"But freedom of movement - which, let's not kid ourselves, is the throbbing heart of the EU issue - doesn't benefit everyone equally. If, for example, Romanian citizens who earn four or five times less than British workers are allowed unfettered access to our jobs market, people lose out. But who cares: they're already poor."
So writes Janice Turner in today's Times, under the headline Confessions of a lonely, left-wing Brexiteer. I agree with almost every word of it. Ms Turner continues:
"In Ben Judah's startling book This Is London, he describes the British builders who once earned £15 an hour but, after waves of migration, are down to £7. He notes the minimum wage is a fiction when Romanian labourers stand outside Wickes in Barking at 6 a.m. beating each other down to get a day's work, just like dockers in the pre-unionised 1930s."
"In broken northern industrial towns, companies such as Next, Sports Direct and Amazon, not content with an already cheap local workforce, prefer to recruit migrants via employment agencies because they have fewer rights. They, along with Lincolnshire's agricultural towns, will vote overwhelmingly to leave the EU and not because they are stupid. A 2015 Bank of England study showed net migration has driven down pay for the lowest paid. Across the economy, although employment is high, wages have stagnated because the pool of labour is almost infinite . . . The well-off transcend community so care nothing for cohesion. They remain untouched by culture clash, overcrowding or fights for limited resources. Yet they condemn those affected - if they dare to complain - as bigots. . . . we will need 880,000 more school places by 2023, 113,000 in London alone. As for housing, the ONS reckons we need an extra 68,000 homes a year just to accommodate net migration assumptions. Is that okay? How will Europhiles tackle this? And can we at least discuss - honestly for once - if this is the society we want."
I can't remember having read such a vivid exposition of the consequences of unlimited migration by anyone in the media, let alone a Left winger like Ms Turner. Just today I heard the dear old BBC deliver a lengthy report about the school places shortage without once mentioning migration. Yes, we'd rather avert our eyes than have our comfortable assumptions exposed to reality. And yet the points Ms Turner makes are blindingly obvious to anyone who cares to use their eyes and ears. Astonishingly, the British liberal middle-classes (and I should know, I'm one of them) prefer to display their virtue by approving the EU's free movement of people rather than condemning its effect on the British-born underclass, many of them with brown and black skins.
None of this necessarily means we should vote to leave the EU. Personally I haven't made up my mind, and I'm concerned about what might happen to our economy if we did. But God knows a withdrawal from the drip feed of Turner's "almost infinite" pool of labour would begin to reverse the inequality it has caused.
Freedom of movement - an unassailable shibboleth of the Remainers - was a principle agreed to forty years ago by a British electorate which is now largely dead. At the time the EU had only half a dozen member countries, all of them enjoying similar levels of prosperity. Now there are nearly thirty members, some of which are dirt poor courtesy of the wrecking ball that is the Euro. Very significant proportions of those countries now have the incentive to try their luck in one of the only EU countries whose economy is growing. Circumstances have changed utterly since the day Britain signed up.
It's not just that unrestricted migration is damaging the life chances of Britain's underclass. Our inability to change the migration rules is undermining trust in politics and politicians. How can we respect our representatives when, on the issue which time and time again the public names first or second on their list of concerns, the EU freedom of movement rules prevent meaningful change?
