15-07-2025
Starmer's claim that he's tackling immigration now looks more ridiculous than ever
Why precisely is it that, over the past two decades, the UK has imported so many millions of foreign workers? Supposedly it's because our country has severe 'skills shortages'. Personally, though, I have my doubts. Especially now that this newspaper has unearthed a list of the occupations that immigrants can cite when applying for 'skilled work visas'.
And among them, believe it or not, is 'poet'.
Now, it may well be true that our country no longer produces great poets of her own. Even so, I'd be surprised if many British employers have been anxiously petitioning Yvette Cooper to allow in more poets from abroad.
'Honestly, Home Secretary, we'd love to hire homegrown poets. Sadly, though, British workers nowadays are just too lazy and entitled to master iambic tetrameter. They'd rather sit at home claiming benefits than get up at 6am to do an honest day's graft on a villanelle or a rondeau redoublé. That's why we urgently need to recruit thousands of hard-working young poets from Poland, Pakistan and Somalia. Otherwise, this country's Petrarchan sonnet industry will collapse.'
Even more surprising, however, is another job on the 'skilled visa' list. It's 'diversity and inclusion expert'.
If there is one line of work in which Britain does not face even the faintest hint of a skills shortage, surely to goodness it's 'diversity and inclusion'. Every single year, without fail, our universities turn out hundreds of thousands of expertly brainwashed, virtue-signalling woke ideologues. That's easily enough to staff the nation's HR departments. So why on earth should we allow foreigners to come over here and steal these jobs in DEI, when our own deranged Left-wing fanatics could be doing them?
Still, perhaps some good will come of this farce. The middle-class Left may finally turn against mass immigration, now it's putting their own jobs at risk.
The single stupidest trigger warning yet
Readers have long grown wearily inured to the dismal sight of trigger warnings on books that contain politically incorrect language. Even so, the one appended to a new novel entitled Men in Love merits special attention. Because, despite stiff competition, it must be the single most pointless trigger warning ever written.
'As a novel set in the 1980s,' it reads, 'many of the characters in Men in Love, as in society in general, express themselves in ways that we now consider offensive and discriminatory.' The warning then hastily reassures us that the author's use of such hurtful language is not 'an endorsement' of it – it's merely his 'attempt to authentically replicate' the way that all too many people used to speak in those shamefully unenlightened times.
At first glance, the above may seem no worse than any other trigger warning. But what makes this one so outstandingly imbecilic is that Men in Love happens to be by Irvine Welsh. Indeed, it's a sequel to Trainspotting – his bestselling 1993 novel about the harrowing misadventures of a group of Scottish heroin addicts.
Bearing this in mind, I'd love to know who exactly the trigger warning is intended to appease. Men in Love 's publishers, it would seem, believe that Mr Welsh has readers who will happily lap up graphic depictions of drug abuse, violence, underage sex and dead babies – and yet be horrified by the occasional scrap of sexist dialogue.
God only knows what sort of complaints they expected to receive, if they didn't add the trigger warning.
'Dear Sirs,
'For the past three decades I have been an avid reader of your esteemed author Mr Irvine Welsh. With unalloyed pleasure I devoured Filth, his charming 1998 tale of a psychopathic, cocaine-snorting, sexually abusive police officer with a talking tapeworm. I equally adored Porno, his joyful 2002 romp about a gang of thugs attempting to produce a pornographic video. And, like millions of other cinema-goers, I delighted in the 1996 film adaptation of Trainspotting – thanks not least to that splendid scene in which a gentleman with diarrhoea explosively fouls the bedsheets of his young lady companion, and then accidentally sprays the sheets' contents all over her parents while they're eating breakfast.
'You will surely understand my disgust, therefore, when I opened Mr Welsh's latest novel Men in Love – only to discover that one of the characters refers to a woman living with obesity as 'a fat lassie'.
'Needless to say, I was shocked and appalled. Never in all my years of reading Mr Welsh did I imagine that he would stoop to writing something so unspeakably offensive.
'Please inform this sickening lout that, unless he makes his cast of violent working-class Scottish smackheads start talking like a panel of Guardian columnists discussing gender equality at the Hay Festival, I shall never read another word he writes.'
