Press Association
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Migrants Lower Inflation : Bank Boss |
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14 June 05 |
The Governor of the Bank of England warned that inflation could be forced higher if Eastern European workers stop coming to the UK.
In a speech to business leaders in Yorkshire, Mervyn King said migrant workers appeared to have helped the British economy by restraining wage growth at a time when unemployment is at a 30-year low.
It is estimated that around 120,000 workers entered the UK from the 10 countries that joined the European Union after May last year.
Mr King said: "Without this influx to fill the skills gaps in a tight labour market it is likely that earnings would have risen at a faster rate."
Bigger salaries for British workers would have increased costs for employers who would have been pressured into raising their prices to protect profits, he said.
This would have increased the risk of inflation overshooting the Bank's target of 2% in two years' time.
Mr King said the impact of globalisation on wage costs -- along with consumer spending and high street prices -- was central to how the Bank decides interest rates.
The possibility that Eastern European workers may no longer come to the UK in such large numbers posed a threat to inflation, he said.
"There is a risk that the effect of migrant labour on wage costs may diminish if the inflows over the past year represented a one-off adjustment to the new opportunities to work in Britain," Mr King said.
His comments back up surveys earlier this year from organisations such as the TUC promoting the benefits of migrant workers to the UK economy.
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A Sovereignty Perspective
There we have it -- the government's fetish for so-called "full employment" (subtly forced labour, whereby absolutely everyone must be seen to be doing something,
however pointless or even harmful it might be; blue whatzitted fly is the order of the workers' day... so long as it isn't bringing up their own "latchkey" children since those particular units of economic activity have now been earmarked for the
government's "Brave New World" style all-day indoctrination centres) lays a pretext for ongoing mass-immigration, otherwise "full employment" would (allegedly)
cause inflation.
The Banker's remedy against inflation is an inflationary rise in interest rates, but of course you're not supposed to notice the contradiction inherent in that. However, we can, they say, avoid such bad medicine
by shunting in more bodies. Which totally ignores the fact that increasing the population, all the more so in an already very densely populated country, will itself inevitably exert inflationary pressure on the prices of thereby scarcer commodities such as houses, food and fuel. But you're not supposed to notice that, either.
Note the Banker's reference to globalisation -- an unstated implication that the process of mass immigration would have to be never-ending, until they attain a wage-level parity with the
most exploitative sweatshop hellholes on the entire planet. At the same time fatcats, senior apparachiks and government cronies would presumably gain their own parity with third-world equivalents, in other words the differential between their income and that of the average member of the population would be even more disgustingly greater than it is already.
So much for the "enrichment" we are forever being assured comes from continuous immigration; and as for the Union bosses -- well, members' interests can hardly be said to feature in their ideologically-driven agenda; as mentioned in the final line of the report: "His comments back up surveys earlier this year from organisations such as the TUC promoting the benefits of migrant workers to the UK economy."
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