The Pensions Myth

"Now the tide begins to turn and the dreary world which the American millionaires and their British hangers-on intend to impose upon us begins to take shape".
(George Orwell, 1943)

Every month, thousands of people enter the UK illegally and claim asylum. There may be as many as one million illegal immigrants claimimg asylum status already in Britain. England is rapidly reaching saturation point. Scottish local authorities are presently falling over themselves to accommodate England's surplus immigrants. One of the main arguments in favour of this policy is that immigration is vital to offset falling birthrates among native Scots. The claim is that a declining and ageing population will mean that there will not be enough working Scots to pay for future pensions.

Superficially, this is a plausible argument. In a time where the state has renounced its duty to prioritise provision for citizens who are no longer a taxable asset and in the light of recent private pension scandals, this also plays on peoples basic fears.

Is Scotland's falling population a problem? A nation's population is dictated by its ability to produce the means to sustain a populace at a level of affluence deemed acceptable within the culture of that nation. Most Western countries have reached a point at which continued population increase would cause standards of living to fall below a level regared as necessary to the maintenace of social cohesion. In recognition of this, birth control and family planning are seen as vitally important in the West. Not all cultures, of course, demand the same standard of living as Western cultures. It is the cultural norm in many Asian and African countries to maintain populations massive by Western standards in conditions of relative poverty. If population size alone determined national wealth, Nigeria and India would have the highest standards of living in the world. In fact, they are among the lowest.

A society can be divided in to two groups. Tax payers can be classed as producers and pensioners etc can be classed as dependents. The pro immigration pensions argument assumes that every successful asylum applicant will result in the acquisition of one adult producer only. However, the proposed immigrants tend to come from cultures where marriage and large families are the norm. For example, the average Muslim couple has five children. This gives a ratio of six dependents to every one producer. How can the pro immigationists argue that the present Scottish population can't cope with the tax burden imposed by a rising population of pensioners and yet can easily cope with the tax burden imposed by the maternity, housing, health, education and benefit costs of large immigrant families? The reality is that immigration would actually have a detrimental effect on pensions. Denmark, a country with some of the highest rates of taxation in the world, is suffering from a pension crisis precisely because the non European immigrant population absorb a massive 34% of the welfare budget.

The immigrationists argument would only work with either constantly increasing cycles of immigration which would rapidly outstrip our national resources, or if every immigrant remained unmarried, childless and died before the age of sixty five.

Successive Governments have presided over an economy in which working class Scots have been priced out of the housing market, an economy which makes it impossible for Scots mothers to stay at home and raise families. Single mums have been denegrated and millions of pounds have been poured in to family planning and birth control. These are hardly the actions of a Government concerned by falling populations.

The truth is that European populations are not falling. They are simply stabalising and finding their natural balance. The problem we have is how to redistribute wealth to take account of this. The ruling elites who tell us we're not paying enough taxes to pay for pensions have had no problem finding billions of pounds to wage wars in Iraq, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. At this moment, Tony Blair is proposing to spend millions of pounds in aid to Africa. The Thatcher regime (the spiritual predecessors of our present Government) created three million unemployed and still managed to send a fleet halfway around the world to the Falklands. They were also able to finance a year long civil war against the miners.

The Government would easily find the financial means to meet future pension shortfalls if it considered Scots pensioners a priority.

Controlled population growth is essential to the maintenance of high standards of living. Mass immigration is, in fact, a burden on the welfare state.

Every nation has an obligation to help the oppressed. No nation should be obliged to commit economic and cultural suicide to do so.

contributed by and © Blaine Montgomery

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