A Better Life...or a Bitter End?

"They don't come to integrate: they've come to rule us!" I heard this again yesterday, in respect if Islamic immigrants to the United Kingdom; and one hears similar comments on a daily basis.

Such assertions are unprovable, even if any of them is true: but such comment is most probably not true in respect of 99% of all migrants. A few men who wear tribal [not 'religious'] dress do appear to intend to implant their tribal lifestyle [including 'arranged' marriages, religious schools and hierarchical political fixing]; and host governments are challenged to prevent any such development becoming abusive of members of such 'communities' or disruptive of the wider civil society. If distinctive 'communities' are allowed to expand by immigration [including the importation of spouses] as well as by breeding, a laissez-faire reaction by the body politic will lead to a backlash on both sides of the barriers that are being erected. Hitherto far-right political movements have gained no traction in British politics; but across continental Europe such movements are attracting much more effective leaders than formerly and this leads apparently inexorably to electoral support. Britain could be next: the time for  preventing such a development is short.

Demographers tell the British that they will not have such a 'problem' of an ageing population as Japan already has, and as China and most of Europe will have [on the basis of predicted human fertility] within three decades: because of the higher fertility of immigrants. This reassurance is an alarm signal to the many ordinary folk who are genuinely afraid of social division growing into political strife and the subjugation of the people whose ancestors provided the legal and social structures that have made Britain such a pleasant place to live, and whose labour created the economic infrastructure that recent governments have allowed to decay as spending has been concentrated on welfare benefits. Until all political parties allow these issues frankly to be discussed, the threat of extreme politics emerging is growing: and if Fascism raises its head, Islamism will be a natural reactive force.

Most immigrants say they have come 'for a better life': and most of them mean just that. But any sensible examination of Britain's economic prospects shows that living standards will go down over the next decade, and probably beyond then. If more people are allowed to enter the country as settlers - whether or not they work productively - there will be more people to share a net national product that is projected to grow only very slowly. If the minority of the population who have creative ideas, and who risk their own resources to invest in economic growth, are rewarded appropriately [and why should they contribute exceptionally other than for reasonable reward?] there is relatively less for the average other person. If the old are to be provided with more heat and medication and care than the middle-aged, there is less of the finite national wealth for the workers. If children are to have an optimal start in life, should that be at the cost of lower living standards for adults?

There are huge distributional problems in any given, relatively homogeneous population. If such issues are bedevilled by questions of the relative entitlement of ethnically defined or religious groups the political situation becomes seriously fraught. The economic problem is bad enough: the issues around immigration can only make it worse - if they are allowed so to do. The best way to allow the problem to get out of hand is to ignore it: as the political class have done for far too long: and I challenge anyone to find a mainstream Economist who has commented usefully on the matter.

Democracy, Debt and Doubt

As the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meet in an autumnal Paris they are all acutely aware of the historical context of the meeting. They have all been briefed on what happened to the global economy in the years from 1929 to 1936, and what were the particular effects of the Great Depression on their own countries.

 The Chinese have studied how the impact of the depression on a country that had notionally been through a democratic revolution, but which had seen only minimal structural change in the economy, was rendered even weaker than before and more susceptible to the imperialist ambitions of Japan. Those ambitions led to one of the most brutal colonialist wars in modern history, and left the unoccupied areas of the vast country prey to warlords. The Japanese withdrawal was followed by a partial Soviet occupation [of Manchuria] and a no-holds-barred civil war in whose aftermath the communists inherited a prostrate economy and a disintegrating civil society; which the new regime began to restructure on doctrinaire lines that represented a 'historial discontinuity'.

Japanese and Russian representatives in Paris knew that the debilitating effect of the depression on the the old industrial countries had left those former 'international policemen' unable to intervene in faraway countries, which were left to pursue whatever policies were selected by their non-representative regimes: Japan decided upon reckless imperial expansion and intensified political oppression at home; while the then-Soviet Union stepped up the incompetent processes of collectivisation of agriculture and overambitious industrial expansion combined with oppression on a gargantuan scale.which left the country in an advanced state of debilitation ahead of the German invasion of 1941.

Germany, France and Italy recall all too clearly that the depression was seen as the context for the consolidation of Mussolini's power in Italy and Hitler's rise to power in Germany. The restoration of national morale in Italy and Germany under the Fascists fostered the hubris that led them into aggressive war; while the absence of such a fillip to French society and the French economy helped to ensure the collapse of France in 1940 and the willing acceptance of their occupiers and of their puppet government by most of the French.

The English-speaking countries all recognise the Great Depression as perhaps the most decisive step in the shift of global economic  pre-eminence from Britain to the USA, which both suffered serious social problems as their economies plunged into the depression. Canada, Australia and New Zealand were forced to increase their autonomy from the 'mother country' during the 'thirties, in the worst of economic circumstances: only to find themselves in 1939 responding to the call to support the British war effort - which they did unstintingly, though  their role in the Second World War proved to be a major step in their maturation as sovereign states. The depression also signalled the coming of the end of the British Raj in India: although the imperial power was able to mobilise the sub-continent for the war, despite the fact that the unsustainability of the regime in the postwar world was evident.

Every other participant in the present Group of 20 'leading nations' has memories of the trauma that affected them in direct consequence of the Great Depression: so they all share a determination to take any sensible steps to prevent any re-run of that cataclysm. But they lack a clear and radical economic perspective from which they could possibly devise any 'magic bullet' solution. The nature of the economic crisis is becoming clearer: its potential political fallout is recognised. But the search for a solution lies in economic policy, and the men and women who have this formidable responsibility are looking for guidance into a soup of discredited economic theory, imperfect statistics and glib back-of-a-fag-packet propositions. They will not find any answer to their dilemma in the resources that are currently available to them..