs of mass immigration to this country. That includes expenses such as crime, health costs, reduction in wages, etc.

I suspect that the situation here is not all that unlike the UK or France where mass immigration has not proven to be an economic plus. In the absence of a "balance sheet" on immigration, however, it remains difficult to have an informed discussion about mass immigration to this country.

New Sisyphus has argued many a time (although not on his blog, as far as I can see) that the Catholic Church is very pro-immigration and regularly advocates strongly for greater immigration. This wasn’t actually something that I paid attention to until after he mentioned it (cheers, NS!) — and I am starting to realise that he is correct.

From Friday’s Irish Independent:

Bishops warn of State powers in immigration bill
By John Cooney
Friday March 14 2008

Catholic bishops are preparing for a potentially major Church-State clash over draconian powers which they fear are being given to the Government in immigration legislation currently before the Dail.

Opposition to the controversial Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill has been signalled by the bishops in a strongly worded statement issued at the end of their three-day spring meeting in Maynooth….

You can understand, of course, where the Church is coming from — with mass attendance rates in the Republic at below 50 per cent (in 2006), the bishops are no doubt looking towards immigrants in order to get some warm bodies in the pews. And the tactic is working:

Newest arrivals enliven Irish Catholicism
Will immigrants help prevent Ireland from a steep decline in religiosity?
By Daniel Strieff
March 17, 2008

DUBLIN, Ireland – Less than two years ago, St. Audeon’s Catholic Church was dying. It offered one sparsely attended weekly Mass in Latin and was on the brink of closure.

Now resurrected as the main home for Polish Catholicism in Ireland, the central Dublin church is one of the most dynamic in the country, providing 18 services a week, 11 of which are in Polish, and drawing up to 5,000 parishioners every Sunday.

The fate of St. Audeon’s illustrates how this country’s recent immigrant wave, roughly half of which is composed of Catholics, is helping to re-energize Ireland’s Roman Catholic Church, an institution that had been in steep decline, caused in part by a series of sex scandals involving priests over the past two decades….

I wonder, though, if the church authorities ever consider at all the effects of mass migration on the host society? Or even the effects on the immigrants’ countries (see here and here)?

See also: Immigrants re-energise Irish Church

Oxford University hit a new low with the news that even after the debating society had invited Hezbollah champion Norman Finkelstein to represent the pro-Israel stance in a debate about whether Israel has a right to exist, it moved to an even more radical debate on "This house believes that one-state is the only solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict." This makes no effort to conceal the union’s hatred for Israel. Not a single word is said about the terror attacks against Israelis, the rockets from Gaza, or even a call for peace based on two states for two peoples. The official motion mentions the Nakba, but says not a word about the invasion of Israel by Arab armies. In short, this debate is about removing Israel from the map. The little Nazis at Oxford Union debating society demonstrate a moral depravity that is hard to fully grasp, with a hatred of Israel that is hard to to take.

Here is the big immigration debate that took place on "Newsnight" on BBC2 last week. I found it a really interesting exchange, with Jon Gaunt closest to expressing my own views on this. The most important thing about this is debate that we are having it! For too long the media has shied away from tackling this topic and I am pleased that Newsnight has had the courgage to cover it. The awful Labour Minister Margaret Hodge just comes across as removed from all reality – too many years in power and soaked in socialist dogma. Hard left Marxist Bob Crowe is  worth a laugh – power to the people!

Go to  http://www.motionbox.com/video/player/4c99ddb61a1ae6c3