Why did I rise to the bait of a twitter fight with UKIP loons regarding immigration? Paul Nutter UKIP’s deputy Fuhrer is on C5 News tonight ranting on about how we will be swamped with millions of Romanians and Bulgarians on 2nd January.
What Nuttall does not say is that Romanians already here, on average, pay 34% more in taxes than they take in benefits, which is a far better ratio than native born Brits. Romanian workers are good news for Britain. What Mr Nutter also declines to mention is that folk arriving in 2014 will not be able to claim a single cent in benefits for at least a year. So they will take the low paid jobs Britain needs to fill if it is to compete.
Aha…they are stealing British jobs. So goes the chant from UKIP followers on twitter.
Bollocks.
Have they tried hiring someone on the minimum wage or even £7.50 an hour? I doubt it. I have placed a number of such adverts over the past year. Of c800 applications received I think three were from native born Brits. In London there are hundreds of thousands of young Brits on the dole who could have applied. They did not. They prefer a life on benefits to working bloody hard for £6.50-7.50 an hour.
Of the three British applicants, one was illiterate. Two I actually gave a chance to but they could not hack it and walked. I do actually now have one British employee in my restaurant now and he is great. But the reason I hire 85% foreign staff is that they are the only ones who will work for £7.50 an hour rather than sit on welfare.
I would love to see our home grown lumpenproletariat out there on the vegetable farms, in restaurants and filling up other low paid jobs. But they simply will not do it. And so I look forward greatly to Romanians and Bulgarians arriving here seeking work next year.
Mt Nuttall should be honest about the real problem we face here. That problem is the cradle to grave welfare state and a dependency culture. It is not immigration. But articulating such a message will not win UKIP votes from the Neanderthal element of the electorate who look for easy solutions and easy scapegoats to the nation’s perceived ills.
Shame on you Nuttall and shame on you UKIP. The idea that you are – as you claim – a libertarian party is a total joke. You are nationalist, reactionary and on matters such as this, downright nasty. Not to say: wholly misleading.