If you listen to the debate on Britain's membership of the European Union you could be forgiven for believing that it's a clash between progressive philanthropists and selfish Little Englanders determined to restore Britain to Victorian values. To the likes of Caroline Lucas the EU represents green fields with solar panels and wind turbines interspersed with cycle lanes, eco-friendly houses and intelligent talented European citizens sharing ideas on how to make the world a better place. This idyllic vision of a new Europe might resemble a cross between a university campus and the Teletubbies, where EU bureaucrats act as benevolent teachers and playground assistants moulding a new generation to break with their forebears' old divisive ways. For all the talk of multiculturalism, pan-Europeanism has always been about suppressing national identities that emerged over centuries of gradual cultural evolution in favour of an artificial social construct.
Just as primary school teachers fear their children will revert to bullying and infighting without their progressive oversight, left-branded EU fanatics would have you believe Britain would revert to a pre-1973 squalor controlled by rightwing Tories intent on undoing all the good things the EU has purportedly done. In reality most environmentally friendly EU legislation just helps big business deal with the adverse affects of higher consumer demand. We may have more energy-efficient fridges and hair-dryers, but not only are these goods imported from afar, they are replaced more frequently offsetting any marginal gains in yield.
Yet it's when the debate turns to the UK's unbalanced net migration statistics that the faux left reveal their true colours. Free movement of labour has become a core value. It's doesn't seem to matter how unbalanced migratory flows are or how many social problems are caused by our inability to accommodate so many new residents, the infantile globalist left has only two answers:
- Shout racism at native workers
- Blame greedy capitalists for not building enough affordable houses, schools, hospitals and roads to accommodate newcomers.
By this logic 19th century Bengali textile workers should have welcomed cheap imports from Manchester in solidarity with their English counterparts toiling away in mechanised sweatshops. Surely any attempt to defend your community and way of life must be motivated by either insular nationalism or Luddism.
Yet the same arrogance that Victorian imperialists showed towards the native peoples of their colonies has now re-emerged as a the globalist revulsion against autochthonous working class opposition to their plans. Just as Victorian industrialists used child labour in English, Welsh and Scottish textile mills, factories and coal mines to displace local cottage industries in the colonies, they use migrant labour today to displace native working classes everywhere.
More disturbing is the pseudo left's emotional propaganda for perceived victims groups. They will have us believe that our health service would crumble without the hard work of immigrants from the rest of the EU. Besides the obvious point that a higher population boosts demand, a disproportionate percentage of NHS staff are indeed not UK-born. This is because the NHS has failed to invest sufficiently in training medical staff and relies increasingly on agency workers, who can be hired and fired at the drop of a hat. NHS managers seek to cut costs by importing ready-trained personnel, thereby reducing training costs and gaining more malleable staff.
No doubt, longer life spans, higher survival rates of disabled people and greater awareness of medical conditions and treatments have increased demand for healthcare in most technologically advanced countries. The NHS employs a staggering 1.7 million people, of whom around 140,000 are medical doctors. However, other European countries have similar needs and need staff too. Why should we pilfer the best and brightest from low-wage regions whether they happen to be in the EU or not? Why are young Britons not pursing medical careers in sufficient numbers or being given chances to train? These are naturally complex questions, but even those British nurses who try to do the right thing find themselves sidelined by agencies NHS spends huge sums on foreign nurses, yet two thirds of local applicants are rejected. The NHS is clearly run by people who do not have the beat interests of their local communities at heart. The locals are seen as customers or, as we used to call them, patients.
The faux left loves to complain about government cutbacks in welfare provision and mental healthcare. Yet has it occurred to them that alternative to both might be better training and job security. Why do so many native Britons need mental healthcare? Why do so many lack any sense of purpose in their lives? Traditionally one lived to provide one's family with comfortable standard of living and a future for the next generation. The kind of neoliberal policies we have seen since the Thatcher era have both destroyed communities and split families. Just as the information revolution enabled greater automation, Western elites decided mothers should organise their lives around wage slavery rather than seeking new ways to enable both women and men to work less and have more time to raise their children. So rather than reorganising our economy so people only have to work 20 hours a week, can retire early and take off a few years for sabbaticals, we opted to condemn millions to joblessness and welfare dependence while others were forced to hand over their young children to third-party carers so they could earn a living in boring office jobs. No wonder so many children lack any clear sense of identity or purpose life. Their parents either depend on welfare handouts or they're away most of the day serving someone else's needs. As men are no longer needed as breadwinners during a child's early years, many women have effectively married the state. However, these developments have not affected the chattering professional classes anywhere near as much. The highly skilled can usually negotiate much better work conditions. An affluent professional couple can easily team up to provide both themselves and their offspring with the right work/life balance. If you earn £100,000 a year each working 40 hours a week you can easily agree to halve your salaries while you take it turns to look after your children, though mothers naturally have a stronger biological bond with their babies in their tender first few months. By contrast if you're on the breadline struggling to pay exorbitant rents or mortgages, you have no such choice. A couple earning 30,000 a year each would both have to work full-time in most of the UK to maintain a vaguely normal standard of living without being a drain on the welfare system. Indeed as discussed elsewhere, anyone earning less than 32K per annum receives more in services than they pay in tax once we take into account childcare, schooling, healthcare, transport infrastructure, policing and other essential public services.
A new reality is dawning on the affluent world. Big business no longer needs most workers, except as marketing, surveillance and support staff whose job it is to control the behaviour of social deviants. The only mission-critical workers of the future will be those essential to the development of new technologies and new ways to manage the great unwashed masses, basically between 1 and 5% of the current workforce, a privileged intellectual elite able to grasp complex organisational concepts. Everyone else's job will be expendable.
The trendy left's simplistic rhetoric may reassure some that they care about the underprivileged, but increasingly it seems they have become extreme advocates of interdependence. Every faux-left cause célèbre seems to lead in the same direction, greater dependence on external agencies and greater reliance on high-tech solutions to cope with the demands of increasingly interconnected lives. If we grow our economies and fill skills gaps by allowing our population to rise, we'll have to import more resources, build more houses and find innovative ways to boost energy efficiency. If we expand mental healthcare, we are effectively policing people's minds rather than enabling them to fend for themselves. If we ban hydraulic fracturing, something I'd certainly welcome, we either cut consumption or need alternatives means of energy generation to cope with demand.
The last people the faux left trust to run their lives are ordinary workers, because sooner or later workers start to think for themselves and may not agree with the universalist vision of infantile globalists. Hence social media has to be proactively monitored for nationalist opinions. Social workers can pry into the lives of every parent or carer. Surveillance has moved way beyond the primitive CCTV of the 1990s. Labour-controlled Glasgow City Council partnered with an Israeli Intelligence firm to introduce a state-of-the-art surveillance system with advanced facial recognition (Big Brother is watching: Glasgow City Council partners with Israeli surveillance company to monitor ‘unusual behaviour' among citizens). If you think the Scottish National Party are any better, just consider their infamous Named Person bill that assigns an inspector to every child empowered to intervene in family matters.
The pro-EU left do not trust common folk to run their lives. They see us as mere voting fodder. If you think they care more about new immigrants or refugees, just consider the plight of Britons of Caribbean descent who arrived here in 1950s and 60s. Labour seemed quite happy to let agencies overlook hundreds of thousands of unemployed Londoners of Afro-Caribbean heritage, and hire directly from Eastern Europe. If the left really cared about immigrants, it would make sure we can assimilate the last wave of newcomers before we import another. If it really cared about sustainable development in Africa or India, it would also make sure they can keep their most talented sons and daughters rather than rely on aid and remittances.
The Teletubbies series started in 1997 and have deservedly been criticised as an exercise in social engineering.