Politicians and journalists will play around with the statistics around immigration – usually to try to claim that immigration is “under control”, “good for Britain”, “beneficial for our economy” and “an enrichment to our cultural life”. But they won’t ever talk about the real trends and costs in immigration – shortage of housing, pressure on schools, hospitals and policing and drain on our benefits system.

So I’ve started trying to see what the immigration figures are really telling us. To measure immigration I’ve used the Government’s figures for the number of foreigners registering for National Insurance (NI) numbers each year.

My first chart shows the overall number broken down by region of origin (click to see more clearly)

The first thing you’ll notice is that the number of migrants getting NI numbers went up from about 340,000 a year in 2002/03 to about 420,000 a year in 2004/05 – a rise of over 40,000 a year. Then the number shot up from 420,000 a year in 2004/05 to almost 800,000 a year by 2007/08 – a massive rise of about 130,000 a year. This was due to people from the A8 accession countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia) moving to Britain.

Then the numbers of foreigners getting NI numbers “stabilised” at a fairly shocking 600,000 to 700,000 a year – that’s an incredible 12,000 to 14,000 a week (2,400 to 2,800 every working day). However, when the 29 million people from Romania and Bulgaria get full rights to move freely to Britain for work or benefits (or both), we can expect the number of migrants getting NI numbers to shoot up again to close to 900,000 or even 1,000,000 a year.

The next thing that is interesting is the rise in the numbers of migrants from the bankrupt Club Med countries since they collapsed into recession

And also the level of unemployment of migrants from Club Med countries compared to British Nationals

It seems pretty clear that the EU is exporting its unemployed to Britain and that these migrants (apart from those from Italy) are much more likely to be claiming benefits than British nationals.

Finally, here are unemployment levels amongst people from the last lot of Accession Countries

Heaven knows what will happen when the Romanians and Bulgarians start flooding in.

So, in answer to the two questions in the title:

Is the EU exporting its unemployed to Britain? Yes!

Will they bankrupt us? Probably.

Yesterday a newspaper raised concerns over charity Age UK’s extremely close (£100,000 per year) association with a firm that sells rather expensive mobility scooters, allegedly through using exploitative “hard sell” techniques https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/10348383/Mobility-scooter-company-targets-pensioners-with-pressuring-sales-tactics.html

So I thought it might be worth shining just a little (possibly unwelcome) light on Age UK’s financial affairs.

Age UK was formed on 1 April 2009 when Age Concern and Help the Aged merged. In the last financial year, Age UK raised an impressive £167.7m, supposedly for charity.

However, it cost Age UK about a whopping £85m to raise and manage this money, leaving just £80.4m for charitable use (after retaining a little money for future use). So, just 48% of the money raised for charity could actually be used for charity – rather pathetic really.

Of this £80.4m supposedly used for charity, around £25m was donated to other charities. As these charities would all have chief executives and financial directors and fundraising managers and staff and offices and computers and whatever, they would almost certainly have costs of say 30% (£7.5m) of all money donated. That just left £72.9m (43%) of Age UK’s cash that could possibly be used for charity. Then you’d have to subtract Age UK’s administrative and management costs – but I can’t find out how much these were.

However, I do know that two Age UK executives were paid (I deliberately did not write “earned”) between £170,000 and £180,000 a year. Nice work if you can get it.

I think one of these is one of Age UK’s well-paid bosses:

Six more Age UK managers were on £100,000 to £120,000. And a further twenty five staff were paid between £60,000 and £100,000. Age UK probably uses less than 40% of the money it receives for charitable purposes, but it’s certainly quite charitable to its own senior managers.

I have previously ranted about the fact that there are an almost unbelievable 180,000 registered charities in England and Wales. Yes, 180,000. The population of England and Wales is around 56,600,000 – that’s a truly incredible charity for every 314 people!!!

These charities employ – wait for it – 874,829 staff. So there is a charity employee for every 65 people. There are also 945,278 charity trustees. I’m sure the Charity Commission welcomes there being so many charities, as the more charities there are, the more need there is for them to employ loads of well-paid, well-pensioned managers and staff. But to me it looks like we need a massive clear-out in our bloated, overstaffed, underperforming charities sector.

As for the mobility scooters mis-selling scam, one of the newspaper’s readers commented: “I know a chap who briefly had a job selling scooters and other mobility aids for some firm or other (n.b. NOT the company featured in this article).

Yesterday I bemoaned the fact that the April 2013 £2.6bn increase in Britain’s foreign aid budget (from £7.9bn to £10.5bn a year) would have been enough money to pay the salaries of the 40,000 troops and 32,400 police being fired to save money. And I suggested that most of our £10.5bn foreign aid was being lost due to corruption and incompetence. So today, I thought I should provide some facts to support my claim that much of our aid disappears into the very deep pockets of Africa’s and Asia’s kleptocrats.

Each year an organisation called Transparency International publishes a Corruption Index in which it rates countries from 1 (least corrupt) to 174 (most corrupt) – (click to see more clearly)

I looked at a British government report listing the top recipients of British aid and then noted where each country stands on the Corruption Index

So what do we see? The two most corrupt countries in the world – Somalia and Afghanistan at 174= on the Corruption Index – do pretty well from our foreign aid. Number 173 – South Sudan – is also in the top 15 recipients of our aid. Two countries – India and Pakistan – are both major recipients of our aid and yet have enough money to have developed their own arsenals of nuclear weapons. Smart. huh?

Nigeria, the fifth on the list of aid recipients, has massive oil wealth and should be one of the richest countries in the world were its leaders not so corrupt.

Congo Congo Land does quite well from our generosity. And Ethiopia, the number one recipient of our aid, has a tendency to use our money to buy weapons to help fight its regular wars with its neighbours. In fact when multimillionaire Saint Bob Geldorf did his great Band Aid thing, there were reliable reports of the food sent to Ethiopia being loaded directly onto Russian cargo ships – the food intended for starving Ethiopians was sold by the Ethiopian government to get money for buying arms. Though Saint Bob vigorously denies this every happened.

Our shoving £10.5bn a year into the hands of the world’s most corrupt people would be laughable……

…… if it wasn’t so tragic.

Reading newspapers and watching TV news, you could start to believe that Britain’s and America’s economies are on the mend. Journalists and politicians are spouting the usual clichés – “light at the end of the tunnel” or “we’ve turned the corner” or “we’re reducing the deficit” or whatever. Whew! I’m glad the financial crisis is over, aren’t you?

This is a picture of an elephant in a room

And this is US Government debt

And this is UK Government debt

I wonder if any readers can spot any similarities between the elephant in the room and the massive, unsustainable government debts that are propping up our economies?

We can never pay back the huge amounts of money our useless, financially-incontinent, incompetent governments are borrowing to pretend our economy is recovering. I wonder who will pay off our debts?

And here’s the “bright” future

How are we going to get out of this mess, Mr Obama and Mr Cameron? Oh, you haven’t a clue? I thought not.

(If you enjoy any of these blogs or find them informative, please send the links to you friends and contacts. When politicians and journalists collude to lie to us, we need to find some way of spreading the truth)

(By the way, yesterday evening I went to see a show by ventriloquist Nina Conti – absolutely brilliant. She’s doing a UK tour at the moment. Go and see her if you can)

I feel uncomfortable writing critically about someone who is dead and cannot defend himself. But if Ed Miliband is going to constantly witter on about what a great man his father was to burnish his own moral and political credentials, we have the right to look at the facts and even question Ed Miliband’s version of events.

After all, it was Ed Miliband’s mentor, the useless Gordon Brown, who constantly claimed that his father was his “moral compass”. If Brown’s father was a “moral compass” then that compass must have been broken as Brown was an economically-illiterate, financially-incontinent recidivist liar who (with the help of Ed Balls and Ed Miliband) wasted about £1.5trn of our money and virtually bankrupted Britain

Ed Miliband has often boasted about what a great man his father Ralph (originally named Adolphe) was in speeches to try to get sympathy and admiration from his audience. But when last Saturday’s Daily Mail wrote an article suggesting that Miliband Pater may have actually been a rather nasty piece of work, Miliband was suddenly furious that anyone dare look at his father’s words and actions.

When it comes to his father, Ed Miliband wants to play “heads I win, tails you lose” – he wants to be able to exploit his version of his father’s history to boost his own lousy political career.

But apparently Ed Miliband considers it unacceptable for anyone else to examine what Miliband Pater was really like.

Here’s a laughably sycophantic piece from the Guardian about Miliband’s father and grandfather: “Yet, in May 1940, the ominous world situation he enjoyed discussing with his fellow teenage activists became an indisputable reality. On the 10th, the Germans invaded Belgium. By the 16th, they had almost reached Brussels. The Milibands packed and hurried to one of the city’s stations, intending to get to Paris (most of France had not yet fallen) and take refuge with relatives there. But the station was in chaos: the Germans had cut off the Brussels-Paris railway line. After lingering at the station into the evening, the Milibands gave up and went home. Back in their flat, Ralph heard a radio announcement that all boys of his age – he was now 16 – were to be conscripted into the Belgian army, currently being shot to pieces a few miles away. This was not his idea of useful political sacrifice; he decided he would walk to France. After a frantic family debate, the plan was amended: Ralph and his father would walk to the Channel instead, a distance of more than 60 miles, while the rest of the family stayed in Brussels and looked for another way out.

For the next two days and nights, Ralph and his father walked west through the flat countryside. At Ostend, they talked their way on to the last boat to England. Once they were at sea, they asked for refugee status. It was granted. The ship docked at Dover. From there they travelled to London”.

But how should we interpret this? Were Miliband’s grandfather and father courageous escapees who just managed to leave Belgium for Britain before the Nazis caught them? Or were they cowards, running off to save their own skins and leaving Ralph Miliband’s mother and younger sister to the mercy of the Germans and possibly the concentration camps?

Who knows? These were difficult times and my father and uncle had to make a similar decision. But my father and uncle travelled thousands of miles to escape to Britain. Ed Miliband’s grandfather and father only had to go 60 miles to reach the coast and then a boat to Britain. Could they not have taken Ralph Miliband’s mother and sister with them?

In fact, thanks to a courageous farmer (and no thanks to Miliband’s father and grandfather) Ralph Miliband’s mother and younger sister did manage to survive the war and evade being sent to a concentration camp.

Ed Miliband has also made much of the fact that his father Ralph Miliband served for 3 years in the Belgian section of the Royal Navy. Did he volunteer or was he called up? And if he hadn’t volunteered, would he have been called up anyway? Who knows? We have Ed Miliband’s version of events. But let’s look at some “highlights” of Ed Miliband’s rise to political power.

Miliband must have lied about supposed Global Warming when (as Energy Secretary) bringing in his economically disastrous 2008 Climate Change Act as by then he would have known that the earth’s temperature had not risen since 1999.  I don’t remember him opposing Blair’s illegal invasion of Iraq even though, as a member of Labour’s inner circle, he must have suspected (or even known) that the dodgy dossier was a pack of lies. But standing up for the truth as Foreign Secretary Robin Cook did would not have been so good for Ed Miliband’s career. And Ed Miliband has been more than economical with the truth when talking about the record of the (for us disastrous) Blair/Brown government of which he was an important part. So why should we believe anything he says now about his father or anything else?

As for Ed Miliband’s histrionic outrage over the Daily Mail criticising his father, I think most people would agree that if a politician wants their family to be off limits for the press, then they should not self-servingly try to exploit their family to promote their own grubby political careers.