LETTER: Is immigration used as a smokescreen by the rich?

Early next year, council tax is to rise to pay for the cost of the large number of retired people (I am one of them).

My generation, baby boomers, doubled the GNP (wealth) of our country. Could not some of this ‘double’ pay for our care?

Next item – and a new angle on the growth of people moving into the UK. Is it just possible that the affluent citizens that sit sky high on the ever-growing riches of our country need to feed a diversion in, another body for the population to blame, otherwise people might focus on the rich?

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Immigration does have a competitive effect on wages and housing, moving them backwards. The exception to this was the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s when, without the immigration feeding the boom, it would have stagnated.

It was the same for the USA during its industrialisation from the Civil War to the end of the First World War (1864 to 1918). Without a malleable and ever-growing workforce it would never have become the most powerful nation on the planet – all built by immigration (the indigenous population – Indians – got massacred).

And of course the same applies to the Irish folk that built the UK railway system. But then again, how can they be immigrants when they were part of the UK body politic at that time?

How can any immigrant be an immigrant when they come from the planet Earth? But I’m rushing in front of myself and my politics. The rich move all over the globe without restriction, perhaps one day it will be the turn of the rest of us. Maybe the rich need to go first?

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Recent immigration to this country arrives in the eye of the storm, in the face of the biggest attacks mounted by the rich on the poor for more than 100 years. The 950,000 Poles arrived through a legislative hole in the wall turned down by all except two other members of the European Union.

Is it just possible that the gates were opened by a ploy of the affluent rulers of our nation to divert attention from them to another body, a 950,000-strong body?

The answer is not to attack immigrants but to attack those trying to use their existence as cover for their mansions, private planes, elite education, booming offshore (and inshore) bank accounts, etc.

Recent arrivals, and those of us born here, need to support each other and fight those putting the prices up, not building the council houses, mounting daily attacks on the NHS, etc.

When the poor fight the poor there is only one winner every time.

Colin Frost-Herbert

Abinger Place, Lewes

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