Immigrants should learn the language of their adopted country

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“We’re far too polite in this country. We talk of immigrants having a duty to integrate into society, but are too embarrassed to insist that they learn English, the essential prerequisite of integration. Instead, our public bodies go out of their way to provide expensive translation services. Last year, Crawley Borough Council spent £1,000 translating a single tenancy agreement into Urdu. Tameside Council’s website boasts of having access to a bank of interpreters covering more than 140 different languages, who can be on call for individuals “within 90 seconds”. These services are said to be required by equality and human rights laws, but this is ‘a myth’. There is no legal duty for councils to translate.”

“The (Labour) Mayor of Newham, Sir Robin Wales, a crusader for integration, has cut translation by 72% and got rid of foreign-language newspapers from libraries. We should make other councils follow his example”.  (Clare Foges, Daily Telegraph, The Week 17 Oct 2015)

Regular readers will know that this blog exists to promote the civilised ideas of Epicurus, who believed in getting along with everyone.  He almost invented moderation.  But on this issue I have a tendency to agree with Ms. Foges. You cannot have a society that cooperates in an effort to give everyone pleasant and rewarding lives if newcomers insist on continuing to speak their own language, maintain their former culture and way of life, and ignore the culture of those who welcome them and maybe even subsidise their lifestyles.  To say the least, it is discourteous. Not all of us are linguists, but most of us, living in a foreign country, would try to learn the local tongue.

Plant extinction

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It might be preaching to the converted, but I think one has a duty to publicise the facts about the effects human beings are having on their environment, even if other people couldn’t care less. Young people, hopefully, do care – it is their future at stake.

The following appeared recently in the New Scientist:

“According  to the first global assessment of plants, by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, a fifth of all plants are threatened as habitats shrink worldwide. Plant habitats are changing and more than 20 per cent of all terrestrial plant species are now at risk of extinction. The team used data from global conservation monitor the IUCN to estimate the number of threatened plants, and assessed land cover using satellite images taken between 2001 and 2012.

Mangroves saw the greatest change, with more than a quarter of their area transformed over the decade – often to shrimp farms or golf courses. While human activity was the main driver, climate change is having a large impact, says Kathy Willis, Kew’s director of science. “We really need to stop and think what we’re doing about land planning on a global scale.”

And this concerns only plants. If you add wildlife and the disappearance or reduction in the number of species, you get two mass extinctions. The issue of land planning should be part and parcel of the fight against climate change. Unless we find a way of moderating the growth of population and get serious about fossil fuels we, the humans, will join the extinctions. Yes, there are hopeful developments, but is the man in the street listening?

Fewer young Americans are buying houses

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There is a debate in the United States as to where home ownership rates are heading, and whether Millennials — people who came of age around 2000 — will get into the housing market the way generations before them did.

The percentage of people younger than age 35 who are homeowners went from 42 percent a decade ago to just a little more than a third now. People are staying in education longer, taking bigger loans, delaying marriage, added to which mortgages are harder to get. Meanwhile, rents are rising significantly amd developers, for a number of reasons, are building fewer starter homes.

Is home ownership on a permanent decline because of high costs, changing demographics or new attitudes about home ownership? Or is it just being delayed for the younger generation by the effects of the recession eight years ago? Is there really a shift in attitudes? 90 percent of those younger than age 30 do say they expect to eventually own. Some observers think it is just taking them longer to save for a down-payment.

However, Laurie Goodman, co-director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, thinks the younger generation is simply less interested in home ownership. A 2014 study by Fannie Mae of “prime” home buyers found that among young, college educated, upper-income, white families, home ownership fell 6 percent from 2000. Why? Because maybe they are tired of constant debt, including the idea of mortgage debt? Everyone agrees that eventually most will buy. After all, at 82 million the millenials are a bigger generation than the Baby Boomers. (based on an NPR article, 2016)

Thatcher and Reagan agreed that home ownership was a key to creating a more conservative electorate. It certainly seems to have worked in Britain, but only as long as house prices go up and not down, which on a small island attracting immigrants they have a tendency to do. From an Epicurean point of view, if owning your own house fosters peace of mind and security, then it is a good thing. Being over-sold a mortgage when you are poor and the mortgage interest rate can rise substantially, is not. Repossession owing to failure to pay your mortgage is not condusive to voting for the status quo. in short, there is nothing magical about owning a house; historically it is a modern idea.

They aren’t welcome in the UK anymore?

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Poles in Britain are frightened. Since the UK voted to leave the EU, British nationalists have felt free to spew their xenophobic bile against immigrants, particularly those from Poland. The far-right accuses the roughly 800,000 Poles living there of “stealing British jobs, scarfing up (mis-using) British benefits and committing crimes against Britons”. It’s now scattering pamphlets calling us vermin and scum and telling us to go home. Poles who have lived in the UK for years report being spat on and sneered at. In southwest England, thugs set fire to a Polish family’s garden shed. Polish children are crying at school as their classmates jeer that they’ll soon be deported. So now the rush is on “to get a British passport”. Poles who’ve created businesses and raised families in the UK are scrambling to get citizenship. But it’s not easy. Britain requires that any new national be a resident for five years, speak fluent English, have no criminal record, and pay a fee of around £1,000 to become a citizen. And in any case, the question still remains: will even those who do qualify to stay feel welcome? (Fakt24.pl, Warsaw, also published in The Week).

It is reported, circumstantially, that Poles emigrate because they hate the Polish culture of humourless suspicion, political extremism and lack of communal feeling that was bred by communism and brutal government and which pervades all Polish life. People seldom smile or offer help or kindness to others. At least, this is the reported atmosphere.

From our perspective, Poles are generally well educated and trained, work hard and well, and out-perform many American and British people. These are the immigrants we need in an aging society. There may be a small number who devise scams to exploit welfare, illegally pocketing housing, child and other benefits. Where this can be established it has to be stopped – it can’t be that difficult to prevent. The small minority of crooks are being used by equally unpleasant thugs to blacken the reputations of keen, hard-working, skilled and English-speaking Poles. If Fakt24 is correct we should get the bullying stopped.

The end of DECC

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The British Department of Energy and Climate Change has been closed in a series of sweeping changes to the government unveiled by the new prime minister, Theresa May. Its functions, which include representing the UK at international climate talks, responsibility for meeting carbon targets and levying subsidies for green energy, have been transferred to a beefed-up business department led by Greg Clark. Clark is seen as a green-minded Tory, but, as far as I know, not a fighter for a cause.

“This is shocking news. Less than a day into the job and it appears that the new prime minister has already downgraded action to tackle climate change, one of the biggest threats we face,” said Craig Bennett, the CEO of Friends of the Earth.

One has to wonder why on earth May did this. British Tories do not seem to have the distaste for environmentalism that affects right-wingers in the United States, but maybe British oil and gas interests have exerted their influence in London after all? For this I have no evidence whatsoever, but May seems a Prime Minister with clear aims, and the Tories, although not climate change deniers as a crowd, are not known as ardent environmentalists either.

More important even than Isamic terrorism and the future of the EU is the global issue of climate change. If you think the world is in turmoil now just wait as see what it will be like by mid-Century.