Mary Kenny on east Europeans

A warm welcome to anyone who surfed on in after seeing my link on Channel 4’s Origination page. The Times (a paper I don’t read often) published an article by Mary Kenny today (The Russians are coming. Splendid) about how east European immigration in particular may be a good thing, as they are often very good workers.

The feminists of yesteryear becoming the memsahibs of today, chattering about staff? If so — so what? We have grown up and reached the mature realisation that you cannot do everything yourself: delegation is necessary in all endeavours. Superwoman is dead: but new migrants are alive and well, and coming to these shores in their hundreds of thousands, to the great appreciation of those who employ them. This includes not just families who need domestic help, help with children, or building extensions, but even more widely in the various areas of the care and service industries.

And the word is that these young workers from Eastern Europe are industrious, motivated, willing and punctual. They are eager to work and to earn and, what is essentially lacking, I fear, in so many of our home-grown workers, eager to improve themselves. In the service industries, they are friendly and obliging. They are also, according to reports, properly educated, politely brought up and not foul-mouthed. This is now the accepted wisdom among the bourgeoisie.

Despite Michael Howard’s appeal to anti-immigration sentiment among tabloid-readers, his natural Tory supporters are more likely to be in a position to be hiring people, and might well be more worried about immigrants drying up than about there being too many:

The notion of a new bureaucratic system of “controlled immigration”, with the CBI [Confederation of British Industry] ruling which skills are in demand and which are not, rather horrifies the employing Conservative who would sooner make that decision herself, thank you.

The people most likely to be hostile to immigrants are traditional Labour voters, and what they fear, according to Kenny, is immigrants being willing to work for less money. I’d like to comment here that the main reason for this is that many of these immigrants don’t live here. They have homes back in eastern Europe and live in multi-occupancy flats, and any family they have to support are back home, where the cost of living is rather lower than it is here.

I’m not sure I’d entirely agree with her about the “degraded British proletariat who are unemployable”. We’ve all heard the stories about stupid compensation payouts, but how many of this “proletariat” really are beneficiaries of the “compo” culture? Her complaints about “compo” culture and rights “unaccompanied by responsibility or discipline” are common and seem to imply that they are the fault of the left. But poor school discipline was certainly a problem under the last Tory administration – I know, I was at school then myself. My first year (11-12 age group) in 1989 was accused of being the worst first year the school had ever had. John Major is famous for his attack on “yob culture”, but even then not much was done about it (after a couple of sex scandals, his government were in no position to lecture the public on morality).

A disturbing aspect of Michael Howard’s anti-immigrant campaign is the myths and lies which buttress it. The Tories themselves are not themselves spreading these lies, such as the stories about Asians grooming white girls for sex and trying to “spread Islam” by impregnating white girls. (Of course, even if this was going on, what role it would play in spreading Islam is a mystery since the children would be left in the care of their non-Muslim white mother.) Another is that “asylum seekers” are responsible for crime. The Tories will, however, benefit from them, as people who would otherwise vote BNP but are dissuaded by that party’s criminal tendencies and its incompetent councillors instead vote for the Tories, because they are anti-immigrant.

It looks like the classic electoral game of aiming for the marginals rather than your core vote. The wealthy Tories who appreciate the east European workers would most likely vote Tory anyway; the target is the middle class who have no interest in taking on a maid. Kenny concedes that “people of colour” might be less well-appreciated although she has no objection to them. What these people have in common is that they often come from more religious countries where family ties are stronger. Surely rather than blaming everything on the clichés of rights and compo culture, this aspect of the decline in British culture should be examined also?