Paying And Non Paying Guests

Placed together, surely some coincidence, in The Mail today online was the story about David Blunkett's dread warning of doom when all those Romanians and Bulgarians arrive after 1st January along with Jack Straw's tearful admission of error about when the doors were opened to the Polish people and a million or more decided to join us.

At least most of the Poles have done some work and pursued lives of relative normality in our terms.  It appears that those to come may have other ideas. According to Blunkett, in South Yorkshire where a number of Romanians already are present there are ongoing and intractable problems.

Reminding myself of all that stuff in the DNA that makes me and you distant cousins at least to all, that in the Atlantic Isles we are all migrants historically and the rest nevertheless world history at least tells us that mass migrations rarely, if ever, result in unbounded joy and rapture for those arriving and those already domiciled.

It may be that the pessimists will be confounded and that either few will come or those that do will happily join us.  Perhaps they might use the spare bedrooms released by changes to social security benefits as well as filling all those vacancies in the NHS and staffing all our Care in the Community needs.

To add a tincture of complexity if the pessimists are correct it is possible that many will arrive in the middle of the worst winter for years.  As the suggestions are that among the first arrivals will be numbers needing significant health issues resolving this will coincide with the most critical phase in the NHS Calendar in what is expected to be a very bad winter.

The NHS is already broke and running into worsening financial trouble.  There are serious staffing problems in many areas which are no longer being contained.  But the NHS is not the only public service under strain.  Quite what could happen where is not known and not possible to predict.  We simply do not know and little means of finding out.

It will depend, and this might be whether, if many do come, they will head for the Notting Hill end of Hyde Park with Chipping Norton or Pontefract Park and Racecourse with Primrose Hill and Hampstead or somewhere else.

It may not take a lot more to break the NHS in some areas if limited numbers concentrate in particular locales.

Wait and see, because that is all you can do.