UK IMMIGRATION NEWS: (1) HOUSE OF LORDS TELLS GOVERNMENT TO LIMIT IMMIGRATION ; (2) OPTIMUM POPULATION TRUST TELLS LORDS: DON'T FORGET IMMIGRATION'S EFFECT ON ENVIRONMENT ; (3) CRITICS QUESTION NEED FOR 'ECO-TOWNS'
We have summarized most of the major points that several news articles have made about these three topics. The similarities between the immigration-driven situations in the UK and Canada should be obvious.
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(1) HOUSE OF LORDS TELLS GOVERNMENT TO LIMIT IMMIGRATION
The (House of Lords Economic Affairs) committee has rebuked the Government for using “irrelevant and misleading” economic statistics to justify the boom in immigration in the past decade.
The committee…includes the former chancellors (Finance Ministers) Lord Lawson and Lord Lamont, former City figures such as Lord Turner and Lord Vallance and leading economists including Lord Skidelsky and Lord Layard. Several ministers are members.
Lord Wakeham said: “The argument put forward by the Government that large-scale net immigration brings significant economic benefits for the UK is unconvincing. (Our 8-month study has) found no evidence to support their position.
There is little or no economic benefit to Britain from the present high level of immigration. The immigrants are not needed to fill labour shortages or help fund the state pension for retiring Britons.
– High levels of immigration threaten to price millions of Britons out of the housing market over the next 20 years.
– Government statistics on immigration are “seriously inadequate” and compromise the ability accurately to set interest rates and allocate 100 billion in public funding.
– Certain groups, including the low-paid, some ethnic minorities and young people seeking to get on the jobs ladder may suffer because of competition from immigrants.
– Immigrants have an “important economic impact” on public services with some schools struggling to cope with the rapidly-rising number of children who do not speak English as a first language.
(From “Limit Immigration, Warns House of Lords)
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(2) OPTIMUM POPULATION TRUST ADVISES LORDS: DON'T FORGET IMMIGRATION'S EFFECT ON ENVIRONMENT
Valerie Stevens, OPT chair, said: The environmental consequences of such a massive population rise (from 61 million to 85 million by 2081) are alarming. They include growing water and energy shortages, problems of food production and food insecurity, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, loss of countryside and green space and all the psychological stresses that come with high population densities, overcrowding and loss of tranquillity. Britain is not only a small and crowded island it is one already beyond the limits of sustainability.
OPT analysis of the 36,000-word report shows that water, energy, food production and climate change are not mentioned at all, noise and congestion only once and the countryside only twice. The words environment or environmental are only used four times and green only once.
Valerie Stevens added: For too long many people with environmental concerns about immigration levels have been afraid to speak out…. If the Lords' report succeeds in finally exploding this conspiracy of silence, it will be very welcome.
A recent OPT study found that the UK could support a population of only 17 million if it had to provide for itself from its own resources. We urgently need a serious environmental examination of just how many people these islands can sustain.
(From “Peers Immigration Report 'Forgets Environment' “)
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(3) GOVERNMENT PROPOSES 15 ECO-TOWNS TO HANDLE IMMIGRATION-DRIVEN POPULATION INCREASE ; CRITICS SAY STOP THE POPULATION INCREASE AND UK WON'T NEED 15 ECO-TOWNS
(a) Charles Clover, Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2008: Unless the inhabitants of the 15 proposed “eco towns” selected by the Government yesterday are to be wafted to work on magic carpets and take their holidays on bicycles without crossing the Channel, the reality is that these settlements are going to add to the country's demand for energy, its greenhouse gas emissions and its use of water.
The fact remains that it would be more eco-friendly not to build these eco-towns at all. .. (Eco-towns? Let's measure them)
(b) Robert Winnett and Rosa Prince, Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2008: Local council leaders said…they were furious that Caroline Flint, the Housing Minister, was preparing to bypass the normal planning process to ensure the towns were built. … (Ministers push through ten new eco-towns with up to 200,000 homes)
(c) Jeff Randall, Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2008: The really Big Lie, however, is not about the extent to which these towns of 5,000 to 20,000 homes will be environment-friendly; it's about why we need them and, indeed, if we need them at all. …
According to the Optimum Population Trust, a charity that highlights the environmental dangers of absorbing more and more people: “Immigration is responsible for at least 70 per cent of the UK's projected population increase, which will take the UK from 61 million today to 85 million by 2081.”
This is the real issue, not the Government's bogus bleating about a need for “affordable” housing (code for subsidised).
The immigration boom did not happen by accident. It was not…the result of incompetence. There has been a deliberate and coldly calculated effort to transform Britain into a Labour-voting multi-cultural melting pot.
For years, ministers have peddled falsehoods to give credibility to their dangerous social experiment. They insisted that importing lots of poor people would somehow make us rich. They claimed also that these new arrivals would solve our pensions shortfalls and soak up job vacancies.
Warnings about the inevitable pressures that these newcomers would put on social services, education, health and policing were rejected as “scaremongering”.
Many immigrants are decent, entrepreneurial folk. But the idea that all who rushed through the doors…are stoking the engine of British prosperity is ludicrous. There are great discrepancies in the economic contributions made by different ethnic groups. (Eco-towns': the wrong answer to the over-population question)
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