"Britain needs millions more immigrants to reduce strain of ageing population"

The Torygraph trots out the usual Home-Owner-Ist propaganda:

The Office for Budget Responsibility said that spending on the state pension, social care and healthcare will rise from 14 per cent of Britain's GDP to almost a fifth.

The report found that allowing more than 140,000 immigrants into Britain a year, equivalent to 6million people, would help increase the overall number of people who are in work and improve public finances.

Its analysis suggests that Britain's borrowing as a propotion of GDP would rise to 99 per cent if there is a steady flow of immigrants. If there was a complete ban on immigrants, borrowing would rise to 174 per cent of GDP.

David Cameron has pledged to reduce the levels of immigration into Britain to "tens of thousands" during this Parliament. Last year the number of immigrants dropped by 89,000 to 153,000.

The Homeys *love* immigration of course - it keeps wages down, it pushes rents and house prices up, it gives them some easy targets to blame everything on.

This sort of propaganda enables the kleptocrats to direct attention away from the fact that the reason for the massive deficits is simply fraud and theft on their part, they can justify tax rises on the basis that they need more money for old people and old people are all too ready to lap this up.

It's the old divide and conquer: pit old against young, pit existing citizens against newcomers etc.

If we cut out the kleptocracy, had proper qualitative controls on immigrants (i.e. can speak English, are not criminals, are not disease carriers, do not belong to a religious sect that wants to destroy everything we hold dear etc), if we had taxes on the rental value of land instead of on earned income and hence more employment and a constantly growing economy, and if we had less NIMBYism then immigration would make everybody better off, and we'd be able to pay for all this old-age stuff out of petty cash.