Not actually burning our money

According to Wat Tyler, the cost of NHS treatment for foreign born mothers is currently run at 350 million a year. This is apparently 25% of the overall cost of maternity services.

My response is, so what? This figure is completely meaningless with out a bit of context (for instance - what constitutes foreign born? In my parish church, there at least three kids under two who were born to foreign born parents - one Irish, one Malaysian and of course the darling wife who is from Singapore). Two of those children however "rejoice" in British born fathers.

More to the point, all three were born to working parents who pay their taxes (indeed, being in this area of the country the chances are those parents are paying a lot more into the exchequer than the value of the services they take out).

AS Dr Crippen points out - if this is health tourism, it does need to be stopped. If it's legal, tax paying immigrants , then so what?

One other thing. Wat Tyler makes the point that:

The average native British woman has 1.6 children. The average immigrant woman has 2.2. And the average Pakistani woman in Britain has 4.7 children.

So what? To maintain the population as is, we apparently need 2.2 children per woman. In the future, we'll need those young people to man and support our healthcare and pay for our pensions - there's no point even in private pensions if there's no one working to earn the money to pay into the funds. If British born women - for whatever reason - aren't having enough children, then it's not reasonable to complain that the immigrants are making up the numbers for them.

Newspapers and Business Coverage

Just thought I'd post a link to this review of the Business sections of the various daily papers (including the FT).

The author of the review works in the City, so it's an interesting take. He's offering to do the Sundays as well - I do hope so!

Happy New Year

It's been a very busy Christmas, what with the Darling Wife returning from Singapore with The Boy and just spending time together, installing furniture and generally trying to get the house in order.

The Christmas Concert went well, and now it's time to prepare for the next concert, namely the Messiah in Chelmsford Cathedral. I haven't sung it in a while, so it will be nice to do again (one of the complaints we had when I was at university was that we did the Messiah too much, but the last time I sang it was probably the year after I left when I kept attending rehearsals.

One rather useful thing I've discovered over the Christmas break is Google's Blog Reader, which makes keeping up with my favourite blogs very simple. Now, if only I could find a way to get Firefox not to hang everytime I open Tim Worstall's blog at work.