THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Immigration Row Engulfs U.K. Minister, Ian Duncan Smith

Immigration Row Engulfs U.K. Minister, Ian Duncan Smith

I am afraid that I agree with British business rather than IDS on this. I think most Australians would. Because of the huge and constant flow of people between the two countries, Australians know Britons very well and the slangy Australian verdict on Brits is that "they wouldn't work in an iron lung". That expression probably makes sense to Australians only but what it means is that Brits are seen as usually lazy and workshy. And their useless public educational system doesn't help either. So I would tend to hire a foreigner in preference to a Brit too. In think it's only immigrants and private school graduates who keep Britain going -- JR

U.K. business organizations have fiercely criticized a senior government minister for telling them to employ more British people rather than hiring "labor from abroad."

In a speech Friday at the Spanish Foundation for Analysis and Social Studies in Madrid, Mr. Duncan Smith said if the immigration system wasn't more strictly controlled, increasing number of U.K. citizens would be left out of work, in particular young people.

Mr. Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said the government is doing its bit to control immigration by placing an overall limit on the number of non-European Union workers allowed into the country each year, but that British businesses also needed to help.

A former leader of the Conservative Party, Mr. Duncan Smith risks inflaming tensions with coalition partners the Liberal Democrats over immigration policy—a subject which has been one of the most contentious areas for the one-year-old government.

He said in his speech: "As we work hard to break welfare dependency and get young people ready for the labor market we need businesses to give them a chance, and not just fall back on labor from abroad. "If Government and business pull together on this, I believe we can finally start to give our young people a chance."

Under EU law it is illegal for the government or employers to discriminate against workers from EU countries.

David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said businesses in the U.K. need to have a highly skilled workforce, and for many firms that means employing migrants. "Highly skilled foreign workers are important to our economy, and it is vital that they are allowed to enter the country so businesses can hire the workers they need."

He said many young Britons lack the basic skills needed in the workplace—such as reading, writing and communication. "Getting more young people into work in this country doesn't rely upon stemming the flow of skilled migrants coming to the U.K.," he added.

Neil Carberry, director for employment at the Confederation of British Industry, said employers should be able to choose the best person for the job, and that the challenge for the government was to ensure more young Britons were in a position to be the best candidate.

The pro-business Conservatives have to balance private sector demands for open markets with party promises to clamp down on immigration after a decade of record new arrivals caused increased complaints by voters.

Mr. Duncan Smith, who is considered on the right wing of the party, said that coming out of the last economic down turn in the early 1990s, employers looked abroad as they struggled to fill jobs at home and have yet to get out of the habit.

Youth unemployment is an issue that has dogged successive U.K. government. However, the problem has become acute since the recession with one-in- five people in the 16-to-24 age group unemployed. In comparison, the overall unemployment rate in the U.K. is 7.7%.

The government has attempted to tackle the problem by promoting apprenticeships and internships for young people but to date its policies have had limited impact.

Further fueling the immigration debate are figures from Labour lawmaker Frank Field showing that 87% of the 400,000 new jobs created during the coalition government's first year in office went to immigrants.

Liberal Democrat lawmakers, in particular Business Secretary Vince Cable, have previously sided with business groups to argue that changes to immigration policy could hurt British competitiveness.

A row over immigration policy erupted within the coalition in April after Cable publicly criticized Prime Minister David Cameron's comments about mass immigration as being "very unwise".

SOURCE

No comments:

Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Immigration Row Engulfs U.K. Minister, Ian Duncan Smith

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive