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Johnstone's View 11th April 2008

Crimes of violence are mercifully rare in the rural north east in spite of what some would have you believe.  The news of a brutal murder in Brechin and dismembered body parts turning up on the shore at Arbroath are however, close enough to home to make us all stop and think for a moment.

There is a small and perhaps inappropriate reassurance to be taken from the fact that, while the act was committed on our doorstep, all the people involved were foreign immigrants and therefore we are somehow insulated from this grotesque crime.  Like me, you may have felt a pang of guilt for having allowed such a thought to enter your mind.

The United Kingdom, like many other great nations, has over the years been subject to waves of foreign immigration.  As with other countries, it has risen up then fallen back down the political agenda over the years.  Here in the north east of Scotland we did not participate in the waves of Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigration which took place after the Second World War.  During that period in fact, emigration was more our forte as we helped to populate Canada, Australia and New Zealand among others.

We have however, had our share of immigrants over the years.  The presence of Polish service men in large numbers during the early 1940’s had a big impact, with many of them returning here to build lives and families after their war had been won but their country had been occupied by the Soviet Union.

Going back a little further to the late 19th and early 20th century, the economic and political upheavals, and in some cases the anti-Semitism, of central and eastern Europe drove many across the north sea, particularly from the east coast of the Baltic, to seek a new life here.

It should come as no surprise to us then, that those who are arriving from Poland and the Baltic states today, driven by new economic pressures, are simply following the difficult route pioneered by their fore fathers.

Here in the United Kingdom we have been lucky enough to have a buoyant economy in recent years and in the north east of Scotland one of our first problems was that we could no longer find the hands needed to do the manual work in our farming and fish processing industries. The Poles and Czechs came here to broaden their horizons and occupy unfilled vacancies, closely followed by those from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.  Soon they were working in catering, construction and retail, often over qualified for their jobs but looking for a chance to ‘step up’.

While in the south east of England the traditional anti-immigration mantra can be heard again, sometimes fuelled by the reaction against organised crime and begging of which we hear so much, our experience is very different.  As I travel across the north east talking to businessmen and women who are often wholly dependant on eastern European labour for their future, I am told time and again about the esteem in which many of these workers are held.

We have become dependant on the flow of eastern European workers to do the jobs our own young people are either too highly qualified or simply unwilling to do.  We are lucky to have been able to attract people from Poland and the Baltic states who are, for the most part, fundamentally honest, hard working, polite and above all, welcome.  They ask for little help and they pay the tax and national insurance, which is going towards the provision of public services in which we all share.  We have a lot to thank them for.

There are three things which we owe these people in return.  Firstly, we must not allow their expectations to be any different from our own when it comes to the provision of housing or health care, education for their children who often arrive here speaking languages for which there are no interpreters in the schools, and assistance in gaining the qualifications which our employers increasingly demand of them.  We also have to address the question of what will happen if an economic slowdown results in many of the jobs they currently rely on being lost and how we might deal with large-scale unemployment in the immigrant workforce.

Secondly, we must be prepared, through our membership of the European union, to take the steps necessary to promote economic development in Eastern Europe so that ultimately these countries can provide the employment and the optimism that their people currently pursue here.

And finally, we can offer them justice.