The latest British Home Office figures  [pdf] reveal that a total of 579,000 migrants from Eastern Europe have registered to work in the UK since April 2004. The figures do not include those who have come to the UK but are self-employed or who have decided not to register on the Worker’s Registration Scheme. The Mail and the Express report that 70,000 of these workers are now claiming benefits in the UK – at a cost of £77 million a year to the UK taxpayer. This represents a rise in the number of 30%. One in seven of those officially registered is now a dependent. Meanwhile the Independent reports that Polish migrants are sending £4.3bn a year back to their home country.

H/T Open Europe

If you tell Germans that they backed Hitler because they were racists, they will grovel at your feet, apologize for their fathers and try to condone themselves, promising that they will never again “discriminate” anyone. But do not tell them that they tolerated Hitler’s atrocities because they were submissive or they feel offended. I received the following letter from an angry German, reacting to my article in yesterday’s Washington Times (not Post).

Dear Mr Belien, 
I had the honour to read your Washington Post (28 February 2007) op-ed titled “2007 German horror tale” today. The topic covered – whether or not home schooling should be prohibited – is a very controversial one, which I personally am neither qualified nor inclined to judge upon.

From Dr. Siegfried Schanda’s psychiatric evaluation of Melissa Busekros

Melissa Busekros was examined by us. She has a childhood emotional disorder, severe school phobia and an oppositional denial-syndrome. Melissa lacks insight into her illness and the need for treatment, and considers herself healthy and her behaviour fully normal. M. needs urgent help in a closed setting if need be, and subsequent special education treatment to ensure schooling.

The subject of reasonable accommodation between Canadians and immigrants has been in the news in Canada for the past month or so, with the stories of two separate communities. The small working-class town of Herouxville, Quebec, population 1,338, made international headlines when it came up with a controversial and provocative code of standards for immigrants.

Earlier this month, a German teen-ager was forcibly taken from her parents and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home-schooled.

On Feb. 1, 15 German police officers forced their way into the home of the Busekros family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen. They hauled off 16-year-old Melissa, the eldest of the six Busekros children, to a psychiatric ward in nearby Nuremberg. Last week, a court affirmed that Melissa has to remain in the Child Psychiatry Unit because she is suffering from "school phobia."

A quote from Daniel Hannan on his blog, 26 February 2007

Had it happened to anyone else, there would have been an earthquake of protest. A man is seized on unspecified charges, and whisked off to a court of dubious authority. He spends nearly five years in detention. He asks permission to visit a heart specialist, but it is denied. Two weeks later, he dies of heart failure, without having been found guilty of anything. Had the man in question been, say, a Guantanamo internee, there would have been angry demonstrations, questions in parliament, hectoring editorials in the Guardian. But because it was Slobodan Milosevic, he went to his grave unwept, unhonoured and unsung.

[...] As [John] Laughland shows, the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia was a disgusting travesty. I would call it a kangaroo court, except that kangaroo courts are at least quick and cheap, whereas the ICTY is working its leisurely way through a $200 million a year budget. [...] Supporters of this growing international corpus of law argue that state sovereignty should not bestow immunity on tyrants. The trouble is that their purgative is worse than the original malady. Yes, some governments are authoritarian, in the sense that their leaders are not answerable to their peoples. But international tribunals, by their nature, cannot be rooted in the democratic process.

The ethical legitimacy of capital punishment is an emotional issue separating political camps and also nations. Both sides have good points, so the positions taken do not necessarily separate the idiots from the brainy, the blood-thirsty from the civilized or the resolute from the softie. While in individual instances these labels fit and as their mud sticks, they are habitually slung. This is the juncture when the keyboard tempts one to add to a debate in which nearly all has already been said. However, doing so would distract from a related issue that surfaced through recent news.

In 1863, at the height of Tsarist Russian imperial expansion, the French polemicist Alfred Mercier wrote in Du Panlatinisme that “Russian domination, a benefit for ignorant and savage peoples, or ones corrupted by the vices of decrepit civilizations, would be a calamity for Europe.” Mercier would not object to Russia’s incursions into Central Asia, and was confident that “as long as Europe remains what it is today, that is, strong and disciplined, the czars’ cannons will knock at its doors in vain.” Europe, Mercier reasoned, would be preserved by its “vitality.”

Writing in the Daily Mail today, Robin Aitken flags up his new book, Can We Trust The BBC? in a devastating critique of what he describes as a form of “institutionally Leftist”. This follows on from the Daily’s editor Paul Dacre who lashed out at the Corporation in January.

I understand that this week there was a general board meeting of Airbus Industries. At that meeting the executives were presented with a plan to save the troubled European National Champion. These plans, called Power8, should be made public on Tuesday next week. I also understand they won’t be.

Airbus needs to save over 1 billion Euro a year.