Is this the same thing?

I find it strange how the media seem to think that the Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Trump are somehow related.

Last June, I voted to leave the EU.  I didn't do it because I believed that immigration was wrong - I actually believe that in manageable numbers it's a good thing.  I didn't do it because I felt I'd been left behind by the political class - I've had a very good and very lucrative career, thank you.  And I didn't do it because I was persuaded by a particular newspaper - I don't read them.

I did it because, on balance, I felt that the EU had become an organisation driven by principles that I don't share.  An organisation run by political appointees, rather than democratically-elected, accountable representatives.  An organisation that gives too much space to lobbyists, that listens too much to commercial interests to make rational decisions that are truly good for the people of Europe.

No, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.  I don't doubt that there are any number of politicians out there who actually try to bring their idea of "good" to the people they represent.  However, I don't believe that companies or corporations can do the same thing.  Companies exist to make profit for their shareholders, and everything they do is about maximising that profit.

And when they get big enough, and influential enough, they use that influence to try to steer government policy.  And with Europe, they can steer twenty-eight governments at the same time by influencing directives, which then have to be enacted in national laws..

I don't like that.

And having worked in the finance sector for the last thirty years, I was rather surprised, to say the least, that the former PM of Luxembourg, that little country of 600,000 (very rich) people, should be the consensus candidate for President of the European Commission a couple of years back.  Here was the man who had - in 20 years as Luxembourg's Minister for Finances - steered the little country to its position as the top tax haven in Europe.  And this guy was the best that Europe had to offer?  Or did it have something to do with the influence of all those global multi-nationals whom he had persuaded to store their money in the Grand Duchy? And when I heard his eve-of-the-referendum comments on the possibility of any future renegotiations (it was de Gaulle's "non" again) I didn't even need to answer the question for myself.  I voted Leave.

Mr Trump, however, is altogether another matter.  

Try as I might, all I can see is somebody who thinks that running a country is the same as running a corporation.

It isn't.

In a corporation, you only hire people you think will succeed, and when they don't, you sack them.  Countries have a lot of people who will probably never succeed, but you still have to provide for them, because you can't sack them.

The tragedy for me is that Trump managed somehow to persuade those people that he - the man who seemed to take pride in the fact that he had paid very little in tax for the last 20 years - would help them.  Paying tax actually means helping other people who aren't as lucky as you are.  If you're a sentient human being then you'll see it that way.

So for me, voting Leave in the U.K. does not make me a Trump supporter.  The real problem for the people of the US, as I saw it last November, was that the only alternative to Trump was to vote for Hillary Clinton.  I was a big Bill fan (after all, he played the saxophone) but in this case I think I would have had to vote for None of the Above.

It's Make Your Mind Up Time

Oh yabadabadoo, it's election time again!

New policies are announced on a daily, no - hourly - basis.  Every issue is reduced to soundbites to reach, one presumes, the least eloquent of the populace. It's crisis this and crisis that, a void of real ideas dressed up as hard-line policy, and underneath it all gurgles the TV news and newspapers' cesspit of sleaze, smoke and mirrors.

Once upon a time, people voted for their beliefs.  A simple choice - you either voted for someone who promised to give everything and make a minority pay, or you voted for the power of the individual.

Now we have so many conflicting ideals and issues.  Should the NHS provide everything for everybody with anything from a verruca to cancer?  Should it provide calming drugs for those who just don't feel right in this world?  Should we let more people in, and if not who is going to pay the tax to pay my pension?  Should a professional person with a conscience be barred from practising their profession and representing constituents?

At the bottom of it all is, of course, money.  An MP's salary of £67,060 is seen as a huge amount of money to a large proportion of the population, but a huge pay cut to someone who has reached the upper echelons of a true profession.  So eventually, we will have no truly educated or seasoned people in politics, just the yes-men who earn their MPs' salaries by studying politics and doing whatever the party tells them to do.

All of our politicians seem to think that everybody should be able to go to university, regardless of whether they have the talent and the discipline to achieve a truly valuable degree or not.  And the expectation is that half of them will never earn enough (£16,910 a year) to repay the loan.  Well excuse me for stating the bleeding obvious, but what on earth is the point of spending three years or more of your life at university and at the end of it earning less than £16,910 a year?  Maybe you shouldn't have gone in the first place.  Maybe you should have bought a calculator instead of that last pot noodle!  I'm sure half the kids that go to uni only go because their parents would be embarrassed if they didn't. 

Anyway, I'm going to hazard a guess at the result of the 2015 election.  And that is that we'll have more of the same.  The Conservatives will win the most seats, and why?  Because in the media circus in which we now live, parties are effectively their leaders and I don't think enough people will believe that Ed Miliband has the tools for the task.  Maybe David Cameron doesn't have all of them either, but he seems to have a more credible presence, and more right to be there than Ed.

We'll see if I'm right...

Europe...

I've always been a supporter of Europe.  That's pretty unsurprising, since I lived in France for eight years and appreciated the lack of real borders between France and the UK.  I could live in Bordeaux, or La Rochelle before that, and take a plane to London to work each week, and nobody questioned my right to do so.

Since I've been living back in the UK, I've paid a lot more attention to the way other people view the EU.  And the impact of the financial crisis on all of us - the ongoing impact of the big financial experiment - has had some interesting repercussions in my view of what Europe should stand for.

In general, over the past few years, I've figured that the less we have borders in this world, the better it is.  After all, we are all humans, we are all life, and we should share our fortune with others who are less fortunate.  But what exactly does that mean?  Does it mean that we should pay for others who seemingly don't have the same feeling of responsibility as we do?  Does it mean that whatever we do, we have to equalise and harmonise everything so that everyone arrives at the same result, irrespective of how we react to the same set of problems?

There is a huge groundswell of opinion now in the UK that is against everything that the EU stands for.  But that's not necessarily something which is against the European ideal - in fact it's based in a mistrust and criticism of all that is politics.  The man in the street, on average, seems not to think that politicians are on his side. 

If you are in a relatively comfortable position, then what you want from politics is probably the preservation of the status quo.  If you have found a way to make the system work for you, then from a personal perspective, change is the last thing that you want.  However, the social conscience is in there somewhere, and I think that it becomes stronger when you are in a more comfortable position than it was during the years when (if) you were struggling.

I've seen both sides of that line.  I've worked a full week and still had to eat plain boiled pasta and HP sauce to keep hunger at bay.  I spent a whole year when my "friendly" bank took all of my salary to reimburse an outstanding debt.  That was in the days when banks could do such things, before legislation came in to stop them.  My only source of rescue was a moonlighting job, playing in a band, that gave me enough cash to live on.  Having struggled through that time, in my early twenties, I can see why people are so up in arms about Europe - why those who have knuckled down and fought their way through the depression are now coming out fighting against those who have done precious little to help themselves but now expect the others for help.  Why should us Brits, who have struggled through cuts and pay freezes and increases in the pension age and extortionate university fees, subsidise others who have done nothing, who still follow the path of spending all that they did before and stick two fingers up at the rest?

I really don't have an answer to that.  at least, not one answer.  Half of me says "bolt the doors and leave them to their stupidity", and the other half says "we're all in this together".

At least, being an island, the UK has more of a choice in that decision.  But will I still feel good about us if we make the wrong choice?

Whose country is it anyway?

France's President Hollande says that the deported 15 year old girl, Leonarda Dibrani, can return to France to finish her education, but that her deported family cannot return with her.

This looked like a desperate attempt to patch up the political damage wrought by the very public story of her deportation following her detention whilst on a school field-trip.  It has emerged that her father lied about where she was born in order to make a better case for asylum - she wasn't born in Kosovo, as he had stated, but in Italy, where she rarely attended school as her father sent her out begging instead.

This story apart, as a regular participant on the BBC's Have Your Say pages, I've contributed to a number of discussions on this the most difficult and perhaps dangerous of political footballs, immigration.

As the years have gone by, so my views on who has the right to live where have changed, from an early traditional Little England viewpoint to something, well, more welcoming.

Back in 1972, when my parents sold our house in Sussex to a couple comprising a white guy and his African wife, our neighbour of two doors away, the postman's wife, remarked "Oh well, I suppose we've been lucky so far."

Immigration is one of those issues which really gets people into self-righteous mode.  The idea that someone comes along from nowhere, settles in your country and in doing so seemingly entitles themselves to all the things that you and your family worked so hard for so long to earn, well that's pretty much anathema to the modern capitalist (or even the modern socialist, it seems to me).  

It strikes me that the source of all this is ownership.  If I have a stake in a country - be that a physical stake, like a house, family wealth, or a non-physical stake, like my own and my family's history, then there is a sense of entitlement and ownership which goes with that.  If someone from outside comes along, then the natural human reaction seems to be to feel a need to defend that stake against further dilution.  So the view that comes out is that these are OUR jobs and OUR benefits and OUR culture and OUR way of doing things.  In this way we can defend the status quo, where we see the value for ourselves.

In 1973, there was a big wave of immigration into the UK from East Africa.  Idi Amin, the president/dictator/whatever of Uganda and his forces forcibly evicted all the Indian and other Asian settlers from the country - around 80,000 in total.  About half of them arrived in the UK on British passports with very little money and even fewer friends.  Even our rural comprehensive school in West Somerset had a few new arrivals from 4,000 miles away.  There was probably a big political debate going on then, I don't remember, all I do remember is that some Indian kids came to our school.  That's the first I remember of anything that had to do with immigration.  Living in a place like West Somerset, it wasn't a big topic of conversation, it happened, we shared, end of story.

A few years later, at the age of nineteen, I moved to London - primarily because there weren't any jobs in Somerset for me outside of what I'd tried already - forestry, painting and decoration, property renovation.  I went to work in a bank, and started at the bottom at the not-very-esteemed rank of junior, or grade 1 clerk if you prefer, and suddenly the world was a very different place.

Back in those days, the world was a very different place.  And banks were too.   All the things which technology does so well for us in 2013, people, aka junior clerks, did then.  In 1979, my first job on arriving in the machine room ("mech" room) of a West End branch of Barclays Bank (which is now a fashion store) was to file statements.  There was a physical file for every account in the branch.  At that time, bank customers could choose whether they received their paid cheques back with their statements or not.  In order to sort this particular need, one of two fifty-something women who'd worked there since the beginnings of time (May and Vera, I seem to remember) would go through the piles of paper and take out any for those customers who did not want to receive their cheques back.  Having spent the first three hours of each day adding up the amounts of cheques on ancient adding machines so that someone could agree their total to a mysterious figure supplied by head office, my next job each day was then to get hold of all the vouchers, as they were called, the cheques for those who wanted them, the credit slips, the debit slips et al, and to file them in the right divider in a drawer somewhere.  After that, there was the day's run of statements, which came off one of those printers that used paper with holes down each side.  First, you had to remove the perforated edges with the holes in them, then split the statements up into single sheets, and then go through all those drawers once again, either filing the statements, if they had "file" printed on them, or putting them in envelopes together with all their relevant vouchers if they had "post" printed on them, after first checking that all the entries on the statement were evidenced with a voucher of some sort.

There was some folk-lore surrounding statements.  People spoke in hushed tones of one junior a couple of years previously who had got so frustrated with the job of filing, they had thrown a basket of cheques and vouchers out of the fourth floor window and let them flutter down onto Regent Street below.  And another one, who left a filing basket of cheques in the loo after an unsuccessful attempt to flush them away, was later discovered to be notable only by their absence.

What has this got to do with immigration, you may well ask?  Well, two things.

First, office jobs are different now.  That job which I did then at the tender age of nineteen doesn't exist any more - it's been replaced by technology.  If it did still exist, then it would be a minimum wage job and I'll bet that more than half the country (the half who get paid substantially more than the minimum wage) would be very happy for an immigrant to do it.

But second, and quite un-related to that first point - this was the first time I had really been exposed to people originating from far-away lands, and what was very interesting to me, second-generation immigrants.  A year after starting at the bank, I moved on to the tills, and became a grade 2 cashier.  Here, I worked on the next till to Sylvia, whose second name I can't remember.  Her family was from Jamaica, but she had been born in London - she lived in Edmonton if I remember right.  What struck me was that, despite her having been born in London, she had a Jamaican accent.  She and I shared a lot of jokes, a lot of laughs together.  Over the course of a year or so, I got to know her pretty well, or at least, her work persona.  She had a great sense of humour, and I remember in particular a day when a middle-aged Caribbean couple came into the bank, and tried to get a forged cheque past her.  She went through all the checks, as were our instructions, but something obviously didn't feel right for her, and she made a call to our fraud centre on a hunch.  She discovered she was right, and she told our two burly messengers to shut the doors and detain the couple whilst the police were called.  The man, having been caught out, started to castigate poor Sylvia with a stream of abuse, saying she had brought shame on her family, that she was a sister and she should have looked after her own.  After they had been taken away by the police, I asked her if their abuse had upset her?  No, she said, of course not.  Firstly, she was honest and they were fraudsters, but also, there was no way she was their sister, her family was from Jamaica, and they were from Antigua.

Whilst I was working in the bank, the riots broke out in Brixton and Tottenham and a few other places.   From memory, they were all about the lack of opportunity in, and the over-policing of, immigrant neighbourhoods.  One of our messengers lived in the middle of Brixton, he had to leave his house for a few days due to the riots and the violence.  They were difficult times, but the outcome of those times, I think, was that the UK came to terms with being a multicultural place, and people's perspectives changed, and became more accepting.

The Scarman Report into the Brixton riots highlighted the high unemployment and lack of amenities at a time of economic recession.  That was thirty years ago.  Whatever happened, whatever people unknown to me did after that, something got better.  London became a multicultural place that was comfortable with itself, as did a number of other cities around the UK.  The violence between white and black that seemed to me to be a common feature of tube travel back in the early 1980s disappeared.  Trevor Macdonald became the chief newsreader on ITN.  John Barnes, and then Ian Wright, blazed the trail in football.  Great Britain started to win Olympic medals again.  People started not to notice colour, it became a secondary, or even a tertiary feature.  Having said all of that, in the team where I work now, those of us who work in front of clients in the UK, sixteen of us, all are white and from the UK, Ireland, the US, Australia and South Africa.

So, that question at the top of the page, whose country is it anyway?

Having lived for eight of the last nine years in France, I guess I've been an immigrant myself.  Having said that, I didn't take anything from France, from the French.  If I saw a dentist, I paid as a private patient - it still cost less than having something done on the NHS in the UK.  I paid my taxes on the house.  I spent money in the local economy - quite a lot of it, as we renovated a house from scratch.  I didn't ever consider myself to be French, I was always an "anglais" but I did feel accepted by the people I met.  I guess it's different, being from Europe, and indeed from the country next door.  But what it did for me was to stop me thinking about myself as British and in fortress Britain, it took me to the next step of thinking about myself as a European.  And from there, it's not too much of a step to just consider yourself a resident of the world.  Once you've got to that point, and you've realised that you have the freedom to go to a great many places, and to stay there if you choose, it's hard to see the world from the blinkered "them and us" perspective that many people seem to have on immigration.

I get paid very well for what I do.  I pay a substantial amount of tax on my earnings.  I don't grudge that in any way, because I recognise that there needs to be some equalisation between those who have been lucky in playing the system, and those who haven't.  But do I think I have the right to choose whether that tax should be spent on indigenous Brits or immigrants?  No, I certainly don't.  What gives me the right to live here?  An accident of birth.  What if I'd been born in Somalia, or El Salvador, or Nepal?  Why should I be denied the opportunity to live here in the UK, just because I was born somewhere else?  Two or three hundred years ago, when the only travel people did generally was migration, then things were different.  But nowadays I can get on a plane with relatively little formality and go to most places in the world, why shouldn't I decide to stay wherever I go?  And if that's the case, why shouldn't others come and stay here?

If I'm not careful, this argument will soon be treading on the even more difficult ground of Property, and that I think needs to be a subject all on its own, so it's probably time to draw stumps here.

So how, or why, has my view changed on immigration over the past thirty or so years?

Since I've been an adult and out in the world, I've never felt "entitled" to a heritage of any particular description.  But the world has changed, immigration is much more of an issue now than it was in the past.  Enoch Powell's famous "rivers of blood" speech back in the 1960s referred to what was, at the time a small minority of immigrants.  His forecast of ten percent of UK residents from ethnic descendancy by 2000 was a little high, but the number was more or less of the right order.  

There are those in our society who feel entitled to something, and they see immigration as a threat to their entitlement.  I have difficulty in seeing things that way, but as I have said before, I think I've had a lucky ride in this life so far, there's often been resource to spare, and so it's difficult to see some points of view.  If I'd had my nose pushed into the grindstone every year for little reward over the last thirty years, maybe I'd have a different attitude.

In any case, with the expansion of the EU, and the lifting of restrictions on migration from the more recent additions in the east, notably Romania and Bulgaria, we are likely to see a further increase in the years ahead.  The "indigenous" UK population is not fully replenishing itself in any case, the birth rate is lower than maintenance level, reflecting other developed societies around the world.   If the impact of the Romanians and Bulgarians is similar to that of the Poles who have made the UK their home in the past ten years, then I can't see too much of a problem.  Maybe that's me being selfish.  I very much appreciate the influx of courtesy and intelligence which has hit the catering and hospitality industries in the UK in the last few years, although I have huge sympathy for the university graduates who are doing those jobs in our economy because they can't get other work.  Hopefully, that will change going forwards and they will be able to get onto more meaningful long-term careers which will help them find fulfilment, and allow the next influx of people to find their own foothold on the ladder to self achievement.