Fraser Nelson, Political Editor of the Spectator, needs to pay a short visit back to reality before he goes on national television and comes out with anything else like this:
Right now we don’t really notice that we have 14% of the population on benefits, a huge figure. But if immigrants weren’t here then my god we’d notice. There’d be huge labour shortages everywhere, we would be forced to actually confront this huge joblessness.
He said this on BBC Question Time in response to a member of the audience saying that yes, we need immigrants, but what about the British people who aren’t working?
Ok Fraser, this is what would actually happen on planet earth. We stop mass, unfettered immigration and make the lazy scrotes who won’t work get a damn job.
Technorati Tags: Fraser Nelson, Spectator, Immigration
Erm, where are these jobs going to come from? Capitalists aren’t exactly job-creators here — they’re closing factories every week! Migrants aren’t flocking to the places where there’s high unemployment as a hang-over from deindustrialisation – like Middlesbrough, which was cruelly dubbed the worst place to live in the UK only the other week, where twenty percent of adults of working age are out of work.
Well, this muppet was saying that 14% of the population is on benefits and we need immigrants to fill the jobs. Either he’s making the whole thing up or there are a wedge of jobs out there that are crying out for our native unemployed to get off their arses and start doing.
He’s talking out of his arse. Look, even if there had not been EU enlargement and mass migration, there would still be a declining productive economy in the UK. And it is the managed decline of the productive economy which produced high unemployment. Bosses aren’t moaning about labour shortages in manufacturing – they’re seeing that its cheaper to move abroad where there’s lower wages and less rights.
Chances are that if what you term the “lazy scrotes” were doing the jobs that migrants are currently doing they’d be harder to exploit since they’d know the language and laws and would not be thought less of because of racism. In other words, they would produce less surplus value, less profit for the capitalists.
[…] task on the blogosphere for days afterwards, and my comments on welfare and immigration have been reproduced and critiqued. Here’s my offending quote: “Right now we don’t really notice that we have 14% of […]