A couple of weeks ago Keir Starmer made headlines by claiming that too many people from overseas are recruited by the NHS. For this he was, of course, slandered as the second coming of Sir Oswald Mosely or Enoch Powell by his own side, who, despite their protestations to the contrary, rarely look beyond the headline when it comes to statements about immigration.
Sir Keir made the point that immigration was not the key to ending the staffing crisis faced by the NHS, a point in which he is perfectly correct. Rather than relying on foreign workers to fill the shortfalls in staffing, he would instead “train people in this country” to return to the goal that every country that seeks: remaining somewhat close to self-sustaining one of its most important government services.
An estimated 34% of people joining the NHS last year were from overseas, up from 18% just 8 years ago, a massively disproportionate amount compared to the wider population. There remains in England a shortage of 12,000 hospital doctors and more than 50,000 nurses and midwives. This compounded with the issues of the COVID backlogs has meant that the health service now faces some of the longest waiting periods in its history. Going into a winter with the ongoing fuel and power it is clear that, amongst the litany of other permacrises the service seems to face, the NHS may be entering one of the most testing seasons of its 75 years.
Why not then, if the situation is indeed so dire, accept as many immigrants as it takes to see us through? This makes sense to the types to whom immigration is a hammer and every problem a nail, but continuing this reliance on outsiders to prop up our geriatric and unreformable healthcare system can only end in disaster. They would have us prioritise short term relief over long term investment, a propping up of an overreaching shanty than to build with foresight the proper foundations of a functioning institution
But it makes sense to build from within. For one, it makes no sense to have our healthcare system, one of the most important things in the lives of millions of our countrymen, reliant on those who could at any time up and leave to go home. This has already happened with many Poles who after the covid pandemic dissipated have decided to go back to the continent, affecting services like bus provision in Birmingham particularly hard; so why are we so blind to it’s possible happening in a far more crucial industry? There is also a conversation to be had about our own homegrown medical personnel leaving for America after their training; but one problem at a time here.
This all feeds into the wider discourse around immigration, which has once again hit a record high. 1 in 6 people in England and Wales were born abroad, yet the ONS has decided – for no reason at all, I’m sure – to no longer record ethnicity statistics, and coincidentally demands for housing and services are strained to breaking point. The arguments are tired, but now with this it seems some are finally awake to our current reality that mass immigration is unfair and unjust to all parties save two: left-wing parties who prey on the votes of migrants; and big businesses who can save on labour costs by endlessly importing low cost workers from the third world.
All others suffer for the system; native peoples find their wages undercut and the value of their vote diluted, their languages and culture displaced from inner cities now turned to foreign ghettos. These areas are inhabited by the destitute peoples drawn to a strange place where they have no roots or history, taken from countries far poorer than ours who desperately need the wealth and skills of the people poached from them by the lazy politicians and managers of our institutions who would rather paper over cracks than build from within a stable and secure foundation.
This is a problem far wider reaching than just the NHS, but given that that particular institution is tantamount to our golden calf it’s a good place to start the discourse. For many in Labour however this discourse is unthinkable, as is any that seeks to come up with any solution to our immigration questions with any other answer than “no human is illegal, just let them all in”. This is Starmer’s problem; there remains in Labour the strain of far-left terminally online social vandals that took charge during the Corbyn administration. Though he is leading a cautious return to the centre, he will be answerable in part to these cerebral vacuums, as will his (often just as miserably online) MPs who have already shown themselves to have a habit of breaking rank, as seen in their attending picket lines over the last few months, in order to appease their Twitter followings.
Starmer, whose wife works in the NHS, might be the political equivalent of a plain ham sandwich but on this he knows what is needed, even if it puts him out of lockstep with his party, to whom even suggesting a policy on immigration that isn’t throwing open the door to the world is equivalent to having a televised fireside chat in which he reads extracts from Mein Kampf whilst sat atop a chair made from slave-picked cotton. It remains to be seen whether he sticks to his guns, or will be cowed back into toeing the line by his party, though on this it can be assured; Keir Starmer is right about the NHS.
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Conservatives Against Equality
The Trojan horse has made its way inside the Conservative Party with an egalitarian agenda it will stop at nothing to implement, including rooting out any trace of actual right-wing policy. However, the enemy within has only been given power by the fact that the Conservatives themselves have no clue what they stand, giving space for leftist ideology to creep in through these infiltrators.
The Conservatives’ abandonment of conservative principles in favour of identity-driven equality can be exemplified through the Equalities Minister speaking at an LGBT event of “Celebrating 50 Years of Pride” with the new, even more hideous pride flag behind him. For one, there should be no such thing as a “Minister of Equalities” (as there also shouldn’t be a “Minister for Women and Equality”). These positions are divisive and identity driven. Secondly, a Conservative MP should not be proudly endorsing a flag that represents gender ideology which encourages children to go through harmful surgery in order to “change gender” and for women to have their toilets and changing rooms infringed upon by perverted males who are into autogynephilia.
Then there are the Conservative Members who are more concerned about Laurence Fox posting an edgy tweet making fun of gender ideologues than the actual gender ideologues themselves. They seem to be silent when the left captures our institutions and calls for destructive and disturbing policies. However, when a Conservative decides to stand up for conservativism in the slightest, they go ballistic. While they claim to be “economically conservative”, they spend all their time arguing with right wingers about social issues, lecturing them that there’s “bigger fish to fry” (while they themselves barely even discuss or talk about these “bigger fish”). Who’s going to tell them that they are participating in the culture war they claim to hate by trying to silence any conservative who stands up for our culture? It would be better if these crypto leftists left the party and joined the Liberal Democrats or the Labour Party.
Conservatives should be against equality, both in the economic and social terms. This doesn’t mean you should be cruel to people. You can argue for better treatment of groups without having to advocate for equality. I don’t treat people nicely based on whether they’re equal to me. I don’t treat people of different races or sexualities the same because we’re equal, I treat them the same because I believe it’s nonsensical to base my treatment of someone on irrelevant characteristics. Furthermore, we shouldn’t treat people equally. A ten-year-old should treat an adult stranger different to the new kid in the playground. A teacher shouldn’t give equal attention to the kid who doesn’t need help and the kid who does. These are both forms of discrimination. We discriminate every day.
However, leftism has convinced the public that “discrimination” is represented by its worse examples and “equality” on its best examples. However, doing things for the sake of equality is stupid. We should embrace that everyone is unique with both skills and weaknesses. We should promote people’s unique skills through the free market. Capitalism is a system that that discourages people discriminating for reasons that do not impact people’s skills (for example, the economist Thomas Sowell has done incredible work to show how racism is unprofitable for businesses). Yet capitalist systems tend to be the most unequal in terms of wealth and income. You can favour social progress and be against unfair treatment without favouring equality.
Eammon Butler states in his book Economic Equality:
The universal case for equality is that, in all important respects, human beings are alike. They have a similar identity, which implies that they are essentially equal and should be treated equally. There are problems with this suggestion. For a start, we cannot infer equality from identity. The numbers 3 and 5 share the identity that they are both integers. But they are not equal; and nor can we make them so. Though people speak glibly of humans being “born equal”, the plain reality is that they are not. They differ naturally in many ways – physically, intellectually and morally.
If the Conservatives want to win, they need to show conviction and know what they believe in. Equality is antithetical towards right wing ideology, and we should not be ashamed of this fact. We shouldn’t have a party where MPs can easily switch between “the left wing” and “the right wing” parties. To the people in the party who are more concerned with the right than they are the left, we should politely guide them to the door. No Blairites please!
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This Great Stage of Fools: Thoughts on the Church of England
There was a time not very long ago when I wanted to become an Anglican priest. I thought I had discovered my vocation; it filled me with hope for the future. Now, however, I cannot think of a more unattractive prospect.
I was warned. At a book signing a couple of years ago, a non-stipendiary priest looked at me and said that the Church of England would eat me up. Another priest expressed such a lack of enthusiasm for his role that he might as well have told me to convert to atheism. I could hardly gainsay them. It wasn’t my place to claim that I would have been a moral, spiritual or intellectual asset to the Anglican fold – though, admittedly, I did wish to ape those clever, eccentric country parsons who so enriched the culture. As Bill Bryson wrote in his book Home:
“Never in history have a group of people engaged in a broader range of creditable activities for which they were not in any sense actually employed.”
The first history of dirty jokes, the Jack Russell terrier, Bayes’ Theorem, the power loom, Tristram Shandy, and even the submarine were all products of bored clergymen.
Of course, to believe that today’s Church of England resembled yesterday’s was my own, rose-tinted failing. Deep down, I knew it had changed almost beyond recognition. But change is inevitable – and often salutary. I could perhaps have embraced the 21st century Church of England. Unfortunately, I doubt it would embrace me. Its recent “yeeting” (to use the scientific term) of Calvin Robinson alerted me to just how far the Church has fallen. Robinson’s politics comport with my own as do his convictions: pride is a sin, marriage is between a man and a woman, and the Gospel is rather more significant than an imported racial ideology, of which Black Lives Matter is the conduit. Robinson’s treatment showed that the Church of England’s hierarchy is committing slow-motion idolatry.
When Robinson rails against what has happened to him, I have no doubt that he speaks for many, if not the majority, of churchgoers, who all but despair of what has happened to our national Church. But Robinson has a platform. We hear less often from young Anglicans, for whom the Church’s every statement seems designed to cater. Thus we get mini-golf courses and helter-skelters in our cathedrals, pride and NHS flags draped over our altars, and statements to the effect that the Church is racist but you should join it anyway. My own local church recently played host to a rock concert, for which the altar was whisked embarrassedly out of sight. Would a mosque tolerate such a thing? No, and nor should it. And of course, the Church hierarchy announced only a couple of weeks ago that they, too, couldn’t make heads or tails of what a woman was – undoing centuries of dogma and theology, not to mention insulting women.
It would be remiss of me to claim to be able to speak on behalf of all young Anglicans, especially given my continuing attraction to both Rome and Constantinople. But, after years of contact with other young Anglicans, I am confident that what I have to say now would attract something close to a consensus. So, Mr Welby, if you’re listening (which I suspect you’re not): we don’t want what you’re offering. We want heaven and hell. We want angels, powers and principalities. We want prayer, orthodoxy and conviction. We want good and evil, right and wrong. Above all, we want Christ. Your generation – the children of the 1960s – became enamoured by the secular. You think that heaven on earth is possible, if only we join the right causes and shun the wrong politic – you have surrendered to the world. But the Kingdom is not of this world. As T.S. wrote in Thoughts After Lambeth:
“Thought, study, mortification, sacrifice: it is such notions as these that should be impressed upon the young—who differ from the young of other times merely in having a different middle-aged generation behind them. You will never attract the young by making Christianity easy; but a good many can be attracted by finding it difficult: difficult both to the disorderly mind and to the unruly passions.”
If this truth isn’t soon heeded, I fear that the Church of England will be all but extinct in a decade or two. It will linger on in London and Birmingham, perhaps, where immigrant Christians still take seriously what the English do not. But it will no longer be the spiritual organ of the nation. Possibly the Catholic Church will fill the vacuum. Who knows?
I say all this as someone who is, technically, a member of the newly established religion: LGBT. It is said to be a community, though I’ve never seen it except when it rears its sponsored head to bully some poor recalcitrant for saying the wrong thing about gay marriage. Exactly this was what happened in my town last year. A Christian councilman said to some committee or other that, while he supported the right of gay people to live happy lives, he could not condone gay marriage. It has become a cliche to compare cancel culture to witch hunts, for good reason but the councilman was subjected to weeks of bullying and the foulest of threats and insults all, of course, in the name of tolerance and compassion. It upset me that the local Anglican church did nothing to snuff the flames – and may even have wished secretly to fan them.
There is, I believe, a ground swell of small-o orthodoxy among the young. New atheism (of which I was a devotee) proved insufficient in answering our moral, spiritual and intellectual needs. Many of us turned to God, whatever our politics. But if we were conservative, we naturally sought sustenance in the Church of England. I cannot be alone in saying that to find it so debased has been one of the great sadnesses of my early life. As Lear says, “we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools”.
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I’m Never Going to Get a State Pension, So Why Should I Pay for Yours?
The modern state pension is one of the greatest Ponzi schemes ever inflicted on the British people, yet our government continues to offer their unwavering support to it. Why? The answer is simple: moronic and selfish baby boomers (the largest and most active voter demographic in the UK) who still believe that it is working just fine.
Now, a lot of our nation’s issues stem from the boomer problem but for the time being, I would like to focus solely on the disgusting nature of the state pension and how it saps the life and well-being of young and working-age people.
Firstly, to circle back to my initial point, pensions are indeed a Ponzi scheme. Baby boomers will endlessly harp on about how they ‘paid their fair share all their working life’, but this is simply not the case. When the boomer was working, they were not putting money into an investment pot (like private pensions); they were, in fact, paying someone else’s pension. The flaw in this system immediately becomes obvious – it relies entirely on never-ending steady population growth. It requires the nation to always have a normal population pyramid with many young people and few old people. Unfortunately for the system, boomers were some of the first generations to have access to free healthcare and cheap prophylactics and abortions. Indeed, many boomers have had one or fewer children and are living considerably longer. Meaning they haven’t even replaced themselves. After the release of the 2021 census, we now know that we no longer have a population pyramid, but instead a population rectangle.
This is bad news and I don’t know how to put this nicely, so I’ll just say it plainly; unless something changes soon, we (along with many other economically advanced nations) are facing a complete demographic catastrophe. There are nowhere near enough children being born to pay the pensions of current working-age people now.
This is the final form of any Ponzi scheme. The initial investors have already been paid back by the newer ones, and soon enough the rug will be pulled and all those people at the bottom will have nothing to show for it.
Let us also not forget that most people over the age of 70 in this country have been recipients of the most glamorous state-subsidised lifestyles ever to exist. The baby boomers are the wealthiest generation in history and it is hard to grasp just how good they have had it. They grew up in a country eager to build a functioning welfare state and a booming population and experienced consistent economic growth for the first 55 years of their lives. Their children and grandchildren, on the other hand, are the first generations in decades to be poorer on average than those who came before them. They have been forced to suffer through stagnant wages and terrible interest rates for most of their lives.
Why do we not fix this problem? Well, for a start, baby boomers vote en masse. Due to the abnormally large amount of them, they were effectively able to establish a voting block which has existed in British politics since they started to turn of voting age (the 1960s/70s). Due to their size, politicians know that they have to pander to them if they hope to win any election. So the government is forced to do their bidding until such a time as there are no longer enough of them to make an impact on elections.
This means that young people (who have remarkably low voter turnout nationally) stand no chance of influencing government policy in comparison to them. The state will, therefore, continue to suck the wealth away from young people to fund the ponzi pensions of boomers.
The important question that young people need to be asking themselves now is, what happens in the future when we run out of new young people? We are already importing about a million people a year via mass immigration to try and plug the gap. But this cannot go on forever. Immigrants also have a habit of getting old, and importing more immigrants to plug the ever-increasing gap is insanity. It would require an unlimited supply of immigrants and levels of housebuilding that have never been seen in this country, it’s hard enough as it is to get permission to build a house let alone a couple million.Eventually, the state pension will cease to exist. I sincerely believe that I, and other 20-somethings, will never have a state pension. This would not be a problem for me (I can afford to buy into a private one) but I, and all other workers, are forced to pay into a scheme that we will never see the benefit of. There is no opt-out, there is no escape from it.Young people are not stupid; a lot of them realise that this is the case. They fully understand the fact that they are unlikely to ever see a penny from the state after they turn 67 and it’s absolutely soul-destroying. We are the main cash cow for the subsidised boomer lifestyle, and we will not see a penny or even a word of thanks.
It would be extremely difficult to fix the situation we are in now, but here are some potential solutions:
1. Force the wealthiest amongst the elderly to sell their assets to pay for their own care.
Boomers are the largest asset controlling class in the country. 1 in 4 are millionaires and, as a group, are extremely asset rich. They own vast amounts of stocks, property, and other assets.
2. Reform the state pension system.
It is unfair to abolish the state pension immediately. Many people have handed over considerable sums of money towards it over their lifetimes. If a state pension must exist, it should operate on an investment model like other pension schemes, and not the current Ponzi scheme model.
3. Make the state pension optional.
Give young people the choice to join the state pension, save up their money, join private pension schemes, or just use it when they receive it.
These are just some ideas of ways that we could at least marginally improve the situation for young people, and make our state’s welfare system fairer and less focussed on the elderly. Young people are the future of Great Britain, and our treatment of them is beyond disgusting. Give them some hope and support schemes and policies that actually seek to invest in them. We should not just be transferring their money to old people.
