Today, I stick my hands up and admit that I was wrong. You see, back in early 2000s, before the new Eastern European nations joined the EU, I thought that letting East European workers take jobs here was a jolly good idea.
After all, it was getting really expensive to employ tradespeople in London, so why shouldn't we get some Polish plumbers to help? And surely the City should employ whoever they thought was best, rather than be limited to Western Europeans?
Actually, the experiment with mass immigration, which started in 1997, is a disaster. It imprisons hundreds of thousands of people in permanent welfare. And it allows politicians to ignore the shocking education inflicted on the poor.
Let's face it: we would not need Eastern European bricklayers and electricians if we provided proper vocational education to children. Instead, we impose pseudo-subjects upon them at GCSE such as Citizenship and Film Studies - subjects that ensure they are unemployable.
The Coalition, despite all its rhetoric about social justice, is doing no better than Labour. David Cameron obsesses about free schools, but these do nothing for poor people: they located so they pick up middle-class pupils.
And while the underclass are imprisoned in their council estates, the rest of us are forced to support them through higher taxes. Free trade at least lets all of us enjoy cheap televisions, but what exactly does free movement of people do for most of us?
Not much, except harm our quality of life. London has been turned into a hell-hole, outside the dandyish world of SW1, where the politicians reside. It is practically impossible to take a journey on the London Underground during rush hour without being squashed up against other standing passengers, and every year the over-crowding gets worse.
Immigration would be less of a problem if migrants were dispersed better throughout the country. Only a tiny proportion choose to reside in Scotland, which could probably benefit from a bigger population. But immigrants overwhelmingly want to live in the major English cities. Would it, as the Guardianistas believe, really be such a wicked thing to repeal our EU treaties and regulate the number of migrants we let in?
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