What is the purpose of the welfare state? To protect British people from unemployment,
or to protect them from jobs like fruit-picking and working in Pret A Manger? I listened to Farming Today* earlier, in which they interviewed the Eastern Europeans that we import
en masse to do jobs that Brits used to do.
Having done the job myself in my younger days (I come from a part of the world where the October break is called the ‘tattie holidays’ so kids can dig potatoes), I can attest that it’s bloody hard work for a paltry reward. But it pays no less than the minimum wage. Without immigration, we’d be forced to find a proper solution to this problem: that welfare has priced a lot of British people out of this particular market.
But my main complain about immigration (which, to the chagrin of some CoffeeHousers, I’m in favour of) is that it has allowed us to cover up, rather than deal with, such problems.
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