My TikTok feed is full of white men marching the streets of London calling for an end to immigration. These guys have a cause, not one I believe in, but one they feel strongly about. It made me wonder if they had had any children? I assumed that most of them must have, these are masculine thug types, and in my experience there’s nothing that makes that type of person more proud than replicating themselves in younger form, nothing makes them feel more like the archetypal Anglo-Saxon male they believe themselves to be.

I hear their arguments, mostly badly though out repetitions of resource based nonsense spouted by people who just repeat the words of influential political charlatans. I’m going to let them into a little secret that is not a secret to anyone who has studied economics or politics…. The reason for your lack of resources, or the slender nature of your slice of the pie, is not immigrants, it is a result of the inherent inequality that your country’s laws, laws formed by the financial classes, allow for in enabling the wealthy to constantly rob the working classes of all their intellectual and productive output.

Did they ask me, or anyone else, if they could make their children? I think not. Their ability to bring into this country, my country, a life that will burden the state, my state, and absorb an enormous amount of tax money, my money, is assumed to be a right. Nobody advised them not to do it, nobody hands them a bill for the pregnancy care, or when the kid emerges, goes to school, receives vaccinations, and there is no people forming a protest group and taking to the streets of London to show anger against the societal cost of their reproductive impetus.

Every time some woman squeezes out another brat I gain minutes on the ETA of any ambulance I might potentially need. My waiting time at the surgery or the hospital gets longer. My chances of getting an appointment shrinks. I go further towards the back of the list of society’s medical priorities because I am not a child and children get first dibs. It seems natural to think that, in a direct comparison, my life has less meaning than that of a child, but not to me it doesn’t!

Yet you may say “stop the boats”, you may wave the ST George flag and proudly display the bulldog tattoo, you may say “Britain’s full”. That makes no sense to me, an immigrant is an adult, we don’t have to wait 18 years for them to be useful they are ready to work. We don’t have to educate them or get them through infancy, childhood, puberty, adolescence. They could arrive on a Tuesday and be working and paying rent by Friday if we had the resources for them. And they mostly speak English well enough to be understood.

The lack of resources is not their fault, nor is it yours, the government causes this manufactured shortage of accommodation, it’s government that enables the economics of high price rentals. These folks on boats just want what you have already, and they’re mostly willing to do what you do to get it. You maybe just don’t want to compete with them, but what if I don’t want to compete with the children you may have? Tell me what’s the difference?

I have not had any children, I suppose I’ve chosen not to. I’ve considered it a few times for sure, and I’ve had partners that wanted us to, but I have not created any object that society has to pay for. I’d personally like to see some sort of process of applying for permission to bring new life, new burdens, into this land. Akin to that which an immigrant faces when they have to jump through hoops and pass tests to justify their acceptance, when they have to prove that they cannot be anywhere else. The premise being that they, those uninvited persons, are a burden to everyone who already lives on this island.

We already live on this island, your future children don’t, not yet. Are you going to ask the rest of us?

Paul S Wilson