Herding Cattle Or Herding Cats?

When working through local parish records in Doncaster’s Library many years ago one of the sadder entries was simply “Scottish Drover, name unknown”. The old drove roads now may be present highways but as often as not are just paths across the hills and fields, their history almost forgotten.

Across the Atlantic Islands for some time there has been precious little restriction on the movement of people or goods despite the attempts to foist either ancient tribalism or recent faux nationalism on one group or another. For a while the appreciation of the practical inconveniences and problems of division have overcome other considerations.

The issue of population movement and migration is one of the several key and complicated issues that could arise in the event of Scotland detaching itself from Westminster in political separatism. It is not simply a question of what may or may not happen at the land border, it is more than that.

There are some bits and pieces of history left over to raise questions. If Scotland has a model of intended population structure and therefore an immigration policy that departs either to a greater or lesser extent from that of the other parts of the Atlantic Isles, it all becomes very intricate and difficult to manage.

There is the Isle of Man, so who does Kelly belong to? There is Northern Ireland, there is the Republic of Ireland which has a number of residual benefits in the UK, there is Wales and as well as Man a number of Crown Dependencies to take account of. This is quite apart from who in England might want to claim Scottish citizenship.

I assume the man from Alloway who I sat next to on a train, currently resident in Dover for work purposes might have that status. But if Scotland stays in the EU and England leaves, he might decide to commute to Dover from Calais to retain his rights in Scotland.

If Northern Ireland opts to retain the English connection but the Republic remains in the EU it is possible that different migration and citizenship rules might well then favour those from Bantry above those from Ballymoney. You need to know your Ireland to appreciate that one.

This game could go on and on working its way through all the variables and all the possibilities for confusion and complication. Scotland may well have its place amongst the nations between Saudi Arabia and Senegal but just who would its nationals be?

Would they include the hordes of silver haired human rights claimants from England wanting the better benefits currently scrambling to find themselves a tartan from great great grandmother from Greenock? Or those English who can afford the second residence in their children’s names for university education purposes?

The idea of a fenced, lit, land mined border with guards sweeping up pensioners for the migrant hostel in an extension to Barlinnie is an interesting one, who knows?

The crucial question is what kind of population model and structure is the SNP talking about and what kind of migration policy? Is it a Bahamas style one? Is it a Dubai style one? Is it a Norwegian one? Is it a Hong Kong model? Given its model what kind of population structure should Scotland be looking to have by 2050?

At present there is only the silence of Scottish Drover.

Poles Apart

Diversity, or for that matter employment and equality law, has not yet reached down to the world of hand cash car washes in our area. The various teams engaged in this form of economic enterprise are rigorously segregated and some may well be from one extended family. My preference has been for the Polish one.

They are efficient, work as a team and do a very good job. There is often a small or longer queue so I am not alone in my opinions. What is striking is that they are all adult, some may well have families back in Poland and are clearly used to manual work and the disciplines involved.

Quite what their precise financial or housing arrangements are I am not sure. It is possible that the UK system of benefits and the rest may be a major incentive but they certainly know what they have to do and get on with it.

The other teams are all migrants from other places. Alas, I am unable to choose a Scottish, English, Irish, Welsh or British group, they do not exist. Perhaps the educational system is at fault.

None of the several universities in our general area have graduate courses in car valeting or post graduate studies in motor transport hygiene management. I enquired of one senior educator why this might be at a recent meeting only for her suddenly to discover urgent business elsewhere.

Meanwhile in the media there is a debate about how it is that so many migrants find work to do in the UK whilst an increasing proportion of our youngsters do not find work that matches their expectations or inclinations. Fingers at pointed at Eastern Europe, notably the Poles, as taking our jobs.

There was a time when in the Midlands town where we lived on a summer’s day there was a large group of Poles making their way up the main road to the beat of a bass drum. When the drum stopped and the band struck up the dignitaries in the grandstand rose as one and the thousands lining the road cheered the men on.

It was the Polish national anthem and the group were men from the 1st Independent Polish Airborne Brigade brought over from Grantham way (did Mr. Roberts serve them in his grocer’s shop?) who had fought at Arnhem in 1944 and this was July 1945 when they were being honoured amongst others.

I was standing on a Jeep courtesy of American’s of the 82nd Airborne Division who were cheering as loudly as anybody. Some wore the Purple Hearts they had earned on 6 June 1944 when they were dropped into Normandy or also at Arnhem.

Many of the Poles did not make it back to Poland for a variety of political and personal reasons. For some there was no family left to return to and for others the welcome might be uncertain from their former Soviet allies now installed in Poland.

The local Roman Catholic churches welcomed them. They provided a devout stiffening amongst the more lackadaisical local men and moreover, unlike those in the congregation from one part of the Atlantic Isles, did not head out of church regardless of the service five minutes before the pub’s opening time.

Most married into local families, there were more than enough widows or lost fiancés to avoid the usual resentments. They were found work in local factories. One was keen to recruit their footballers and especially the most able chess players amongst them. The works chess team became one of the best in the Kingdom.

This is all two thirds of a century away and it is likely that most of their grand children may have forgotten their Polish heritage or know little about it. It is possible that some of the loudest complainants about recent migrant Poles may well have that blood.

In any case if one looks at the patterns of male DNA in the Y Chromosome there are a good many in the UK from the long past who left behind cousins in central Europe as they moved north and west after the last Ice Age. So many Poles are closer to some of us than we think. Much the same applies to the maternal DNA.

The questions arising from recent mass migration, employment patterns, educational provision, benefits policy and housing and health provision are very complicated. In the case of the Poles the history is even more complex.

None the less there is a profound irony in large numbers of Poles coming over to do the jobs that many of our own young people do not want to do, may not in fact be capable of doing and in any case are able to refuse.

Which reminds me, the car needs a wash.

Hell Is Other People

The row of the week over the excess of comings over goings that have embroiled the Home Secretary, the former head of the Border Agency and others ought to be instructive for a number of reasons because it features so many of weaknesses and insanities of our present ways of government.

The special weakness is because of the media need for simplicity and to have issues put into slots and the equal need for politicians to deal with only one thing at a time because that is all they are able to do results in separation of related issues.

In fact it is all much more complex and is interwoven with a number of current other questions that are demanding attention. They may seem to be separate but they are not. The consequence is that what should be a seminar turns into something more like a student riot.

If you look at the question of airport capacity, hubs etc., the need for airlines to stay in business, the tourist industry, the higher education industry, employment policy, the benefits system and Europe, they all affect migration matters. We do not plough much money into real research, only into retailing recent history together with ideas and assumptions from the past.

For airlines to function, stay solvent and even grow they need passengers and airports. The more people they can put into aircraft and the more that can be moved cheaply through facilities designed for mass transport the happier they are.

As this is associated with top business people, but also families, ordinary working needs, with persuading large numbers that a holiday must entail flights and that the beaches furthest away are the most desirable it creates a large market. Moreover, all these people on landing in the UK want to be on their way as soon as possible.

This creates major political imperatives to subsidise airports and flying and in particular ensure easy mass transit at public expense on the ground and other communications. So the numbers become very large. When I walk along the road to town the vapour trails tell me that in the few minutes it takes there are thousands of people up there above me.

In the era of cheap oil and with the growth of mass air transport the idea that the tourist industry is a good thing has been an easy get out for trying to plan economic activity for many places. Clearly, those that are sandbars in the ocean unable to either grow or make anything will not be able to support more people without money coming in and being spent if the population can increase.

Most people in the UK have bought into the notion that tourism is essential to the economy and not simply an add on for quaint places and less populated areas. Because so many of us go to places which exist only by tourism it is easy to assume that it might be a good thing for us.

Similarly, the belief that any higher education is good so long as it is post 18 and attracts students has created a large sector for that purpose. This has gone beyond the point where the taxpayer can stand the racket, which leads to awkward choices. One is that the UK students might pay more another is to market UK provision to overseas students as desirable.

Clearly if large numbers of people are being invited in because we want or have come to need their money and some decide to stay it is not only inevitable but somehow seems unkind to insist on throwing them out once they have put in a lot of cash to keep us going.

Many foreign students are from nations with surplus males and their piece of paper will buy them at home only middling clerical work at best at local incomes. They will often have a single life in a corner in a crowded home somewhere where white collar jobs are short in supply. Little wonder that they like to stay in the UK, draw benefits when needed and can live free from the restraints of the home cultures.

Around a decade ago when at a meeting discussing the world environment the speaker talked about the “footprints” of major urban areas to indicate how much of the world’s resources were required to keep this city conglomeration or that alive. The subtext was that the uncontrolled growth of many areas was not sustainable.

There was one man who popped up to comment, one of the Prime Minister’s close advisers to declare that UK immigration should be unlimited and there should be no restrictions for all sorts of worthy reasons. That the UK has a large number of urban areas did not worry him, it would all take care of itself.

Later we had major reorganisations of government departments and a lot of work was devolved from the civil service to agencies of all descriptions. Many of these seem to be exercising power without responsibility so if the Borders Agency is doing the same it would be nothing new.

As the heads of so many of these bodies at present were appointed by the previous government then this will not help to try to brings things back together again.

Then there is Europe and the power we have handed to it and the added difficulties of trying to manage to deal with their policies and decisions. These have brought additional large numbers into the UK in recent years, substantially in the lower income levels.

Apparently, there has been a flood of Greek money into London in the past few months taking advantage of our arrangements for the better off to rescue their finances from the disaster to come. It is likely that we may have numbers of Greeks coming in to join those already here to follow the money.

Quite the worst event if international finances deteriorate will be the mass migration that the UK government and especially the opposition do not want to see. It is all those older UK citizens who went away to sunnier climates in the last couple of decades returning spent up, homeless and angry.

Will we welcome them in the same way that we do the tourists, the students and the financiers?

C4 "Dispatches" Sweatshops, Serfdom And Snorting

The C4 “Dispatches” last night, Monday 8th, dealing with sweatshops and serf labour in Leicester took the lid of a very nasty business that has been running for some time.

We had all the usual spin from the bosses and financiers about their deep ignorance of where the profits were coming from and how and all the paperwork they had saying that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

In my purely personal opinion I do not believe them, I do not believe their Press and Public Relations advisers, I do not believe their lawyers and above all I do not believe either their associated directors and all the executives and managers they employ.

Moreover, in my purely personal opinion, I do believe that the Leicester M.P’s were aware of what was going on where and why. I do believe that the local leading politicians and their connections were aware of the situation.

I do believe that too many of these people were gaining too much personally from the way these businesses were conducted.

To add another touch to the issue of belief and disbelief, I believe that throughout the fashion industry and the associated celebrity culture the great majority of those involved are well aware of how the money was being made and the conditions.

Literally for every snort a serf works for a week and still may not be paid. The effect has been to put very many into debt slavery, a condition that few of them are likely to escape.

It has to be said that this problem has been building up for some time. It is very likely it existed in a lesser form before 1997 and the pre-conditions were there for it to turn really bad. Since 1997 it has gone wholly out of control for the benefit of all the usual suspects.

There was one error in the programme I did identify. It was the community worker who used the word “slavery” to indicate his opinion. He said it was as bad as employment conditions were in Leicester 100 years ago. He was wrong. It is much worse and the nastiness is a great deal worse.

There is a grim irony. The particular sweatshop shown was located in the former Imperial Typewriter Works an award winning factory built in the 1930’s and regarded as a model its kind put up by a company that had a deserved high reputation for its treatment of and facilities for workers.

In November 1946 it was visited by the King-Emperor George VI who still was ruler of a vast empire then including the Sub Continent of India. See the Pathe clip, although the factory shown is another one.

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=26816

My photograph above shows HM The King at an assembly bench at the Imperial Typewriters. You can see it was a well laid out, airy room. There were also canteen medical and recreational facilities. The wages compared well and there was a real pride in the firm. The London offices were on Kingsway at Imperial House.

The sports fields were a couple of miles away with several pitches, tennis and athletics facilities and decent changing rooms. Their Chess team ruled the roost in the County and beyond, largely because of Polish recruits. When a Grand Master came for a simultaneous match with the local chess elite the Imperial men were rarely beaten.

The modern sweatshop in the building had none of these things, the fire exits were blocked, no ventilation or facilities of any kind, it was in the basement and it was filthy by any standard.

Built originally purely for storage of engineering parts during the early 1940’s it was used as a key local air raid shelter because of the strength of the structure. When the C4 film started it gave me a nasty jolt, because I recognised it all too well having spent too many unhappy hours there.

There were lighter moments, such as the practice fire drill that owed more to Buster Keaton than to the intentions. As for the Pathe clip, if you watch it I was on Spinney Hill Park with “Tebbs” Lloyd-Johnson (Google him) who then lived overlooking the park as the King and Queen went through.

He was around more than 100 years ago along with many others I knew and later worked with. He had moved to a growing city which had a rich culture and opportunity. Many economic migrants arrived in the early 20th Century because it was a good place to work and live.

The Luftwaffe did not get the building and the company, it was the UK government and the economic planners that did followed by the asset strippers of the early 1970’s. It went very badly wrong and turned nasty in the 1960’s when the firm like so many other Leicester firms hit the skids.

Twenty odd years of having their profits and revenues creamed off and ambitions frustrated did for them. As a one time prosperous town, like most of the Midlands Leicester was treated as the cash cow for subsidies and development expenditure elsewhere and many firms, such as Wolsey suffered as well deprived of the ability to compete fairly or effectively.

Meanwhile down in London the celebrities that the sweatshops fund preen and parade and those who run an industry based on this sit in judgement on government, are lauded for their riches and incidentally remove most of their wealth to tax havens.

Welcome to British Freedom 2010 Style, the Land of Lost Content.

Chancellor Merkel & Migration

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany has made some observations on issues arising out of recent migration and its consequences in her country. This has sections of the press and political parties working up a lather. Many of them have rather missed the point.

She has been indicating that the migration of the immediate past has created issues but the sub-text is that the level of recent movement might be creating the pre-conditions for larger scale movement if the situations in several parts of the world continue to deteriorate.

What we forget, or more often do not bother to find out, is that the experience of other places may be different from our own and they might have long memories.

Chancellor Merkel is from Mecklenburg Vorpommen, that is the northern part of the former East Germany. It is within my memory that this Lander (Region) had very substantial migration experiences in the 1940’s as a result of World War II. These spilled over into Western Germany as well in that period and were still a feature of much of the 1950’s.

The Germans are well aware of the legacy of such migrations. The stresses of that time still have a lingering effect in German politics. I recall in the mid 1950’s there were a good many refugees and migrants still in one camp or another or living in poor accommodation on very low wages.

This was European migration and to this has been other waves more recently. But none of this is new. In Spiegel this week has been reference to a rather earlier pattern of migration, several thousand years ago, in a long article:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,723310,00.html

The map above is from the article in question.

There has been a long debate as to whether the spread of farming after the last Ice Age was one of peoples or of lifestyle and the learning of new techniques. The Germans pay rather more attention to real history than we do for various reasons so this debate matters. The article suggests that it was not a peaceful process.

Since the Neolithic Period there have been many movements across Europe and The Atlantic Isles provoked by variations in climate, the increase and decrease of populations and endemic wars. The ones we cannot legislate for are those related to the collapse of communities and political structures in other places.

It could be all there in the history books but we mustn’t mention the War and what did the Romans ever do for us, apart from bringing in a lot of Germans in their Legions and Auxiliaries?