British immigration policies, an antidote for ‘brain drain’!

I’ve just come up for air after an inconveniently nasty bout of swine flu, and groggily began to find out what’s happening in the world around

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me. Been there, done that, now I get all kinds of IMs from friends and frantic parents in India. My only advice is, as Douglas Adams would say, Don’t Panic. It’s mostly harmless.

Well, I could write about the NHS, considering my unusually intimate brush with it over the past few weeks, but what? The NHS, in my opinion, is generally a jolly good idea, if only someone would figure out a way to actually translate it into practice.

The doctors are fine. But I suspect their regs manuals are double the thickness of their medical books. While on the subject, what, exactly do India’s pandemic laws about who you can jail have anything to do with making enough anti-virals or vaccines available to the general public? Pandemic-hit countries are working on things like limiting, treating and tackling the virus, not whingeing about ancient laws.

Honestly, we always get hold of the wrong end of the stick. So, other than swine flu, what else is happening around here? Well, this is one that should give loads of people — including me — evil glee. The venerable British Academy, along with a slew of highly respected academics, commentators, and thinking heads, even the usually umm, (what’s a polite word for fuddy duddy?) Financial Times has now come to the conclusion that economics and economists need to do some serious rethinking on the future of economics itself. The way the subject has evolved has lost the plot, say the bigwigs, is too dependent on obscure and irrelevant mathematics, and economists are being seen as some kind of cross between astrologers and alchemists.

Of course, it took Queen Elizabeth herself to ask why this emperor has no clothes, when she gently enquired of the LSE, ‘How come nobody saw all this coming?” a few months back. The crux of the problem, they say, is that all those theories are based on assumptions that super efficient, super intelligent individuals all work in perfect rational harmony based on perfect information all over the world, and that’s fundamentally wrong. Duh uh?

We all realised that in college, and after trying to traumatise various teachers and getting nowhere, I figured I was better off for life learning in the canteen or library. (I wasn’t wrong. I haven’t used a comma I mugged for exams in my entire working life. I’ve used almost every canteen experience, people encounters, or fiction I read in class).
Anyway, now there’s a global debate about economics. The British view is that it needs to get closer to being the social science it is, and stop pretending to be some kind of offshoot of physics with mathematical models. They’ve finally figured out how silly they’ve always sounded. Woo hoo.

And then, of course, there’s the Home Office. Hooray. What would we snarky columnists do without them getting up to their silly antics? It’s ahuge relief that I don’t want a British passport, or else I may have to stop writing snarky columns. In a new public consultation, the Labour government wants to institute even more complicated laws for ‘earned’ citizenship and ‘probationary’ citizenship and so on. This round is more of Ms Jaqui Smith’s legacy, the former home minister best known for her husband’s porn watching habits.

Needless to say, it’s been met with bitter criticism both in the UK, the business community, and other countries like the US. In the new move, apparently ‘earned’ points will be deducted for some undefined ‘anti-patriotic’ activities, which include anti-war demonstrations. Maybe even this column, because it doesn’t show due ‘appreciation’ of British values. Now if only the British could tell me what those values are, I might appreciate them. This time last year, we were all engaged on a hugely expensive and major national exercise to define ‘Britishness’.

I usually go through Home office releases to explore new depths of stupidity, and these are some gems from the new UK Borders Agency consultation paper. One avowed aim is to ensure that UK’s immigration policy reduces the ill-effects of ‘brain drain’ for developing countries, but as yet, the government hasn’t the foggiest what that is.

Excuse me, did anyone ask the esteemed British government to worry about, say, India’s brain drain? Not that I know of. Sigh. The empire is over, people, long ago. Wake up and smell the coffee. Next there’s an entire para about how potential citizens need to be ‘integrated’, and pass tests on British history and politics, because they need to vote. Sigh, again.

All commonwealth and EU citizens already vote, from the day they rent a home, and yes, I voted in the EU elections as well as council ones. Last I heard, large chunks of British history, including Winston Churchill, were dropped from the local school curriculum to make space for life subjects like healthy eating. Exactly why do probationary citizens need to know British history when school kids don’t?

I guess the final word comes from Keith Best, the head of the Migration Advisory Service. All these desperate Labour ploys to win right wing support are dead in the water if the Tories come to power. That, without being an economist, we can pretty much predict as more than likely.