IT HAS been reported that the Government is thinking of funding a PR campaign in Romania and Bulgaria aimed at deterring potential immigrants from coming here by telling them that it rains a lot and the jobs are poorly paid.
Always keen to help out, I have a few further suggestions. The campaign could include posters of David Cameron in his pinkest prime with the words “And this man is in charge!” written beneath. A sub-head might add: “He’s jolly rich and privileged and the only proper job he had before was as a PR man for a television company.”
Another poster could show Mr Cameron with Nick Clegg looking shifty: “He’s in a job share with this man, who sold every last principle he once possessed to get into power.”
Just to be fair-minded, another poster could show a picture of Ed Miliband at his most Wallace like: “And this man thinks he could do a better job!”
While we’re about it, we could show a poster of Education Secretary Michael Gove: “He used to be a columnist – now he dismantles the education system just for the fun of it.” (To think of anyone giving a columnist anything to run, just imagine – it’s like putting me in charge of the council).
To throw matters open, another poster could show a celebrity diving ineptly into a swimming pool: “And this is what passes for entertainment on television on a Saturday night.”
An accompanying poster could show another vaguely famous person, preferably Keith Chegwin, falling over on the ice: “And this is what passes for entertainment on television on a Sunday night.”
Of course, it could backfire. Perhaps our politicians look more inviting than theirs.
Maybe television in Romania and Bulgaria is so appalling that Splash! won’t have seemed so awful. We could always seal the deal by sending over a picture of Ant and Dec: “Mystifyingly, this pair presents every other programme on ITV, but nobody knows why.”
Despite the jauntiness of my tone, this is a serious matter. Who would consider such a dim-brained notion? Didn’t anyone think how stupid this would make us appear?
It has been reported that such a campaign may now not take place. Real or not, the campaign has stirred up a diplomatic row with Romania, which is hardly surprising. Now I know that plenty of people worry about immigration, but the trouble is that we often get things out of proportion.
According to a generally sensible Sunday newspaper – the only one I buy – Romania’s minister for labour, Mariana Campeanu, says that Britain lies behind Italy, Spain, France, Portugal and Germany as targets for her people.
It reports that at present there are an estimated 150,000 Romanians in the UK, with most (around 80,000) working in agriculture, while others are doctors and nurses, students or construction workers.
In other words, of the relatively small number here, most are working or properly occupied and not sitting around on benefits or bringing their illnesses here for the free NHS. And of those who could come here, most would rather go somewhere else.
This latest bout of nastiness has arisen because curbs imposed in 2007 when Romania joined the EU are set to expire.
This prospect is allowing those who stir up these matters to generate the usual xenophobic panic about benefit-seeking immigrants.
One often-repeated myth has it that the last Labour government had an “open door” policy on immigration.
Now I am not taking sides here, merely pointing out that no government has ever had such a policy, which implies that all rules and regulations were torn up and a sign placed at the borders reading: “Please come in, wherever you’re from, and don’t worry about wiping your feet.”
More people may well have arrived under Labour, but there was no open-door policy.
Anyway, to a large extent immigration is the price we pay for living in a wider world.
Yes, there have to be rules, but we cannot stop people moving round the world, or indeed return to a fondly imagined past when we had the country to ‘‘ourselves’’.
And not least because such a time never existed in the first place.
Follow Julian on twitter @juliancole5
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