I thought this was really interesting by Paul Mason on the OECD projections for the world economy to 2060 ...
"To make the central scenario work, Europe and the USA each have to absorb 50 million migrants between now and 2060, with the rest of the developed world absorbing another 30 million. Without that, the workforce and the tax base shrinks so badly that states go bust."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/07/capitalism-rich-poor-2060-populations-technology-human-rights-inequality
so where does that leave our immigration policy if being able to sustain any measurable growth is relying on taking people in just to stay solvent?
As the current (wholly predictable) crisis unravels I keep thinking back to another Guardian article, this one by John Berger writing about the painter Francis Bacon. This is what he says is Bacon's relevance to us today ...
"The present period of history is one of the Wall. When the Berlin one fell, the prepared plans to build walls everywhere were unrolled. Concrete, bureaucratic, surveillance, security, racist, zone walls. Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich. The walls cross every sphere from crop cultivation to healthcare. They exist, too, in the richest metropolises of the world. The Wall is the front line of what, long ago, was called the class war.
On the one side: every armament conceivable, the dream of no-body-bag wars, the media, plenty, hygiene, many passwords to glamour. On the other: stones, short supplies, feuds, the violence of revenge, rampant illness, an acceptance of death and an on-going preoccupation with surviving one more night - or perhaps one more week - together.
The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us. Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to. It is not a wall between good and evil. Both exist on both sides. The choice is between self-respect and self-chaos."
I am encouraged by some of the reactions from the German public this past week. Given that their technocrat masters only just closed ranks and stomped on Greece perhaps this wave of sympathy is about the German people showing those masters that they don't like being coerced into imposing misery on other people. They are choosing self-respect over self-chaos. We probably wont. There will be no "Refugees Welcome" signs at Stamford Bridge or Twickenham.
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