Dear Editor
Robert James’s spirited defence of Nigel Farage and his demolition of Lord Heseltine’s ‘fascist’ slur were both well-aimed. Yet his closing observation that ‘young Brits don’t want to do entry-level jobs’, risks repeating a convenient myth. The issue is not moral decline, but economic design.
For decades, successive governments have quietly manufactured inflation while suppressing real wages. The expansion of the money supply, the offshoring of industry, and the financialisation of everyday life have combined to make low-paid work structurally non-viable. Young people are not lazy: they are rational actors in a distorted economy where the cost of living has outpaced earnings for an entire generation.
When I grew up, taking a small job at fourteen or fifteen was expected, a paper round, shop work, farm labour. It built habits of effort, independence and self-respect. By formalising workers’ rights and raising entry-age limits, we quietly removed that first rung on the ladder. The cultural expectation to start early disappeared, and with it the sense of progression that connects youthful effort to adult contribution. The ‘seedcorn’ of work ethic was ploughed under long before today’s young were blamed for not sprouting.
Mass migration does not arise as a spontaneous response to labour shortages, but as a prepared answer to a manufactured call. It provides the low-cost labour required to sustain an economy propped up by inflated assets and cheap debt, one in which property values rise, credit expands, and GDP is flattered while real productivity and purchasing power decay. The so-called ‘labour shortage’ narrative conceals this deeper orchestration. It is not that the young refuse to serve; it is that the system no longer serves them.
And beneath that choreography lies something deeper still: the managed dilution of culture and cohesion. A nation preoccupied with survival cannot guard its inheritance. Inflation and migration thus operate as twin instruments of a guided economic stealth weapon, not simply cheapening labour, but weakening belonging. The end-game is not prosperity, but pliancy.
If we are to speak honestly about sovereignty, immigration or work ethic, we must first speak about money, how it is created, who benefits from its dilution, and why we have allowed economic policy to become a mechanism of cultural decay. Until that is faced, arguments about national character will remain a distraction from the quiet theft beneath our feet.
Andrew D Harry
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