British Prime Minister David Cameron took a turn to the politically incorrect, calling for his nation to stem the tide of immigrant workers from Eastern Europe and to reform welfare so that it doesn’t encourage recipients to stay unemployed.
Mr. Cameron first remarked that half the workforce in the country’s factories hailed from Poland, Lithuania and other Eastern European nations, The Telegraph reported. He then said: “You can’t blame” immigrants for their work ethics.
“You can’t blame them, they want to work, they see the jobs, they come over, and they do them,” Mr. Cameron said, at a recent business gathering, The Telegraph reported. But it was a “cruel fact” that the youth in Britain could be “left behind” and shut out of the country’s economic recovery, because they didn’t have the skills necessary to work.
One of his answers, then, targeted the immigration population.
“As a country, what we ought to be saying is no,” he said. “Let’s get our education system right so we are producing young people out of our schools and colleges who are capable of doing those jobs. Second, let’s reform the welfare system so that it doesn’t pay to be out of work — it pays for you to be in work.”
And third, he said, The Telegraph reported: “Let’s have sensible controls on immigration, particularly from outside the EU where we can cap the number of people who come.”
Between April and June of 2013, a total of 683,000 British workers came from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia, The Telegraph reported.
• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.
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