Easter and Immigrants

 

 

The dog has hurt her paw and is currently hopping around on three legs until the vet opens tomorrow.  However she seems quite cheerful about it and is hopping at a good rate.  There’s clearly nothing broken so it’s either a sprain or something stuck deep in the pad which we cannot find. 

 

So, although Easter Sunday was a fine clear day, there was no dog walking and we spent the day lazing about the house.  We had wild flowers on the breakfast table and tried to identify them from a very nice book called Henry Terry’s Flower Album, a facsimile of a Victorian’s paintings for his children.   We think we have wood anemones, cowslips, water violets and something called self-heal at the moment.  We also had Easter eggs.  

 

 

I spent about three quarters of an hour weeding in the garden in the afternoon and made dinner in the evening.  Apart from that, there was some television watching which also involved a little knitting.  I may have filled in the odd Sudoku and done a little reading but that was the day, basically.

 One of the reasons I am mentioning this inactivity is that today I have been reading various official reports about immigration in Britain and do bear with me on this one.   I am getting rather tired of listening to people telling me what a problem immigration is to the British tax payer.  A constantly expressed  view is that immigrants come to Britain in the sole hope of becoming benefit claimants and that (1) they are costing the country a great deal of money and (2) they are generally a bunch of lazy no-goods living it up on job seeker’s allowance and using different identities to make myriad claims.   

It seems that official findings are that migrants are much less likely to claim benefit than UK nationals.  6.4% of claimants to the British benefits system are immigrants.  This percentage includes claims for working tax credits and housing benefit, so is not entirely composed of job seeker’s allowance.  Migrants are much more likely to be in work than claiming.   They come to work or to study and the majority of migrant social security claims are legitimate.  In a study of 9,000 claims, only 125 were found to be unentitled to the benefits which they were claiming. 

NOW the greatest pull on benefits in the UK is old age pensions and related benefits paid to pensioners - to people like me, my husband and many of my friends.  So it’s a very good thing that all those migrants are working away and paying into the UK tax system to support lazy loungers like those of us who have retired to the Dordogne and keep us in wine and Easter eggs and other goodies.   But now that we know all that, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Cameron’s government decides to legalise euthanasia very soon – and pops a little note about it in with the next pension mailing.