Immigrants
According to the press, 2.2 million immigrants arrived in this country in the last five years. I must admit that I am finding that I’m dealing with foreigners, mostly on the telephone, but also in the shops and that to some extent, I have a language problem in so much that being slightly deaf I have no clue of what they’re saying, as their accent is totally foreign to me. It was interesting that in the same piece it said the UK born resident population had dropped by half a million in the same period. Speaking of my own case, a number of my family left this country to either be educated or work overseas, all of them hoping to return in due course. Some other statistics I found relevant were in the overseas-born of working age had increased by 26% to almost a million, while the British-born working population fell by 44,000. About 40% of the long-term migrants to the UK in 2005 were aged 15 to 24, compared with 13% for the UK population as a whole. I believe the significance of these figures is not only the problem of housing, health service etc which is being stretched, but with that age group it is possible that they will bring other members of their home community, as wives and so the multiracial mix of this country will increase year-on-year. A friend of mine employed a European person to clean house. This lady then returned to her own country, I assume having made the nest egg that she needed, and then her daughter immigrated and took over her job. I found it interesting that there was no one locally who was either prepared, or whom my friend was prepared to employ, and yet she picked a foreign person, with little English, and probably without a reference, and
found the whole system suited them.
Town terrorised by eight-year-old youngster.
I am not conversant with the law in England, when it comes to children having toy guns. When I was a kid I had dozens because I ran a small army in my back garden, with shoulder badges hat badges, the whole gamut. But it seems that times have changed, A copper in Wiltshire threatened and frightened a little boy of eight because he had an orange and black toy gun, and because the policeman said, that it was a replica, (what small child would want anything less?) he threatened the child with arrest, demanded that he broke up the gun and only left when the father broke it. The cream of the joke was he then returned five minutes later to warn the boy’s stepsister, aged six, about riding her battery-powered Barbie car on the pavement. Anything I would remark on that lot, would be superfluous. I told you I didn’t understand the law in England.
The EU Treaty
I never wanted to join Europe, if we had done in 39, we would never have survived after Dunkirk. I remember clearly the days when Edward Heath was extolling the merits of what is now the EU. Having spent my adult years touring Europe, meeting the Italians the French and the Germans, and spending time with them, the difference in their general approach was a key to the future, their patriotism and their parochial views predicted, as indeed ours did, that there would be serious problems. From my own assessment, I could never understand how a government could legislate for the whole of the EU, when the customs, the attitudes of the populace, the financial status, and most of all the geographical differences were all so variable, there was inevitably going to be mismanagement. Later Brussels started tinkering with legislation, which influenced purely parochial matters, probably instigated by commercial factors, not matters of state, if one considers the EU as a state. This tinkering had the effect of putting small businesses to the wall. The final nail in the coffin in my view was when France and Germany formed a voting coalition.
We need to have the small print relayed to us in language we can understand, explained without bias and then have a referendum couched in terms, which gives necessary options rather than just in or out. Unfortunately I think this so complicated, it won’t be workable