Mass Immigration: A Stealth Tax on the Working Class
Ask any mainstream politician
about taxation policy and they instinctively reach for the quiver, pull up
their tights and begin chanting the mantra of “taking from the rich to give to
the poor”. To the public it is the anaesthetic that dulls the pain of paying
the government a portion of their salary, the accepted Marxist incantation
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” David
Cameron and Nick Clegg will squabble like schoolboys leading up to next year’s
General Election over who takes the credit for raising the income tax threshold,
while Ed Miliband’s plan to reinstate a 50p top rate is designed to win votes
rather than accrue revenue. It’s the default populist position; the age old
desire to play Robin Hood to the opposition’s Sheriff of Nottingham is alive
and well in Westminster.
But the truth, absent from
any manifesto, is that for well over a decade UK governments, whether Conservative,
Liberal Democrat or Labour, have been enacting a policy that cannot help but lower
the pay of the poor while simultaneously increasing the wealth of the rich, and
they will do so for as long as they are elected. Hidden from the masses by a
crafty sleight of hand, and denied the oxygen of public debate by smears and
propaganda, it is nevertheless true; since the UK opened the door to the A8,
mass immigration of cheap labour has been a stealth tax on Britain’s working
class.
A favourite trick employed by
politicians to deceive the public is to mislead by quoting spurious statistics.
Anyone who has read George Orwell’s 1984 (compulsory in the build up to any
election) will recognize the tactic of convincing the proles to doubt their
instinct by unleashing a bewildering barrage of statistics and spin. So it is
that the working class man, who has seen his job security diminish, his pay
decrease, & his bills soar in the last ten years, is distracted by the illusion
of mass immigration being a boon for the country. While he tries to reconcile
this fantastic claim with the deteriorating circumstances of his own life, the smoke
and mirrors of an abstract “GDP figure” is deployed to infer the economy would fall
apart without this policy.
That is arguable, but what is
not is that contained within the GDP figure are some winners, but many more losers,
and it’s the lowest paid that lose every time. Mass immigration of cheap labour
makes the poor poorer and the rich richer, it is a fact, as the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration confirm. A stealth
tax is applied to the wages of the bottom 5% of earners to pay for a tax break
for the top 5%. For every 1% of the labour market taken by immigrants, the lowest paid
lose 0.6% of their wages. Who would expect it to be any
different when the door is opened for millions of people, used to earning a
fraction of the going rate in Britain, to compete with the British unskilled
for employment by international corporations?
Employers and politicians claim that economic
migrants are harder workers, and willing to do the jobs the British feel
beneath them. David Lammy, a candidate for the next mayor of London, said as
much in March when asked why British born workers turned down fruit-picking and
jobs in Coffee shops...
“They don’t want to be
security guards. They want to watch the X Factor.”
Well maybe this is why.
To illustrate the difference in wage expectation
between residents of the A8 plus Bulgaria and Romania, and UK citizens, let us imagine
a standardised minimum wage across the EU set at the current UK hourly rate
(£6.31), and make a comparison using the actual minimums. This shows that
economic migrants are effectively getting the following hourly rates when they take
a minimum wage job in the UK
Bulgaria
|
£47.18
|
Romania
|
£43.30
|
Lithuania
|
£28.10
|
Latvia
|
£25.49
|
Czech
|
£24.50
|
Slovakia
|
£24.41
|
Hungary
|
£24.31
|
Estonia
|
£23.15
|
Poland
|
£21.28
|
Slovenia
|
£10.82
|
Who can blame people from any of those countries
for working themselves into the ground for a minimum wage job? Why be surprised that their
willingness to graft creates a favourable comparison with the “lazy” unskilled English
youth? They are getting up to a 700% pay rise! Wouldn’t you be tempted to leave
the UK if the going rate in the Sofia branch of Starbucks was £98,000 a year,
or if picking crops in a Carpathian field paid £7,500 a month? But for Brits
that isn’t the going rate, (it would be £1,700 a year in Starbucks, and £159 a
month in the fields). The argument that EU immigration is a two way street falls
at the first fence.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown knew only too well that
this would be the result of opening the UK’s borders to the continent’s poorest
countries, but they were intensely relaxed about the damaging effect on the
working class. If any dared complain... well, ask Gillian Duffy. That the policy
continues under the Coalition is all the proof needed that there is nothing
between the three of them on this issue.
So when “progressive” politicians try to buy your
votes with promises of tax cuts for the poorest and tax hikes for the richest,
remember that already includes a hike to the minimum tax rate and a cut from
the top. If they compare hard working immigrants with “feckless” British youth,
remember that economic migrants have the incentive of a staggering pay rise,
while our own youth can’t afford to go in the opposite direction, and remember
that while we are members of the European Union, there is nothing anyone can do
about it.
Interesting. Hadn't realised the gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow effect was so substantial.
ReplyDeleteMust be a bit of shock tho' when a recent Sofia resident at the checkout perceives a single potato @ ASDA costs £4.99.
Not stopping him/her obv.