Sainsbury’s, to use the demotic title for Britain’s second largest chain of supermarkets, is important to the UK retail sector.  These days, it’s true, the Sainsbury family own only 16% of the (reportable) global empire, and prefer the adornments of honours and high office and the sweet odour of charitable deeds to flogging cornflakes and spuds.  But Sainsbury family funds flow like lifeblood into the Labour Party, and no doubt the Tories get their whack too.  So the views they - or their underlings, actually - present to House of Lords committees of enquiry can hardly go unnoticed:-

Sainsbury’s says ‘immigrants better workers’

Immigrant workers have a “superior” work ethic to British employees, according to the supermarket giant Sainsbury’s.

The company said it found immigrants to be more flexible and happier with their terms and conditions in employment.

It added that employing migrant workers in its stores often had a positive impact on the domestic staff. Sainsbury’s was giving evidence to a House of Lords inquiry into the impact of immigration.

In a written submission, it said that it had greatly increased the number of immigrants it employed over the past two years and would likely continue to do so in future.

It said: “We have found migrant workers to have a very satisfactory work ethic, in many cases superior to domestic workers.

“We believe this results from their differing motivations — they want to learn English, or send money home to their families.

“They tend to be more willing to work flexibly, and be satisfied with their duties, terms and conditions and productivity requirements.

“In the long term, this could have a positive effect on their domestic colleagues. In some areas we have definitely seen a positive shift in culture where migrant workers have been introduced, which has led to a more diverse workforce fostering a more engaged group of workers.”

The company, which employs 150,000 people, said it did not specifically recruit migrant workers and looked for the “highest calibre recruit” for any vacancy.

... Sainsbury’s said it had not met with trade union resistance to employing migrant workers and said, as the UK population decreased and aged, migrant worker use would likely increase.

So it’s all there, really ... the argument for a controllable, wage-competitive workforce.  Hardly a foundation for working class solidarity.  So why the complicity of the trade unions.  Are they simply run by too many internationalists and fervent anti-racists who would rather drink hemlock than raise the issue of race?  Or are they simply too craven or too well-in with the political Establishment ... all fixed up for a merry-go-round future of superannuated, semi-detached jobs with NGOs, government commissions and what-have-you?

I don’t know.  But they are not the only dogs, of course, who do not bark.  What about the eerie silence from our elected representatives?  Here’s what the academic, author and libertarian Sean Gabb had to say in one of his Free Life Commentaries:-

Now, I had tea a few months ago with a Conservative Member of Parliament. I put parts of this case [for the decline in electoral participation - Ed] to him. His reply was that his constituents—and he meets hundreds of these every month—barely ever mention these heads of complaint. He would love them to complain about Europe and political correctness. Instead, they complain about poor standards in the schools and about hospital closures. I was an intellectual, he told me. I might want the world to be as I claimed it was. But he was a politician. He had to deal with a very different real world in which people had fundamentally changed even since 1997.

The conversation moved after this to matters on which we could talk more amicably over the teacups. But he was wrong and I was right. The truth is that few people think very well, and most people do not think at all. They are unhappy with England as it has become. But they are not able to say what are the causes of their unhappiness. On immigration and political correctness they are frightened to say what they probably do think. On the other issues they are unable to speak because they do not know what to say.

It’s easy to see from these two conflicting dynamics - the business drive for cost savings and the curiously muddled and downright missing case for the defendant - that there’s only one foreseeable outcome.  And it’s the wrong one.

But imagine what kind of power there would need to be behind the “defendant’s case” to match the business juggernaut and bring it to a halt.  A veritable revolution ... street politics, new parties, free media!  And all in a land of mortgage debt and product fetishism.  Perhaps not, then.

So where do we go from here?