JP2 pt4 (and out)

JP2 #5
Originally uploaded by StefZ.

So, there is a long established Polish community in London. They have been here for 60 years now. This country is their home. Their kids grew up, work and have raised their own kids here.

But their relationship with Britain, particularly the roots of their relationship with Britain, is complex and, in places, dark.

This kind of complexity undoubtedly applies to most immigrants, recent and not so recent, in this country.

And what is the standard of debate taking place about migration into the UK? Well, you can choose from:

We need immigrants to do sh*t jobs

Or

I dont like foreigners

The British can be a very ignorant people sometimes.

And that kind of ignorance does not happen overnight. It takes years of terrible education, puerile journalism and the tireless promotion of the trivial to produce a nation quite so ill informed and incapable of objective thought.

And that is why you can open the Guardian today and read that just everything to do with migration, for example, is peachy. Or turn to the Daily Mail and read the exact opposite.

After misunderstanding something I had said, my Hungarian friend with the Wales fixation once told me that I had little to fear from East Europeans coming into the UK. He assured me that they were surprisingly similar to people from the UK and no threat at all.

I know that, silly.

Though I have to admit that I am quite scared of scummy East Europeans. Sixty years of totalitarian rule tends to produces some really serious scummers. Moving over here and plying their various unpleasant trades in the relatively liberal UK, after years of dealing with some really serious law enforcement, must be like a holiday for those guys.

But, scumbags aside, nobody should have any real problem with anyone else, from anywhere else.

Except for one small issue.

What do we, in the UK, have to offer them? From China to India to Poland there are millions of people looking to match our standard of living. They are willing to work harder for less and their education systems are nowhere near as rubbish as ours is.

What do we have to offer them? What are our kids going to be doing to make a living?

I have my own ideas about what Britain could offer the World. For all their numerous faults, we were blessed with a series of institutions and traditions that maintained a framework of justice and freedom that allowed all sorts of other endeavours to flourish. But few people seem to rate these institutions very highly and they have been corrupted or discarded without so much as a tear.

Like the Americans, we in the UK have lost it big time. With each passing year we make less and do less. We buy Asian goods and employ migrants to do our dirty work. We, on the other hand, sit at desks doing biff. And really pointless biff at that.

We are soft and we are losing it. Again, like the Americans, just about the only thing we are still good at is projecting military force around the world. Between our two nations, we account for half of the World's military spending. Everyone else is making consumer durables and we are manufacturing death.

So, what's the game plan looking like then boys and girls? Maybe those guys I photographed last night were marching in Rome after all.