Immigration

Do we BENEFIT from IMMIGRATION? (a brief exploration of semantic influence).

/ Garry Abbott / Leave a comment

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Can you see what I did there in the title? I conflated two loaded terms together to make one all pervasive semantically primed caption – designed to capture your attention and activate certain feelings and emotional responses that are being subconsciously suggested to you on a daily basis through the myriad of programming on these two topics.

Now, before you start screaming ‘lizard people!’ at me – this is not to say that someone or some group has sat down and decided to use the semantic priming of the electorate to stir up ill-feeling and division against certain groups of people in order to divert attention from themselves. No. That would be ridiculous wouldn’t it?

Of course, if the ongoing demonization of these perceived social sub-groups is not some diversion tactic by the powerful elite, then it must be something else. Stands to reason really. So what else could it be? Here are some options and considerations.

1.            We (as a collective entity incapable of individual thought) are genuinely concerned about benefits/migrants.

Sounds reasonable. I mean, there are no shades of grey here are they? We, the 63 million headed beast known as ‘the electorate’, have come to a majority consensus that we don’t like bene-grants, sorry, I mean, immi-fits, (whoops!) I mean benefits and immigrants.

I suppose that’s because we all wake up every day, covered in immigrants, go downstairs only to find we’ve lost our JOB to an immigrant and that we’re not entitled to any support because the welfare bill is being used by all those bloody benefit claimants. Then, as you walk down your street, which is full of immigrants and benefit CHEATS, you look through their windows and they’re all having a big party around a FLAT SCREEN TV, watching SKY, drinking BEER, smoking CIGARETTES, taking ILLEGAL DRUGS, committing other CRIME and having BABIES at our expense.

What’s worse is some of them are one and the same thing: immigrants on benefits (OMG!). And some of them look just like us so it’s hard to tell which is which and who to hate the most! I mean, we hate our ‘own’ benefit claimants anyway, so what if they are foreign? I suppose that means we hate them twice as much? Does it work like that?

For example, you are trapped in a burning building with two other people: one is a white British benefit claimant, the other is an immigrant benefit claimant. Only two of you can survive. Do you a) save the evil British person cos they’re only ‘one bad’, or b) save the ‘two bad’ evil foreign person because you probably are one too, or c) let yourself burn and let them both live (whatever!), or d) let them both burn as they are evil anyway and you are a better human being than them?

I suppose if you genuinely do hate immigrant/benefits then you will have given this much thought. I mean, ‘hate’ is a really strong word and historically has led to all sorts of problems, so you don’t want to take a subject like hating a whole section of society lightly. It’s not like you would just watch say, one episode of a ‘structured reality’ TV show on Channel 4 and come to this opinion, that would be absurd. (Or worse still – read the opinions of one newspaper and think that represents the whole complexity of the issue!)

2.            You are not so concerned about the individuals who are being targeted, more the impact on the economic situation these issues can cause.

We’ve moved up a notch here from burning people alive, for those of a more academic disposition. It’s not racist to talk about immigration after all, and it’s not elitist to talk about benefit claimants. To give you an idea of the kind of audience this option applies to, listen to any Radio 4 phone-in at the moment, or watch question time.

This kind of opinion doesn’t come from tabloids or scare tactics. How can it when you read broadsheets and watch the neutral BBC treatment of these topics? (mostly commissioned in response to the tabloids and political scare tactics – in order to represent a ‘balanced’ debate of the issues of the day).

Now we’re considering, in a mild mannered and measured way, the IMPACT on SCHOOL PLACES, on HOUSING, CRIME and the NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE. Let alone the overall contribution to THE DEFICIT. We’re talking about immigration CAPS and CHECKS and BALANCES. Also, on what it means to make a FAIR CONTRIBUTION to the STATE. And this is the world of STATISTICS.

Funnily enough, this is also the world where during a three hour debate phone-in, an expert can happily tell us that there isn’t really a problem – that the figures are massively insignificant in comparison to say, financial fraud and tax evasion at the highest level – and yet no one stops the debate and says “oh well, there isn’t much point us continuing to talk about people on benefits and immigrants anymore if this isn’t really a problem compared to these other things.” No, the show continues to debate the none-issue anyway in a weekly series of ill-formed opinion tennis, as that’s what we want to hear, apparently.

It’s tempting to think, when listening to some semi-retired bed & breakfast owner in Torquay waxing lyrical about the strain on the NHS due to immigration, and how it wasn’t like that in ‘my day’, that they are only ever a stone’s throw away from suggesting we put up a big wall around the country and shoot on sight. But it’s okay, because they don’t mind immigrants as people because they met some nice one’s working in the 5 star hotel they once visited in London (even if they did have trouble understanding the accent). And they understand the plight of people out of work on benefits, but why should these people have FLAT SCREEN TVs, and not go out and GET A JOB like they did once in another decade/place/social situation?

You may have noticed throughout this blog that I have been using a lot of CAPS to emphasise certain key words. Not very subtle, and I’m sorry if it seems like I’m typographically shouting at you. The reason however was to see if anything illuminating comes from stringing these words together once I’d finished ironically appraising the broad ‘camps’ of public opinion as presented above.

Option 1 was, roughly, your tabloids and shock TV approach to making ‘folk devils’ out of immigrants and benefit claimants (‘folk devils’ by the way, is a social sciences term for how the media represent  sections of society perceived to be ‘out of order’ with the rest of us – often totally sensationalised and disconnected from the reality of the situation: there are theories that this comes out of political and corporate influence to divert attention and/or good old fashioned profiteering – both seem likely, both are probably true.) Option 2 was your BBC/Broadsheet coverage of these issues which does much the same with a different audience in mind and longer words.

So, we were left with a number of ‘buzz words’ that I have categorised below:

Public Services:

SCHOOL PLACES – NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE – HOUSING – CRIME

Consumer Items:

FLAT SCREEN TV – SKY – BEER – CIGARETTES – HOUSING – ILLEGAL DRUGS

Lifestyle:

JOB – BABIES – CRIME – HOUSING

Economics:

THE DEFICIT – CAPS – CHECKS – BALANCES – CONTRIBUTION – STATE – STATISTICS

Emotive:

CHEATS – IMPACT – FAIR CONTRIBUTION – GET A JOB.

For me, this little list is basically a ‘picture postcard’ of almost every domestic political issue going, with a bit of advertising thrown in for good measure:

  • We all want high quality and easily accessible public services (no brainer). But these are suffering (for reasons such as benefits and immigration) and therefore need private help, unsurprisingly.
  • Owning a flat screen TV with an expensive SKY subscription is apparently the pinnacle of modern existence. Our reward for being good tax-payers. (Which makes it much more annoying when some cheat achieves this without even going to work!)
  • Alcohol, cigarettes and illegal drugs are almost pitched as envy items for the option 1 readers/viewers. After all, what we all really want (according to that view) is to watch SKY on our TVs while getting intoxicated one way or the other, especially if you are in a low paid job with little prospects. So these migrants and benefit claimants are cheating their way to that ideal. Naughty. Furthermore, for the option 2 view – these are mostly seen as repugnant vice’s, putting moral distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’. For option 2 views, we want to be able to watch our flat screen TVs enjoying moderate legal intoxication. Because, as stated, that is the aim of all humanity.
  • Apart from that, we all want to work, no matter the job(?). Breeding is arguably one of the certain motivations of all life, and having somewhere to live one of the others. If you don’t want to work, you’re probably a criminal (although robbery does involve a lot of heavy lifting I hear).
  • But we can’t have all these thing all the time because of the economic deficit! That’s why we need checks and balances and caps on (all manner of) things. Use the words state control instead: it’s easier and more accurate. Plus we need to contribute to survive, and that’s shown in the official statistics for almost every aspect of our existence. (And again, if you don’t, you are probably a criminal).
  • Which brings us to the ‘idea’ of fairness. Which boils down to: get a job and contribute to avoid the crushing and devastating impacts that cometh to us if we don’t. (Or be a criminal and face punishment).

And who is to blame (at the moment) if we can’t have these things in the way we want, as often as we want, without concessions? One, two three… The immigrants and benefit cheats! Yes! We have an answer to all our problems, as spelled out to us daily in every article, debate, documentary and news item to grace our senses.

Now, Mr and Mrs readers – I hardly need to tell you all this. You are after all probably not who this type of media is aimed at (or maybe you are, I have no way of knowing), and are probably unsurprised about these conclusions. The question I want to ask is BUT WHY? And WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT? I don’t have these answers yet, and don’t think any one person can without consensus, but I would really like to know what those of us who aren’t swayed by sensationalism and rhetoric can do to help those that are. Because this is making a real and negative difference. It’s not the migrants and benefit claimants who are the problem (at the very least, not to any degree of scale as is being portrayed) – it is the media representation (for whatever motives, political and private), and it needs to stop.

Please send your ideas on a postcard to Mr Cameron, 10 Downing Street, or alternatively, leave them in the comments box below.

Thank you for reading.

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Mystic Gaz – Ten predictions for 2014

/ Garry Abbott / Leave a comment

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What better way to start the new year than with some predictions eh? Predictions are much easier than resolutions: there is no implied permanency of action or intent. One can just make a prediction, write it down, walk away and forget about it until a given time (if indeed, a time is specified), and then (if it turns out true) bask in a smug all-knowing glow, or (if it is false) marvel at the randomness and unpredictability of the chaotic world we live in.

I suppose the best way to make predictions is to abandon any personal notions of optimism or pessimism, and instead just follow the trajectory of events to a logical progression. But the world rarely works like that does it? Last year, I would have had no inkling that within days of the new year, the words ‘Horse Meat’ would come to dominate our screens, papers and radios – because there was no precedent. Similarly in 2012, unless I had been a keen follower of Russian fem-punk outfits I would have never been able to predict that I would get the childish joy of hearing BBC newsreaders saying the words “Pussy Riot” over and over again (which, I maintain to this day they take great pleasure from – next time you hear a report on ‘Pussy Riot’, listen to the aplomb and clarity by which the presenter pronounces the name).

I guess that last paragraph was to excuse myself for wild inaccuracies or glaring omissions should the following predictions be reviewed this time next year. I will now set out ten predictions, covering various aspects of our world, mostly based on the news headings you find on the BBC news website (which as we all know are the ancient categories of all life entrusted to the guardians of knowledge by the great sun God Ra himself).

To get us in the mood, the first five predictions are ‘quick fire’ and not at all serious:

  1. George Osborne will pull such an evil face in a photograph that anyone who looks at it will be immediately turned into a Tory. (Note – replace George Osborne with ‘Iain Duncan Smith’ or ‘Michael Gove’ if you wish.)
  2. Nick Clegg will call someone a bigot on camera and no one will care. This will cause Clegg to go on a rampage, running around the streets of Sheffield naked, pointing at people and shouting all manner of abuse. Still, no one will care.
  3. The hysteria over the ‘influx’ of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants will continue regardless of any actual facts or evidence. One newspaper will coin the term ‘Bromanian’ to further homogenise two whole nations of people into one nasty baddy who is coming over here to steal the jobs we don’t have from the people who don’t want them.
  4. Google and Amazon will join forces and declare themselves the ‘winners’.
  5. In a bid to outdo herself, a naked Miley Cyrus will inject heroin into her eyeballs live on stage while licking a rod of weapons grade plutonium.

Now onto the serious (or at least semi considered) predictions. As when playing Trivial Pursuit, let’s get the difficult category out of the way first:

 

Prediction 6: Sport – England won’t win the World Cup.

Ok, ok, so I’ve gone for a bit of a freebie here when it comes to sport. I’m  not really a ‘sport’ man (I’m definitely not a sportsman) but I do like a bit of football here and there, and I do enjoy the international tournaments (and not, I must say, because of England, though I do watch them for the few matches they play before being inevitably and anti-climatically eliminated).

Let’s face it, looking at the likes of Spain and hosts Brazil (who I guess in a little sub-prediction, will face each other in the final if that’s possible, or at the latest possible knock-out stage, the winner of that match going on to win the competition) – England aren’t going to win. I’m not going to give you detailed or technical reasons as to why (because I can’t), but I will tease that it might have something to do with Wayne Rooney’s hair graft causing a major upset in the Amazonian city of Manaus.

Other sport will happen too. I can guarantee that.

 

Prediction 7: Business – Sometime in late Autumn, America will look over the ‘fiscal cliff’.

Well, it’s almost tradition now isn’t it? I think it’s generally around October time that the American government propose and vote on the ‘debt ceiling’ and come to loggerheads about it. This year it got so bad that the White House gift shop had to close for a week or two, so as you can see, this is serious stuff. Similarly, back home, we will see the budget announcement in March as always, where slight variations of percentages will be announced, poured over and dissected by the press and the opposition (who will of course, offer up their own slightly different variations of the same percentages to appease our perceived desire for democratic choice).

It will be much of the same I reckon. The BOE ‘base rate’ will remain unchanged at 0.5% – but it will be increasingly hinted at that this might rise as the economy ‘recovers’ and unemployment ‘falls’. It is so very hard to talk about business and politics in this world without the use of inverted commas to represent the fact that nearly everything they talk about is ‘bullshit’. In fact, I predict that inverted commas are going to be so popular in 2014 that they will be privatised by the ‘government’.

 

Prediction 8: Politics – Early General Election.

This is a biggie. I’ve said it before somewhere last year, but in a nutshell, these things will happen:

  1. Some issue will arise that divides the coalition on how to respond. At a guess, I reckon something to do with tax breaks or welfare proposed by the Tories.
  2. All of a sudden, the Liberal Democrat membership will be up in arms about supporting this new policy – even though they’ve happily propped up the Conservatives for the last three years.
  3. This will provoke a leadership challenge within the Lib Dems as Nick Clegg fails to convince his party that supporting the new tax/benefit measures is a good idea (he will stake his career on it – well, I suppose it’s best not to gamble with anything valuable).
  4. A new leader will arise who has a track record of being an outspoken critic of the Tories, even though they too have spent the last three years propping them up (my money’s on Vince Cable).
  5. This division will split the party, make the coalition untenable, and force a general election in which the Lib Dems will have the opportunity to rebrand themselves away from the Clegg/Tory era, and have at least a slim chance of not committing self-political genocide.

This may happen in early 2015, with the signs of it in late 2014. My reasoning for this is I just can’t believe that the Liberal Democrat membership, financial backers and ‘old guard’ are going to let Clegg take them into an election next year as one half of an unpopular coalition having broken so many promises. They must know what is coming to them in 2015 if they do: obliteration. Unfortunately, out of the two parties in power, we weren’t surprised when the Tories started acting like Tories because that’s what they are. The Lib Dems, however, have actually let people down. If you vote Tory and believe in their philosophy, you are getting what you asked for (more’s the pity for you). If you voted Liberal Democrat, you are not.

But fear not! If they simply follow the above plan, they can direct all the scorn and mistrust into Nick Clegg, boot him out and pretend to be a changed party. It’s either that or have Clegg, possibly one of the most unpopular politicians in history, try and convince us that we should trust him and that ‘he really means it this time’ when it comes to his pledges and abilities to temper the top down policies of the Tories. Nah. It will be a managed move. At the very least, Clegg will not be taking the Lib Dems into the next election, whether this happens in 2014 or 2015.

Oh and Labour will just watch it all unfold and get some column inches making jeering comments about the whole debacle while failing to realise that no one likes them either.

 

Prediction 9: Welfare – Something will happen to the Nationwide Building Society

Now remember these are predictions okay?! I don’t want to do a ‘Robert Peston’ and potentially cause the thing I’m providing discourse on (not that that’s very likely unless unbeknownst to me this blog is read by leading influential investors and hedge fund managers). But, they are the only sector of the financial industry left not to have been embroiled in some major scandal, and given the fake-inflation of house prices due to the dubious government loan policies – maybe they are next? After all, they are the UKs biggest Building Society and the general ‘go to’ company for mortgage and housing data. The second largest used to be Britannia, but they got merged into the nation’s only cooperative, and look what happened there… So, even though I have no cause, reason or evidence to suggest this, there may be an outside chance it will happen so I’m saying it anyway.

Prediction 10: Scotland referendum – Bye, bye Scotland.

It’s a damning indictment of Westminster that this referendum is even happening. It is happening for a reason. I can only imagine what it would mean to me if I was ‘attached’ to this government with an option of leaving it all together in these times. Maybe I am in the minority and the waffle about security, monetary union and EU membership will be enough to convince people that they aren’t good enough to ‘go it alone’, but I hope not: because change is a good thing. Not this fake, incremental creep of percentages this way or that, but real, tangible change is a rare opportunity and I hope that they grasp the thistle with both hands and show us all that there is more to life than the whims and needs of the City of London and demonstrate (in time, and no doubt with some difficulty) that alternatives do exist.

And there we go, my predictions for the new year. I’m sure I could have made a list of hundreds but I have neither the time, patience or attention span to do so. I will refer back to this list should anything happen, and I will review this in early 2015 when I make next year’s predictions (presuming of course that by that time I’m not an international best-selling author who has teams of people to write his blog and manage his social networks on his behalf – did I mention I’m releasing a book shortly called ‘The Dimension Scales’ featuring 14 short stories based around themes of malevolent and secret authorities, metamorphosis, survival and projections of contemporary fears into near-future realities?).

Have a great new year everyone.

Garry