UK society – concerns over net immigration

News item of the week in the UK is that net immigration is up – That is essentially that fewer British are migrating and more international students are coming here. Funny really, how the conservative government is paranoid about figures like these and is focused on getting this down in order to ‘improve’ the economy. But first, lets dig a little deeper and see what the root causes are. British love to live abroad. Unfortunately this requires significant savings on the individuals behalf to buy up large tracts of rural ‘sunshine’ destinations as in France and Spain.  So Bung economy = less Brits that can afford to jump ship.

On the immigration side of things, Universities are pitching to international students on an unprecedented scale, much the same as in Australia. Why? Well there is a lot more money to be made by churning out degrees to foreign students who pay more than 3x that of the local students, and generally take less rigorous and less difficult to teach topics.

So is this net immigration a bad thing for the economy? Doesn’t appear so from here – the Brits who would have left the country are still spending their hard earned here, and international students are literally pouring cash into the universities. It surely has something to do with Public sentiment then – given the massive general resentment about foreigners taking British jobs – apparently 75 % of then population would like to see a decrease in net migration as published on the  bbc. This in itself presents an interesting topic - the majority of jobs critical to the British yobs existence are usually taken by Asians. Yep there are not too many white people manning the Taxis at 3 in the morning, or the Kebab shops, or even the local off-licence.

The really interesting bit about the issue of net migration in Britain is that of imposing a cap on numbers does not impose a limit on the number of European migrants. Funny thing is that typically European immigrants far outnumber the others So apparently 57% of the British population is for a restriction on immigration – yep that includes Aussies. But I’m pretty sure if you asked the same people if Britain should limit immigration from Australia they would first question whether or not we needed visas – since we are part of the commonwealth and all. Another debate unto itself….

At he end of the day it would be interesting to see how the average British person who opposes immigration would progress without it – none of their favourite conveniences would be so cheaply and readily available, and perhaps the economy would be in even deeper shit.  Oh and they might turn around to find that a cap is placed on the number of working holiday visas granted to Australia for the - since limtis on these are reciporical. 

English society – understatement

We all know the English like to understate their humour, but how about the rest of it? Well there is certainly a minefield to negotiate when it comes to the daily grind! One must be very careful when expressing their opinion, for not only must one interpret the coments of others with the possibility of understatement, but if comments are made without out it  - all maner of things may be blown out of proportion by the poor Englishman on the receiving end. Fortunately there are several tell tale signs that you may be offending your fellow Englishman – listen for frequent smatterings of “to be honest”, and “to be fair” – the frequency of these – particularly “to be honest” is crucial. When these have reached fever pitch, there is only one option for the Englishman “to be frank…”. When you hear this, run for the hills, the shit has hit the fan! 

So after dealing with this kind of situation – how does one progress to avoiding it? Negation! Not only negation, but double negatives! Yep turn a positive sentence the other way round with a negation at the end. The first time I heard this I was convinced that the English were just trying to knock off European ‘class’ by saving the crux of the sentence to the end. Nothing so flash here, they are just being polite. I find this most amusing given the love English profess for their own language and using correct grammar! They even take this to the point of contracting the wrong part of the sentence, but that’s a long way off course for what I’m getting at here. 

One final word, remember understatement is a two way street – so next time if there is even the remotest possibility of something slightly negative being said about you – it probably is! Hit em back with a few lines of “to be honest’” and you should be on a level pegging.