Where are we
going?
(Reprinted from Bill
Bailie's Nation Revisited)
The Japanese have signed a
trade deal to turn the Association of Southeast Asian Nations into a
common market. The Bangkok Declaration of 1967 was designed to promote
trade and cooperation between Japan and the states of Southeast Asia.
The similarities between ASEAN and Japan’s wartime empire are obvious.
Japan is an industrial giant with huge export markets. Thailand,
Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines are
developing economies with important natural resources. Singapore is a
vital Banking and financial center. Together they can achieve
self-sufficiency.
63 years after America
dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the economic forces that
drove Japan to dominate the Pacific have eventually triumphed.
Suppliers must find markets and manufacturers must find materials.
Japan’s challenge to European and American imperialism in the 1940s was
met with devastating force. It took Japan a generation to get back on
her feet but this time she has built an empire founded on trade and
mutual advantage.
After the war Japan went
for automation and we went for immigration. Japan only admits migrants
from neighbouring states and makes absolutely no concessions to alien
cultures. Japanese workers are properly trained and represented and
enjoy a high standard of living. Japan became an economic giant by hard
work and diligent investment not by exploiting cheap labour.
Third World immigration
into Britain has kept down wages, aggravated housing shortages and
supplemented our native underclass of drug dealers and benefit
scroungers. We have got an unemployment problem and a labour shortage
at the same time. It’s all very well for the Daily Mail to
scream about Polish workers but we need them. Young Britons do not want
to get their hands dirty and some of them lack the basic skills
necessary to hold down a job.
In 1997 Tony Blair’s New
Labour government promised us “education, education, education” but all
they gave us was recession, war, inflation and immigration. We cannot
go on as we are. We must ask “where are we going” and take a good look
at the Japanese model.
Japan only employs
Japanese workers - a lesson for Britain?
