Bloody Immigrants

The Tories went into the election promising to reduce immigration. They state that "The Government believes that immigration has enriched our culture and strengthened our economy, but that it must be controlled so that people have confidence in the system. We also recognise that to ensure cohesion and protect our public services, we need to introduce a cap on immigration and reduce the number of nonEU immigrants."

Let's examine that carefully. Firstly, immigration is a good thing by virtue of cultural and economic strengthening. But it needs to be controlled to ensure confidence in the system. I don't disagree that it needs to be controlled. But controlling isn't necessarily reducing. Indeed, given that it is apparently a good thing, one might argue that increases are desirable, if one can control things such as who immigrates, when and where etc. Furthermore, there are various ways in which one might try to bolster confidence in the system.  As an immigrant I can assure you that the system is farcical and is perversely complex, expensive and eratic. Ask almost anyone on a Tier 1 or Tier 2 visa and they'll have a horror story or know someone who does. Errors, delays, unecessary court proceedings and an utterly opaque system are the norm. So some more confidence in the system is not a bad thing, and if the system can't produce a way of managing who comes in and out then it clearly needs to be fixed.

We then find that, despite being culturally enriching and economically strengthening (at a time when our economy could do with some stregthening), we need to cap immigration and reduce the nonEU immigrants in order to ensure cohesion and protect our public services.

I'm unclear quite how nonEU immigrants threaten public services. NonEU immigrants are usually students or those on work permits of various kinds. They have no recourse to public funds of any kind: so they don't get benefits. They have to prove that they are finanically self-sufficient in order to obtain their visa. They can, however, utilise health and education services. The majority of students though are within the education system and are paying exorbitant fees to be there. The majority don't have children. Tier 1 and Tier 2 visa holders are generally highly-skilled, earn high salaries and pay high taxes. One could argue, therefore, that the pay their way. I don't think it is self-evident that these immigrant threaten the UK's public services.

Cohesion is another matter and a more slippery beast. But let's look at these populations: students and highly-skilled migrants. Most students will have to speak english or are here to help learn it. Highly-skilled migrants will generally need to speak it to obtain high-paying jobs. There is also a requirement to pass an english test or come from an english-speaking country to obtain such visas. So language isn't really an issue here. The real issue is, I suspect, the formation of large homogenous communities of non-UK residents in particular places. But given the naturally transigent nature of students whose courses tend not to last more than three or four years they're clearly not the "problem". I'm not sure about highly-skilled migrants in this case, but given their numbers are low (30k p/a) and that they tend to be affluent my suspicion is that they're not at the heart of what's driving Tory policy either.

It appears that business lobbying has reduced the cuts to skilled migrant visas. To reduce highly-skilled migrants who help create innovation and lead growth in high-tech business and research was surely folly in a world where increasingly it is intellectual property that is crucial. But that means the target must shift to students. Vince Cable appears to have prevented the axe falling on university students, but the univerities are still very worried (who contribute £2.2bn of funding to the UK's univerisites and supply over 10% of their teaching staff). Again, to have reduced these at a time when university funding for teaching and research is being decimated would have been an act of perversity. So it will be FE students, in the main who are refused visas. Yet, figures show that many of these students then go on to university in the UK.

By all means immigration needs to be controlled and its impact monitored both socially and economically. But the coaliton's arbitrary cap, which lands on exactly the kind of immigrant that a country might want and need, is politically driven attempt to win votes and to be seen a being "in control" despite potentially unlimited EU immigration which is both far greater in number than nonEU immigration and also qualitatively different. The truth is that the government can't control this immigration but in order to be seen to act it is acting. What worries me most is that this reflect such a lack of strategic thought that the mind boggles. Just when innovation is needed, just when funds from overseas students are needed, just when taxes from affluent workers are needed, we're looking to reduce them. These changes won't appease those against immigration for xenophobic reasons. They will, however, pile straws onto the back of the camel of the UK economy.

A Royal Wedding

I struggled to surpress my anger at the attention given to the Royal Wedding. There are various reasons for this, but the first is: the attention given to something comparatively trivial while meanwhile we face huge  public spending cuts as well as fundamental changes to the role of the state which are coming so thick and fast that there is virtually no public debate about them.

The second reason is the fawning reverence paid to these people because they are "royal". In a modern democracy, it seems bizarre to me that the public are still prepared to treat these people as their superiors purely by virtue of their birth. BBC radio, with no irony at all, used the word "commoner" to describe Kate Middleton on various occassions. I nearly choked at this before quickly checking the date to enure that I hadn't woken up in 1510. At least the Guardian had the sense to put it in inverted commas.

In fact the very concept of "royalty" is one which is deeply problematic, especially in the UK. By having an hereditary institution at the heart of the constitution and government, as well as holding a central place in the national psyche, we normalise the notion of inherited privilidge and power, we accept the fundamental birthright of some to be superior than others, to be ruled over by a class of people considered superior by virtue of their birth. This is entirely antithetical to our democracy and to the notion that all people should have equality of opportunity.

I have no qualm with the royal family as individuals (in fact I think the Queen executes her duty with both dignity and good sense) but I feel the institution of the monarchy conflicts so deeply with so many principals that we purport to hold dear and preach to others that I'm not sure how it is compatible with these.

It would be interesting to compare the modern obsession with celebrity and both past and present infatuation with royalty. Both feel somewhat hollow and deluded to me, but appear to fix the attention of the media and populace in a way which seems strangely unhealthy to me.

MIA

My furtive start to blogging was halted by the theft of my personal and work laptops (amongst other things) when my house was burgled last Thursday.

Very cross. Strangely, no real sense of violation which most people seem to think I will have. Rather (and perhaps I'm going native) I just think it's really quite rude. Strange.

Anyway, insurance will do its job so materially there's little lost.

So....back to blogging...

Local Authority Cuts: when 28% is not 28%

The CSR saw 28% cuts to Local Authority spending. By any measure, that's a big cut. What people haven't realised yet (but soon will) is the implication of this figure and that it means more than just a 28% reduction in services.

Local Authorities cost a certain amount to run which, without fundamental changes to their business model which they struggle to do, are relatively fixed. So not a huge amount to be saved there.

Then there are statutory duties which can't really be touched. So child protection, for instance (increasingly expensive since the Baby Peter case), won't see budget cuts.

In addition to these, many authorities have already outsourced many functions and have contracts with providers. These contracts can't be changed easily or quickly or for free. Some authorities have up to 40% of their budgets tied up in these contracts.

This leaves a situation where the 28% overall cut must be found in, say, 50% of the overall budget. That means the cuts won't be 28%, but closer to 50 or 60%. In order to achieve that there will be decimation of "optional" services. I've heard discussion of all statutory services being removed. That includes libraries and public toilets. In Somerset, we've already seen that Arts grants have been cut by 100%.

The full impact of the cuts to Local Authority finances are yet to hit. They will fall more heavily than people currently anticipate.

Prophesying Doom

It's often tempting to prophesy doom: it's eye-catching. Hyperbole is the stock in trade of our now saturated air-waves and other news media because in order to stand out from the deluge of information mild irritation needs to be fury, setbacks need to be catastrophes and so on. 

I do think, however, that there is a serious risk of doom for the UK over the next few years. 

Why? Since the formation of the coalition government and the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) we have seen a wave of policy changes and decisions that frankly the press and the public have struggled to keep up with. We have witnessed both a very large volume of changes put in place at a very rapid speed. 

Volume and speed of change aren't necessarily bad things in and of themselves, however they make changes more difficult to implement. But in addition to that my reason for prophesying doom is that all these changes will interact with each other to multiply and warp and produce greater and more varied consequences than first imagined. 

My fear is that the combination of large-scale public (and private) sector redundancies, enormous cuts to both benefits (especially housing) and social care budgets, sharp increases in the cost of transport, cuts to universities, increases to student fees, the saga of Regional Development, a cap on skilled migrants and overseas students and the decimation of Local Authority budgets (more on this anon) will be greater than the sum of the parts and that, moreover, there has been little thought given to how these decisions will interact on society and the economy. 

I can't predict what the combined effect of these changes will be, but it would be heartening to think that someone better qualified than me had given some thought to the systemic implications of the CSR.