An Unrecognisable Nation

If one listened to certain sections of the political right, it would be forgivable to believe that the recently great United Kingdom had become merely a shell of its former self, and that the cause should be obvious: immigrants. Of course! The reason that Britain's unemployment stands at around 7% and that the budget deficit has been above £100 billion for five years is the Poles, the Romanians and most recently, the Bulgarians; they steal our rightful jobs working cash in hand to stay off the books, driving up the
unemployment statistics, and then also claim benefits, keeping government spending at an unreasonable high level. One could say that they have even left the nation 'unrecognisable'.

Joking aside, it would be incorrect to attribute the fall from great power status to immigrants, or even to recent times; since the end of the Second World War, Great Britain has merely been a side-kick to our Atlantic counter-parts. Even with this acknowledged, it would again be incorrect to suggest that immigrants detract from the UK economy in any meaningful way, of course, it is possible that they create negative externalities in certain communities, and it would be ridiculous to ignore these negative points of immigration, but figures from November 2013 suggest that immigrants to the UK have made a contribution of £25 billion since 2000. Why then, is immigration such an issue with the right of the political spectrum, and a concern for many of the electorate? It seems that immigration, with all of its positive and seemingly no negative economic concern as a whole, is the only sensible path, and that any restriction placed on immigration would be cutting of the nose to spite the face.

But for many living in the UK, it doesn't matter that immigrants contribute £25 billion to our economy. How much of that do we feel realistically? And even though the EU, in theory, allows for 2-way immigration and complete freedom of labour across the European Union, if the UK economy picks up to a much greater extent than the European economies, and jobs begin to be created, then the movement of labour can only really be in one direction. No matter how free I am as a UK citizen to travel to Greece to work, it is unlikely that I will find work in a place where youth unemployment shockingly surpasses 50%, but it might be easier for a Greek with the same freedoms as I, but much fewer job prospects in his home nation, to find work in the United Kingdom. Of course, the real situation is not as clear as the one that I have presented, and there may be more specialist jobs in Greece than in the UK, and more blue collar jobs here than in the Balkan state which would redeem the freedom of labour to an extent.

However, is immigration the cause of the fall from great power status of the UK? The United Kingdom Independence Party on their own website have claimed that since 1997, immigration has added 4 million people to the UK population (of course it is painfully added that this figure does not include the uncountable illegal immigrants since 1997), which can only mean that the industrial potential of the UK has grown substantially in that time, meaning that, for subscribers to the accelerator effect, even more jobs could be created, be they for British people or not. It is also suggested on the UKIP website that due to immigrants, and sustained high levels of immigration, England is 'one of the most densely populated countries in the world', comparing us to famously massive China, boasting an impressive ranking in the density tables of 80th in the world, and India, who are only at 33rd themselves. The figure used puts the UK only at 27th, behind the giants of the population density game such as South Korea, Bangladesh and even Singapore. The 407 people per square kilometre puts us only scarcely ahead of our closest rivals (Lebanon - 404), and relatively behind our next closest (Nauru - 444). Of course, as long as UKIP were cherry-picking figures, they might as well have gone all out; London has a population density of over 5,000 people per kilometre squared, placing it at 5th in the world rankings (of countries).  How could the oblivious leaders allow the capital to get to such a state, only less dense than Hong Kong, Singapore, Monaco and Macau, with its population surely swelled by immigrants?

There is no basis for calling the UK unrecognisable (or rather, no non-political basis), as we have, since before our conception, been a nation of immigrants. Through waves of migrants, the UK never once lost any cultural identity, nor became weaker. In reality, it strengthened the unity of the commonwealth and enriched the cultural tradition of the UK. Who can be considered a native on an island nation, last connected to mainland Europe during the ice age? Do the UK Independence Party want to trace back thousands of years to see who deserves to be moved up the council housing lists? Should we merely exclude those from after the invasions of Claudius, or those not from Cnut's time? Even recently, to say that those that left the West Indies in the middle of the 20th century are not as British as the next person is a statement completely untrue and unfounded. The recent European immigrants should not be treated any differently, and as a community, we should be willing to accept these new additions. The only thing unrecognisable about Britain today is the rampant intolerance of new Britons.

HS2: An Opportunity Creator Or Further Subjugation?

The High Speed rail line set to run between the North and the South-East is estimated to cost £2 billion per year to build, similar to the estimated cost of the Crossrail, another transport system to be found linking the biggest UK city to its surroundings. But is it right that these grand projects take place, ready to suck the best minds in the country towards our biggest vacuum, rather than trying to create a more balanced economy, with a series of cities able to compete with each other, and drive up competitiveness and ambition over a more spread out area.

Today, Evan Davis' programme 'Mind the Gap: London vs the Rest' aired its second part, focussing on the issue of a counterweight to the dominance that London enjoys in the UK, one interviewee almost jokingly commenting that Hebden Bridge was the UK's second city, boasting suburbs such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Preston. But there is to be some case for a Northern city that can combat the quasi-monopoly of London in the UK white-collar jobs; without immobility of labour amongst the Northern cities - Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool and even Birmingham - one Northern hub could rival London, and would possibly rebalance the economy of the UK.

The next innovation that could promise this removal of immobility of labour is of course, high speed rail; with times from Manchester to Birmingham being suggested to be halved (from 1 and a half hours to 41 minutes) and Manchester to Leeds even more so (2 hours to 51 minutes), we can see that transport between the Northern cities becoming less of an issue than travelling from some suburbs to the cities themselves. Obviously, a possible solution to creating a pseudo-super city in the North, an area of labour that can commute from Liverpool to Leeds, would be to lay the tracks of high speed rail across the East-West belt of cities in the North, and allow the working populations of those cities to move freely, in turn creating an area of prosperity and competitiveness, similar to that we have seen in London and the South-East.


However, with the plans that we have seen, the aim of the line seems to be to create a greater pull from the cities which I envisioned to be linked together and rather take the entrepreneurs in the regions and relocate them to London. With the Crossrail system doing much the same across regions East and West of London, one must start to wonder if the North is being viewed by those in the South-East as a suburb, workers only living there to commute to London to work. It has been suggested that HS2 will create opportunities in  the cities outside of London, with some estimates of 22,000 jobs and £1.5 billion per year in Birmingham due to the rail line. And with this incentive, it is easy to see why places like Crewe and Stoke are both trying to outbid each other for the rail way to pass through their ranks. However, is the real answer to the wealth inequality in the country creating spillovers from the capital, or do we in the North require something more substantial?



Watch the second part of 'Mind the Gap: London vs the Rest' on the BBC iPlayer here:
Mind the Gap