I have argued in many of my blogs that immigration is good for the UK. With the recent rise of the far right in the
shape of UKIP and the response from the Conservatives to move much further
right, the immigration debate and the whether we should stay in the EU debate
will continue to hot up even further as we approach the General Election in
May. It is with great pleasure on my
part that I learned of a serious piece of research by leading migration
economists at University College London that has just been published. There has been no end of nonsense data quoted
by the popular press and various idiot politicians in the last couple of
years. At last we have a decent study on
the subject from a globally acknowledged academic source. Migrants coming
to the UK from the EU are highly valuable to the economy, paying out significantly
more in tax to the government than they receive in the form of state welfare. The study by the leading migration economists
at UCL has revealed that between 2000 and 2011, EU migrants made a net
contribution, after any state benefits, of £20bn. The research reveals that the UK has been
especially successful in attracting the most skilled and best qualified EU
citizens to work here. The study, titled
‘The Fiscal Impact of Immigration on the UK’, highlights the growing number of
migrants who hold university qualifications: more than 60% of migrants from
southern and western Europe hold degrees, and more than 25% from Eastern Europe
also have degrees. In the UK as a whole
only 24% of the workforce are holders of degrees. Britain attracts even more graduates than its
closest EU competitor Germany. Professor
Christian Dustmann, a co-author of the study and director of UCL’s centre for
research and analysis of migration, said: “A key concern of the public debate
on migration is whether immigrants contribute their fair share to the tax and
welfare systems. Our new analysis draws a positive picture of the overall
fiscal contribution made by recent immigrant cohorts, particularly of
immigrants arriving from the EU,” the Guardian reports. EU migrants to Britain are not only better
educated than the UK population, but also receive a lower proportion of state
benefits. Between 2000 and 2011, they were 43% less likely to receive welfare. Last
Friday, David Cameron finally made his long awaited speech on how he intends to
curb EU immigration because despite the obvious benefits, he needs to take a
hard line to counter the massive threat from UKIP. He stopped short of announcing illegal caps
on numbers and instead announced that all EU immigrants will need to have lived
in the UK for at least 4 years before they can claim any form of benefits. And
if they come here and fail to find a job within 6 months they will be ‘required
to leave’ or deported. A couple of
things I would like to point out here.
Firstly the deportation bit sounds illegal and discriminatory to
me. Does it apply to the millionaire Frenchman
who has bought a house in Knightsbridge to escape the French economy? Secondly this whole debate has followed the
usual colonial British attitude: will these rules apply in reverse to all the
Brits living and going abroad to Europe?
Perish the thought. Unfortunately
the public is convinced (thanks Herr Farage) that EU immigration is a huge
problem so the sane parties have no choice but to react in this way. There are
about 2 million Brits living in other EU countries. I assume these countries
will adopt similar rules which means some of these people will no longer be entitled
to local benefits and will be repatriated to the UK. And then the British tax payer will have to
pick up the bill for them. This is all
clearly quite bananas!!
We have just celebrated the 25th anniversary
of the fall of the Berlin wall. This prompted me to read a book about the
Stasi (Stasiland by Anna Funder) which narrates the stories of a number of
victims and officers of the Stasi (the East German secret police) between the
dates of 1961 when the Wall went up overnight to its fall in 1989 and the huge
impact it had on everyone’s lives in East Berlin. The reach and the activity of
the Stasi just a few decades ago is shocking to the modern European. Just look at these facts: one tenant in every apartment building was
designated as a watchdog reporting to an area representative of the
Volkspolizei. Spies reported every relative or friend who stayed the night at
another's apartment. Tiny holes were drilled in apartment and hotel room walls
through which Stasi agents filmed citizens with special video cameras. Schools,
universities, and hospitals were extensively infiltrated. By 1995 some 174,000
inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (Stasi informants) had been identified, almost 2.5% of
East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60. A former Stasi colonel
who served in the counter-intelligence directorate estimated that the figure
could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included. About one
of every 63 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi. By at least one estimate,
the Stasi maintained greater surveillance over its own people than any secret
police force in history. The Stasi employed one full-time agent for every 166
East Germans. Tactics employed under Zersetzung generally involved the
disruption of the victim's private or family life. This often included
psychological attacks such as breaking into homes and subtly manipulating the
contents, in a form of gaslighting – moving furniture, altering the timing of
an alarm, removing pictures from walls or replacing one variety of tea with
another. Other practices included property damage, sabotage of cars, purposely
incorrect medical treatment, smear campaigns including sending falsified
compromising photos or documents to the victim's family, denunciation,
provocation, psychological warfare, psychological subversion, wiretapping,
bugging, mysterious phone calls or unnecessary deliveries, even including
sending a vibrator to a target's wife. Usually victims had no idea the Stasi
were responsible. Many thought they were losing their minds, and mental
breakdowns and suicide could result. Efforts have recently been
accelerated in reassembling the files destroyed by the Stasi as the Wall fell. Some of the restoration work is very
easy due to the number of archives and the failure of shredding machines (in
some cases "shredding" meant tearing paper in two by hand and
documents could be recovered easily). In 1995, the BStU began reassembling the
shredded documents; 13 years later the three dozen archivists commissioned to
the projects had only reassembled 327 bags; they are now using
computer-assisted data recovery to reassemble the remaining 16,000 bags –
estimated at 45 million pages. It is estimated that this task may be completed
at a cost of 30 million dollars. The
other thing that I learned and was schocked by was the existence of HohenschÓ§nhausen
prison. It is now a museum that you can visit but until 1989 nobody outside a
segment of the secret police even knew it existed. It was blanked off all maps, the people who
lived near were not allowed near it, all ‘deliveries’ of prisoners took place
in vans disguised as laundry companies or fishmongers and so on. The place contained tiny prison cells where
you could only stand up – sleep deprivation was a favoured torture method,
waterproof cells in which prisoners had to stand with water up to their noses,
and other much more sophisticated torture devices that I can’t describe. Who would ever have believed that humans
could treat their brothers and sisters like this? Erich Honecker was the leader of East Germany
from 1971 until the fall of the Wall and Erich Mielke was the Head of State
Security (Stasi) from 1957 until the fall of the Wall.
 |
| Erich Mielke |
 |
| Erich Honeker |
We went to see The Imitation Game which is based on the life of Alan Turing who,
with his team, cracked the Enigma code during the Second World War. Enigma was considered unbreakable and was
used by the Nazis throughout the war for their secret communications. The team was based at Bletchley Park, near
Milton Keynes (a city that didn’t exist at the time) and there is little doubt
that their work shortened the war by at least two years and saved the lives of
about 14 million people. Those 14
million are people who would have died in a longer war but also those who were
saved by the ability of our secret service to access the Nazi communications
and use the information to save lives – and to win the war. Winston Churchill
said “Turing made the single
biggest contribution to
Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany and its Axis partners.” This is quite clearly an extraordinary
achievement, probably unique in its scale. However, Turing’s life was tragic;
he was a homosexual and at the time that was an offence. After the war he was prosecuted and instead
of a jail sentence agreed to ‘chemical castration’. The drugs probably dulled or removed his
ability to work and he committed suicide a little later. It is only in recent years that his
contribution has been fully recognised – in part due to the secrecy around
these events for 50 years (the organisation he worked for was the predecessor
to GCHQ in Cheltenham). Turing is now
widely regarded to be the inventor of computer science, of Artificial
Intelligence and perhaps even the computer.
Just a fraction of any one of these achievements would make him an
outstanding genius but he did them all!
Wow! Without Turing it is almost
certain that we would have lost the war (and be ruled by the Nazis?) as the effectiveness
of the Nazi U Boat campaigns sinking all the US ships carrying supplies to the
UK means we would have run out of food and have been forced to surrender if the
Enigma shipping code had not been cracked in 1942.. Recently he was given a posthumous pardon by
the Queen and with this film he is now starting to get the recognition he so
deserves. Some critics say the film was
too soft, too Hollywood, too schmaltzy, like a Harry Potter film. I say it is worth toning down the sex to get
a 12 certificate so it is accessible to a wider younger audience. Let us not forget.
 |
| Cinema Poster for the film with Alan Turing played by Benedict Cumberbatch |
 |
| Colossus, the world's first electronic programmable computer, in 1942 at Bletchley Park |
When we first went to Bicester Village is was about half its current size, parking was easy
apart from Saturday afternoons and the staff were knowledgeable and very helpful. Today, it has to a certain extent become a victim
of its own success. Parking is a real
challenge much of the time despite the addition of a multi-story car park and
several additional car parks adjacent to the centre; at peak times they operate
a free park and ride service from a distant car park. These days the customer service is generally poor
as I imagine it must be hard to get staff.
Last Friday on so called ‘Black Friday’ the shops were open until
midnight and the crowds were so large that many people reported 4 hours of queuing
in their cars to get there and the Police issued an alert to ‘avoid’ the
area. I felt sorry for the local
Bicester people just trying to go about their normal business. Many of the major brands there now have
Disney-style ‘snake queues’ as I call them outside their front, so not only do
you have to queue to park but once you are in, you have to queue to get into
Ralph Lauren, Uggs and many others. What started off as an outlet for the top
end brands to sell off their excess last season’s stock has become a major
business in its own right with excess stock being produced intentionally to go straight
to these outlet stores. Bicester Village
is now a major stop on the tourist circuit with many coach tours stopping here
for the day. A recent addition is a large
coach park. The Village itself is beautifully designed, architected and
landscaped and always immaculately clean despite the crowds. It is particularly
popular with Chinese and other Asians who are in love with the brands and Russians
and Middle-Easterners who are very wealthy but still love a ‘bargain’. I was
shocked to hear that the large Tesco superstore next door to the Village is
likely to be bulldozed shortly to allow for the expansion of Bicester
Village. Clearly a sign of the times?
 |
| Queuing outside Raplh Lauren |
 |
| What it looks like in the adverts |
 |
| What it feels like when you go there |
Autumn is one
of my favourite seasons. I love the
colours and there are usually plenty of warm or sunny days. This year, for the first time in the 20 years
we have lived in Oxford, we had a rather special visitor in our garden – a male
pheasant. He was not easy to photograph
but I did capture a few shots of him before he left. We also have a Cotinus bush in our garden
which has spectacular golden leaves before they all fall off as we move into
winter!
“Sometimes
it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can
imagine.” The Imitation Game script.
