Death of an English Village

"Are you sure though? Have you got any numbers that back it up."

Well I don't but Coleman has lots.

I usually recommend that sceptics access the paper and tell us where Coleman is going wrong. To date none have returned with a rebuttal. Could you be the first?

A chance to make a name for yourself.

Brings to mind a contribution of one's on an earlier forum of this ilk, entitled "On a self-funding repatriation scheme:


There seems to be an impression shared by some members of this forum, particularly those of a, should we say, 'immigration enthusiast' persuasion that any repatriation scheme is not only immoral, but also financially non-viable. I'd like to challenge this presumption by offering the counter-proposition that such a scheme could be at least partially self-funding. The following has been posted previously in slightly different form on several 'progressive' forums, including Liberal Conspiracy before my perma-banning there, but has never been seriously challenged. Let's see what sort of a fist the resident immigration enthusiasts here can make of it.

That repatriation made economic sense was a view was actually shared by the Labour government which rationalised its ‘Assisted Voluntary Return’ scheme for failed asylum seekers and foreign criminals by highlighting the cost savings that result from avoiding future benefits and accommodation expenses in such cases. Here is Lyn Homer, Chief Executive of the UK Border Agency in written evidence to the Commons Select Committee on Home Affairs in February 2010:



This ‘profit’ is set against the costs of the scheme of £6.3 million, which include discharge grants of £500 and ‘reintegration’ grants of up to £5000 per repatriated prisoner. Similar amounts are available for asylum seekers and other illegal entrants who agree to go quietly.

But how might the financial picture look for a ‘normal’ migrant, one wonders. The point is accepted that £5000 is not a large enough carrot to induce many of those who represent the largest drain on public funds to return home, but what might the magic number be?

To scope this out I decided to indulge in a little role-play, and imagine myself as Mohammed, a relatively recent subcontinental migrant, originally admitted some years earlier as a 'trained chef' under Labour's highly relaxed work permit rules, but actually employed as a pot-washer on minimum wage at one of the tens of thousands of “Indian” curry emporia up and down the country. Munira, like most Bangladeshi women, is a stay-at-home Mum, in this case looking after little Faisil and his three other school-age siblings. There’s another on the way, but we won’t account for that in this present analysis.

Now Mohammed of course is here to do one of those jobs that local people won’t do, at least for the kind of wages that he would (£7.20 per hour, the statutory minimum). Being a fiercely independent type, no way has Mohammed come to sponge off the rest of us, but the friendly folk at the local Citizens Advice Bureau and the JCWI have convinced him that he is entitled to it and even offered to assist with making the application.

And so we find ourselves on the very helpful online ‘Benefits Calculator’ thoughtfully provided on the Directgov website. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the system responds that Mohammed is entitled to claim a total of £681 per week in benefits, including income and child tax credit, housing benefit, council tax relief and child benefit. Other bits and pieces like free school meals, clothing grants, NHS ‘Healthy Start’ vouchers, and so on round it out to say £750, or £39,000 p.a., the cash equivalent of the benefits provided to Mohammed and his family from public funds.

So that’s the direct cash benefit, what about other benefits in kind? Of these the most significant will be the cost of educating the five nippers and keeping the entire brood healthy. A quick browse of school budgets in Mohammed’s postcode indicate an average cost of around £7000 per pupil per year (the median in London), equating to around £35000 once all five nippers are in school. Basic health insurance for a family of seven starts from around £500 per month or £6000 annually.

For Mohammed’s brood then we have an public subsidy of £80,000 each year to be borne by other taxpayers, since Mohammed himself will pay little if any income tax over the course of his working life.

Totaling this all up, over a twenty-year period Mohammed’s presence amongst us will cost the taxpayer over £1.6 million. The question then is, how big an inducement might be necessary to persuade him to return home to Sylhet where he could like a king, in a dry and sunny climate, and not have to put up with the nasty, racist British. £50K, £100K, £250K? Even the latter represents an r.o.i. that canny financial speculators would kill for.

There are probably several hundred thousand 'Mohammeds' whose daily life even their existence in Britain is only possible through generous subsidy from the British taxpayer and, with welfare, education and the NHS representing almost half of all public spending, the long-term opportunity cost of not assisting them to return to their ancestral homeland is staggeringly large.

Any further questions?

NB this article needs to be updated to reflect present benefits entitlements, education costs etc. which are certainly far greater than at the time the above was written but the underlying argument remains completely sound.

Living 12 miles out from London in the 90's with a modest garden and woods near by we had hedgehogs, foxes, squirrels, sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds, starlings,blue tits, magpies and shrikes.

Noticed in the 90's things starting to change, now 15 miles out.

Mapies, pigeons, robins and foxes.

Much more traffic and phones masts are certainly a consideration

Of course a venue such as this is not an appropriate place to go into the finer detail of a 'Homeward Bound' scheme but it would make sense to design the scheme to target as a first priority potential returnees who represent the largest drain on public resources. Like Mohammed above.

Any such scheme will always need to be a judicious blend of carrot and stick, carefully designed to appeal strongly to identified target segments at a particular point in time.

You think the two are entirely unconnected?

Or that overpopulation is not an issue?

Because in the normal course of social intercourse conversations digress.