Absolute tosh
Petronella Wyatt
have to say that I feel real, gung-ho sym pathy for Beverley Hughes, the immigration minister. Hughes is under savage attack for allegedly misleading the Commons over the true extent of her department's covert policy that relaxed checks on foreign immigrants.
Further hysteria has been expressed because this May ten countries, most of them Eastern European, will be joining the EU. These countries include Hungary, Poland. Slovakia, Slovenia and Lithuania. According to the scaremongers, we will be swamped by nasty foreigners who will steal our men and women. make 'sham marriages' and then live off the state.
What absolute tosh. I am the daughter of an immigrant from Hungary. My mother was forced to come here when the communists began to persecute her family. She hated London and often says that it took her seven years to become used to the English. Yes, she married an Englishman, but it was he who pressed her to marry him. Was that a sham marriage? Most marriages become shams sooner or later, anyhow. But my mother, with her Continental charm and tolerance, remained married to my father for twice as long as any of his previous English brides.
But let us leave that aside. Knowing Eastern Europeans slightly better, I suspect, than most columnists, it is inconceivable to me that Britain is in danger of being swamped by lazy louts. After May there will be two kinds of immigrants. The first will be scientists, researchers and workers in different areas of the arts who cannot find enough funding in their own country. This can only be to our advantage. Hungary, for instance, can boast more Nobel Prize winners per population count than any other nation. Just think of that Biro you keep in your jacket pocket or handbag. Who invented it? A Hungarian.
Many Eastern Europeans have a wonderfully un-English gift for making money from their creations. The late Arnold Weinstock — a Polish Jew. My mother's first husband, Laszlo von BansIcy — the inventor of a lucrative pioneering cure for asthma. Alexander Korda — without whom there would have been no British film industry. Now we have no British film industry because it is run by the British.
The second group of immigrants will consist of the grindingly poor, of whom there are fewer and fewer in Poland and Hungary, who may come to Britain to do the lowly manual jobs that we so loftily refuse to do. Once they have earned enough money, however, they will go back. I know this because there has been a veritable parade of Eastern European au pairs and cleaners through my house. In six months or less, they all return to their countries. There are more nightclubs, bars and cafés in Budapest than there are in London. Yet the British persist in thinking that Eastern Europe should be classed as Third World.
It is highly presumptuous to believe that the majority of immigrants will want to live here in perpetuity. They dislike many things about us, particularly our hooligans, our crime rate and our bad manners. Just remember that when Spain and Portugal joined the EU there were similar fears. Oh my goodness, wailed commentators. Britain will be overrun by Spanish and Portuguese. The opposite has happened. Spain has been overrun by the English, both by the lager louts and the middle classes who have bought houses there, and one cannot hire a Portuguese cleaning lady any more — because they are all back in sunny Portugal.
I suspect that, in ten years' time, when the English have discovered the remarkable, unspoilt beauty of Eastern European countries, they will be the ones about whom people will complain. The Eastern Europeans will bemoan that entering the EU has caused them to be swamped by lazy louts from Britain.
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