The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

I love this line about a magazine article teaching Polish immigrants how to cheat on one’s gas bill:

But the article advised opening electricity and gas accounts with bogus personal details. `Once you’ve cheated the Communist government and the Iron Curtain, running rings round British Gas is child’s play. How can I pay bills that aren’t addressed to me?’ the writer asked. Then he added: `The accounting system in Britain is based on trust.’ That was the bit that choked me up.

That attitude - that it’s square to pay one’s bills on time, or pay them at all, and to generally be honest - is typical of Eastern Europeans [Polacks are arguably the biggest thieves in the world, even greater ones than Nigerians.], I’ve found in my daily experiences. .. Plenty of non-Whites are like that, too. But these people just can’t understand the point of being honest. Life becomes a contest to haggle and pay as little as possible, and screw others out of money.

30 August 2008 8:51 PM
80m Britons, and no one you can trust. A future I’m glad to miss

This is Peter Hitchens’ Mail on Sunday column

Our Brussels masters predict that Britain will soon be the most
crowded country in the whole of Europe. Presumably this is what they
want, since it is their laws that have destroyed our borders and
abolished British citizenship and British passports (that wretched
puce thing in your pocket is an EU passport, not a British one, and
the further east you go, the easier they are to get).

The European Commission says there will be almost 80million people
crammed into our landscape by 2058. Just imagine all that concrete,
the thousands of square miles (or square kilometres as they will be
by then) chewed up by bulldozers.

Imagine the unending 24-hour whoosh and grind of traffic, the
bulging trains, the seething, noisy, litter-strewn parks on hot
summer Sundays, the crowded schools, the endless waits at enormous
polyclinics to see a doctor you’ve never met before and will never
see again, who probably doesn’t have English as a first language,
and the multicultural schools where half the class will always be
from somewhere else. I’m quite glad to think I’ll be dead by then.

I’ve always been unmoved by arguments that immigration `benefits’
the country economically. Maybe it does, if you eat at restaurants
rather than working in them, and then hurry away to expensive areas
where no immigrants live. But for most people it’s an unmixed curse.

For the migrants themselves it is often a journey into exploitation
and squalor, miserable pay and ten-to-a-room living conditions. It
holds down wages and puts unwanted pressure on services, transport
and housing which are already under strain.

But there’s something else about it that is profoundly,
heartbreakingly sad. When so many of our fellow creatures don’t
speak our language, don’t understand our laws and customs, don’t
know our history, can’t read our facial expressions or work out when
we’re joking, we live at a lower level than we did before.

This was summed up for me by an article in a magazine for Poles
working in Britain. Please don’t take this as some kind of rant
against Poles. If this country is going to be repopulated by anyone,
I’d like it to be Poles, whose hard work, resilience and general
civilisation can teach a lot of our own young people a useful
lesson.

But the article advised opening electricity and gas accounts with
bogus personal details. `Once you’ve cheated the Communist
government and the Iron Curtain, running rings round British Gas is
child’s play. How can I pay bills that aren’t addressed to me?’ the
writer asked. Then he added: `The accounting system in Britain is
based on trust.’ That was the bit that choked me up.

For our entire society is – or rather was – based on trust. But from
now on it can’t be. Trust exists between people who know each other
well, who share a long history together, who are bound by the ties
of unselfishness that grow up only in a stable, ancient society. And
now it’s gone.

So we must be ruled by snoopers and carry slave-badge ID cards and,
soon enough, register with the police before we can have gas or
electricity. And we are not a people any more, just inhabitants of a
sort of airstrip, where nobody belongs and everyone is entitled to
be.

http://hitchensblog .mailonsunday. co.uk/