Skip to main content

New Year- same old, same old

Although I was back in the office yesterday, it was something of a quiet day- few people around. As I arrived at my local tube station the joy of the latest tube fare increases was fully apparent: a zone one journey has gone from an extortionate £3 to an eye popping £4- a 33% increase. As usual Ken "sobersides" Livingstone came out with some tosh to justify this disgraceful state of affairs. London tube fares are not just higher than any other major city in the world- they are a multiple of the fares in any other major city in the world. This, together with the near doubling of bus fares and the likely further increase in the congestion charge beyond £8 a day, is just another example of the punishment that the incompetent administration in City Hall visits upon Londoners. I might feel less aggrieved, were it not for the constant drip of Mayoral propaganda on posters across the tube network: the latest being an anti-nuclear poster campaign. Frankly, the cost/benefits of nuclear power stations may not be quite what Greenpeace suggests, and I resent my money being spent on simplistic propaganda based on questionable science.

Mind you, this morning my good humour was slightly restored by the comedy act that is Migration Watch. Having claimed that the benefits of immigration were actually only 4p per citizen, the very next item on the Today Programme was about the elementary mistakes that job seekers make on their applications. Such things as poor grammar, including misspelling "Curriculum Vitae" were amongst the most basic errors. Migration Watch would prefer to impose further costs on British business by forcing them to pay for training, in order to fill skill shortages and thus eliminate the need for immigration. The fact that this would erode British competitiveness to the point that British firms would leave the UK in greater numbers does not seem to have occurred to these Daily Mail reading bigots. Immigration keeps jobs and taxes in the UK. Without it, the jobs would move to where more skilled and more disciplined workers actually live: the quality of the native British labour force is simply uncompetitive as it stands. The 4p number is as spurious as most of the other Migration Watch statistics. Still- it did allow me a chuckle as I emerged from the shower.
Labels:

Comments

chris said…
Even with their dodgy statistics Migration Watch still had to admit immigration was a good thing! I bet that the real result is a much greater benefit to those already here, even if you don't count (like they didn't) the benefit to to immigrants themselves which are even higher still.
11:40 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are the Liberal Democrats Libertarian?

A few days ago Cicero met with one of the better known figures in the Libertarian Alliance, Brian Mickelthwait . Brian writes for various blogs that I enjoy reading- including Samizdata . Ahead of our meeting Brain expressed "scepticism" about the Libertarian credentials of the Liberal Democrats: "My charge was that when you meet a Liberal Democrat you never know what he will believe. The one who talks to you is likely to say what you want to hear. But the others will simultaneously be telling other people with quite different views what they want to hear. So don't vote for these lying creeps." Political parties- all of them- are coalitions of people who quite often disagree with each other. Apparently we are not supposed to "air our dirty linen in public", but actually one of the reasons that the Liberal Democrats appealed to me was that they were prepared to talk about issues and policies amongst themselves in public. The eclipse of the Liberal Party...
18 comments
Read more