Britain: the Truth about Immigration

Britain: the Truth about Immigration

The Truth about Immigration

This fascinating insight into history and a major current political topic in the UK comes from my long-time friend Robin Mitchinson*, with some light editing by me…

Whether politicians like it or not, immigration is now well up the political agenda in the UK. There sure is a lot of nonsense spoken about it.

Britain is a creature of immigration.

We have had a constant succession of intruders, mostly with malice aforethought: the Romans who civilised us; the Angles, Saxons, Danes, Jutes, Norsemen over a thousand years.

And then the Normans, who tried a bit of ethnic cleansing and scorched earth, destroyed the superior civilisation of the English, and tried but failed to turn us into French. We turned them into English instead. The French have been trying a repeat process for centuries, and still are.

We had the first influx of Jews, and then expelled them.

Due to the perfidiousness of the French in abrogating the Treaty of Nantes and their relentless persecution of Protestants, we began to receive a huge influx of Huguenots after Charles II granted them “denizenship”.

They were as welcome as the flowers in spring. They represented all that was best in craftsmanship and enterprise. The English churches raised money to relieve their poverty. House-to-house collections raised £40,000, millions in today’s money.

They were an incalculable asset to England. They brought a whole raft of new skills and technologies.

They brought new wool-dying techniques to Barnstaple that would make it famous. They became tapestry weavers, spinners, woodcarvers, and calico workers. They created whole new industries – leatherwork, fans, girdles, needles, soap, vinegar, and revolutionized the silk industry.

They transformed the manufacture of paper. From a zero start, they created 200 paper mills; they produced all the banknote paper for the new Bank of England, and they started the first newspaper press. Several became the first directors of the Bank of England.

Their contribution to the British economy was enormous — although this early example of offshoring was disastrous for the French.

It is estimated that 7 per cent of us have Huguenot blood.

The welcoming of immigrants continued unabated during the 18th and 19th centuries.

We acquired people of genius, like Brunel (the father of Isambard Kingdom, the engineer). He was the first to devise mass production and the production line for the manufacture of pulley blocks at the naval workshops in Portsmouth, the largest factory in the world in Nelson’s time.

We became home to Herschel, the mathematician and astronomer of genius (his sister became the first woman to become a Fellow of the Royal Society in the early 19th Century).

And many others.

After Oliver Cromwell gave qualified permission for the Jews to return, we had many influxes, first Sephardi and then Ashkenazi, as a result of pogroms all over Europe. There was another wave in the late 19th century.

It is ironic to read in the contemporary press the kind of shrill comments that we hear now about the dirty, diseased, ignorant, non-English speaking foreigners coming here to inflict Lord knows what on the indigenous.

What is remarkable is that within a very short space of time those Jewish immigrants had integrated so unobtrusively that their presence went generally unremarked upon.

And they certainly produced some big hitters – Ricardo, the Sassoons, the Rothschilds, and so on. They also helped finance the upper classes through their daughters marrying into aristocratic families.

The last big arrival of Jews was the Nazi ethnic cleansing, which over the years has produced to this day a disproportionately high number of top politicians.

At the end of WW2, we took in displaced persons for all over Europe, large numbers of Italians, and then – and this is where the plot changes – Caribbeans.

The latter were welcomed, especially into the National Health Service and transport services, where there was a serious manpower shortage. But this was the point at which race and culture became serious issues.

I now put my head into the lion’s den by reflecting on which groups of immigrants make a positive contribution to contemporary Britain.

*www.whydonttheylistentous.blogspot.com

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