There is perhaps a subtle irony
in the fact, that a country, which is supposedly so valued by so many
outsiders, will almost inevitably be destroyed by them, such is their
determination and desire to become part of it.
I well remember a friend who
lived in a beautiful little Victorian Spa town in Mid Wales telling me about
the hundreds of visitors who regularly visited his hometown every year to
marvel at the architecture of a bygone age, set in the tranquillity of the
Welsh countryside; and the many who wished that they too could live in this
same rural idyll away from the noise, crime and pollution of the various
English towns and cities that lay just across the other side of the border. And
some of these same people actually did go on to make the move, from urban
conurbation to rural community, selling off their extremely expensive city
homes; and purchasing properties and land, where they hoped to create their own
little piece of heaven on earth, just as they'd imagined when they first
visited the area a few years earlier.
In fact, before long, so many of
these city dwelling visitors had relocated themselves into the small Victorian
Spa town that virtually all of the existing housing stocks had been exhausted;
and in order to accommodate even more of these largely English settlers,
increasing amounts of farming land, the very same pastures that had helped
create the rural idyll in the first place, was sold to housing developers, who
very quickly began to build new housing estates to accommodate all of the new
residents. These same new properties all required new utilities, new roads and
new shops, all built to cater for the growing population, that within a decade
or so, had fundamentally destroyed the rural idyll that every one of the
visitors and foreign incomers had been so desperate to be a part of in the
first place.
In a similar manner, but on a
much larger scale, one could so easily make a comparison between what happened
to that small Mid Wales Spa town and what is currently happening to Britain.
Ask the economic migrant or the political refugee from almost anywhere in the
world where their preferred destination would be and there's a fair chance that
a significant proportion, if given that choice, would choose to come and settle
in Britain, often for the widest variety of reasons. It might be because
they've heard that our native people are highly amiable, because we have
beautiful countryside, because we're a democracy, because we don't stigmatise
or persecute minorities, because there are lots of employment opportunities,
because we offer generous welfare benefits to the poor, or because we offer the
disenfranchised and the dispossessed the chance of a new start in life
regardless of their past. In fact, name your reason for people to choose to
leave their homelands and no doubt some or other migrant or refugee has used it
as a reason to come to Britain.
Putting aside the basic fact,
that per kilometre, the United Kingdom is the third most populated country in
all of Western Europe, were it simply a case of actual physical
"space", then in all likelihood our country could doubtless
accommodate millions more than it does at present. In truth however, the matter
of physical space, or actual room, is not quite that simple, as one also needs
to consider the farmland, the rivers, the buildings, the transport links, the
airports, the houses, the business parks, the forests, the parks, the cities
and the towns that make a modern country what they are and what they need to
provide to their indigenous peoples. Were we simply able to live shoulder to
shoulder, with no basic need for heat, light, shelter, food, healthcare,
transport, entertainment or education, then quite obviously we could quite
probably fit tens of millions of extra people onto our little island home, only
knowing that our limits were reached when the people on the outer edges of our
communities began falling off our coastline and into the seas that surround us.
In the real world though, people
do not live like that and neither would we expect to, or indeed like to. Even
the most generous, the most naive amongst us, must recognise that limits on our
population are necessary, if only to ensure that we can adequately feed, house,
educate, transport, warm, defend, entertain and employ ourselves. Even though
it might be argued that we have plenty of spare room in Britain, in order to
easily accommodate the extra 200,000 migrants and refugees who come into our
country each and every year, it's perhaps worth bearing in mind that each and
every one of these newcomers has to be fed, housed, employed, cared for,
transported around and in some cases educated, from the very limited resources
we have, but that were never intended to cope with such huge additional numbers
of users.
Obviously we can build new homes,
schools, hospitals, motorways, railways, airports, shops and offices; just as
we can employ more doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, teachers, classroom
assistants, nursery nurses and policemen, but at what additional cost to our
existing citizens, as well as our national exchequer and our native
environment? Just how long would it be before large parts of Britain would
start to resemble that Victorian Spa town in Mid Wales, with its rapidly
diminishing natural environment being slowly but surely replaced by busy
commuter routes; and growing suburban sprawl, complete with its associated
accoutrements, like the schools, supermarkets and health centres that commonly
attach themselves to such growing population centres. It's not so much a rural
idyll anymore!
Other changes that often
accompany such large scale migrations by outsiders to a particular area, or
indeed country, is the almost instinctive desire for these strangers to
surround themselves with familiar things from their previous lives. Consider
the number of "urbanites" who initially proclaimed the raw beauty of
the rural life in Mid Wales, who very quickly came to complain about the lack
of facilities that they had become used to in the former city homes. No
restaurants, no cinema, no big department stores, no high end brand stores, no
burger bar, no fun pubs, no nightclubs; all of the sorts of things that one
would never expect to see in the sort of rural idyll that they claimed to want
for themselves, but that inevitably established themselves in the Welsh
countryside in pursuit of their custom.
Likewise, most foreign refugees
and migrants who come to Britain simply seem to pay lip service to the very
same things that they claim drew them here in the first place. Instead of
adopting the values of their new homeland and integrating themselves into
British society, significant numbers of these same foreign incomers tend to
isolate themselves within their own ethnic or national communities, becoming
part of the disparate foreign ghettoes that regularly establish themselves
within our bigger towns and cities. Rather than support and use British based
businesses, they often choose to establish their own, complete with foreign
language signs, as a means of further segregating themselves from the
surrounding British based community. They instil their own cultural histories
and traditional values into their children, most of whom were born here in the
UK, rather than those of their adopted British homeland, thereby undermining
the cultural heritage of our own country, yet would still deliberately and
dishonestly claim to "love" everything about Britain, when in fact
their actions and behaviour suggest otherwise.
Some migrants and refugees who
reside here, not only actively dislike Britain and anything British, but can
also occasionally bring with them their own inbred intolerances from their
native homelands, be they cultural or religious, which are fundamentally alien
to the British way of life, Sometimes these same natural prejudices can become
engrained into the various foreign communities that exist within our national
borders; and can sometimes cause even British-born nationals to commit criminal
or otherwise intolerant acts, ostensibly on the basis of injustices, beliefs or
teachings that have absolutely no place within British society; and yet we
allow them to continue!
Clearly, it is absurd to expect
that a Pole, a Romanian, a Frenchman, a German, an Indian, or a Chinese
citizen, who wasn't actually born in Britain, to want to safeguard our
historical or cultural heritage. Why would they? After all, that would be like
expecting a Briton to protect theirs! And why would we do that? We have no ties
or allegiances to their histories, or their cultures; and neither do they to
ours! Migrants from our European neighbours are not here for any other reason,
than it pays for them to be so. If it best suited or paid for them to leave
tomorrow, they would be gone tomorrow; and on that basis alone, we should expect
nothing more from them; and we certainly shouldn't expect them to protect or
even respect our hard earned history and culture.
Like it or not, the British
public appear to be facing a series of hard choices in the coming years. Do we
choose to continue as we are, with an open door policy for anyone with an EU
passport, a Commonwealth link or a personal hard luck story; or do we decide to
say enough is enough, we're full for the next few years, until such time that
we can bring some sort of order to our country's immigration policies? A break
with our previous open door migration policies might also allow time for the
various foreign communities within Britain to make a choice of their own,
either to try and integrate more fully into the British way of life, or maybe,
just maybe, to find a new home elsewhere, in a country that best suits their
particular linguistic, cultural or religious needs.
In reality Britain is and never
has been a promised land for everyone. We are and always have been a country and
a people who have been shaped by our past. Our national awkwardness, though
damned by some of our nearest European neighbours, might be thought to be based
on our own national reluctance to change, which may be a good thing or a bad
thing, depending on your own personal point of view. However, large scale
unfettered and unregulated migration from elsewhere in the world will simply
cause change to be imposed on us all, whether we want it or not. If Britain is
any sort of promised land, then it was only ever meant to be so for the
generations that came after those who paid the price of building it for us, not
for the millions of international waifs and strays who would come to our
country and rob us of the historical, cultural and religious inheritance that
we were gifted by our forefathers.
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