Leo McKinstry

Leo McKinstry is a British author and journalist, noted for his extensive coverage of British and Irish history and best-selling sporting biographies. Since 2005 he has been a columnist for the Daily Express.

Immigration is causing depths of poverty last seen in Dickens' time

Amid all the bogus figures and hollow words, it is clear that the Gov­ernment of Gordon Brown has been engaged in a systematic conspiracy to deceive the British public on the issue of immigration.

Morecambe Bay a Chinese cockler attempts to make a living Morecambe Bay, a Chinese cockler attempts to make a living

But this exercise in deceit is becoming ever more unconvincing. Every British citizen must now be aware of the disastrous consequences of Labour’s policy of uncontrolled immigration, whether it be in overcrowded hospital wards or overcongested roads, in rising crime or in the babble of foreign voices on our streets. 

As our island grows more populated, large parts of our urban areas are now descending into Third World squalor, beset with corruption, poverty, gangland violence and ethnic divisions.

What is remarkable is that a Left of centre Government, sup­p­osedly dedicated to social justice, should go on spouting its empty rhetoric about the benefits of mass immigration even when the damage caused by this approach is all too evident.

Brown’s ministers continue to prattle about the joys of cultural diversity and economic growth that supposedly result from vast influxes of foreigners yet the reality is that no one benefits, neither the arrivals nor the settled population. 

despite paying ever larger sums in taxes, they see their own local services, such as the NHS and housing, severely overstretched. 

It is a strange paradox that a Labour Government should be pursuing an approach which achieves the opposite of its stated objectives. 

For in reality, untrammelled immigration leads to the exploitation of foreign labour, downward pressure on wages and a breakdown in public services. Labour is meant to be the party that fights poverty yet over the past decade it has done all it can to import pov­erty from the Third World and throw British workers on to the economic scrapheap.

The fire this weekend at the huge vegetable warehouse in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire could almost serve as a tragic metaphor for the destruction of our civilised society in the face of migration.

Four heroic firefighters lost their lives in the blaze and it seems that they entered the burning premises because they believed that some migrant workers might be inside. According to reports, some of the employees at the warehouse have taken to sleeping there because, after their gruelling 16-hour shifts, they are unable to get to their accommodation in neighbouring towns in the West Midlands.

If this is true, the deaths of the four firefighters should be a permanent rebuke to the Labour Government’s eagerness to use mass immigration as a battering ram against the basic standards of civilised society. Indeed, the fire is a disturbing echo of the harrowing incident that took place on Morecambe Bay in February 2004 when 18 Chinese cockle pickers, all of them migrants, were drowned by rising tides while trying to carry out their grotesquely underpaid work.

Behind all the blather about employee rights this is the real, vicious face of Labour. Through its obsession with immigration, it has created a society where Dickensian conditions now prevail for large swathes of the working poor. At the bottom end of our society no one gains from this cut-throat approach. 

Too many of the immigrants who come here from eastern Europe or the Third World are treated like fodder by ruthless employers who know they have nothing to fear from an ­enfeebled, pro-migrant Gov­ern­ment. Some of these foreign workers, particularly in agriculture and retailing, are earning less than £14 a day, have to live in overcrowded accommodation and enjoy no job security or employment rights. 

In Boston in Lincolnshire for instance – now one of the capitals of migrant labour – fruit and vegetable pickers earn a pittance for working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, exactly the kind of toil that Victorian reformers campaigned against in the 19th century. As one Pole says of Boston: “The gangmaster rules the town. It is a total disaster.”

In the climate of exploitation, British workers also lose out. With bills to pay, they cannot compete with these poverty wages so they find themselves out of work. Moreover, despite paying ever larger sums in taxes, they see their own local services, such as the NHS and housing, severely overstretched. 

The Labour Party, which was ­founded to protect the interests of the British working-class, treats them as undeserving aliens in their own land, smearing them as racists if they object to their own exclusion from the services for which their families have paid.

Sometimes it feels as if we are living in an inverted universe, where we have an ostensibly Left-wing Government that treats the British working class with contempt so that capitalist employers can exploit poor migrant labour. 

Sometimes, when you listen to Labour ministers, you would think that before the era of mass immigration Britain was living in the stone age. But Labour’s distorted version of history ignores the reality that once we were one of the most prosperous and crime-free societies the world has ever seen.

Labour likes to pretend that nothing can be done, that mass immigration is just a consequence of our globalised world. But this is just ideology dressed up as expediency. It is telling that the most successful European countries such as Iceland, Norway and Switzer­land are those with restrictions on migrants. And we could have stopped the inflow if we’d had the political will. 

But the Brown Government was never interested in that course because socialist politicians, filled with self-loathing for our country, have seen mass immigration as the route to creating a multicultural land where all sense of tradition and patriotism would be destroyed.

They have succeeded. And the lethal chaos of society is the price.

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