Victoria Gillick of Wisbech has sent me a copy of a letter she has submitted to the Wisbech Standard for publication following my two blog posts about migrants in Wisbech, which can be viewed here, and here.

I really enjoyed her accompanying letter which said: “I’m really grateful to you for what you have done for the town … bless your sweet cotton socks.” She also kindly sent me a link to check out Home Office crime statistics.

She questions the true figure of Wisbech’s migrant population and seeks more answers on this issue. This is what she wrote:

Political blogger Ellee Seymour is almost right, but not quite. Commenting on the recent Daily Mail article about Wisbech, she says that ‘a third of Wisbech’s 20,000 population is now said to be Eastern European’.  Statistics are funny things, and Ms Seymour’s mistake, although a common enough one, is too important to be overlooked.

Until a decade ago the population of Wisbech was indeed 20,000. But if, as seems evident today, one in three of the town’s inhabitants are now from Eastern Europe, it means that these incomers have in fact increased the population by 50 per cent to a current total of around 30,000. By anybody’s reckoning this is a huge population explosion, and goes some way to explain why local people have a distressing sense that they are being slowly but surely elbowed out of the picture by this rapid and continuous influx of foreign speaking settlers.

When their numbers are relatively few, immigrants will usually make an effort to integrate socially with the host community. But the new immigrants to the Fens are legion, and therefore feel little need, or desire, to integrate at all. They are employed en bloc in the fields and factories and they lodge together in shared rooms or house, each different East European nationality sticking closely with it own. They have established their own shops, selling their own kind of food, in their own language. Some even run their own exclusive pubs in the town.

Others have been further dis-integrated from the local populace by being granted their own separate church services, again in their own language. We have also seen how an increasing number of them have felt sufficiently well established to start having children, or have brought other dependent family members, even grandparents, over here to live with them. So the population keeps on growing, and with no apparent upper limit in sight. Everything is guesswork, nothing is known for certain.

Will Fenland councillors please wake up and start giving their electorate some simple facts, however uncomfortable. For example, have medical and NHS dental services in Wisbech been substantially increased in recent years to cope with the situation? How many foreign nationals are living in subsidised council accommodation in the Fens? How many migrants’ children are now attending local primary and secondary schools? How many local immigrants are currently unemployed and receiving benefits or pensions? And what is the jobless total among young Wisbechians? In the last three years, what proportion of local crime has been committed by foreign nationals?  And finally, why is Fenland Licensing Panel continuing, against all police advice and public protest, to grant drinks licenses to yet more and more outlets in Wisbech when the town is already awash with hard liquor and its damaging consequences?

*Victoria is quite right when she says that the population figure for Wisbech which I quoted is a decade old; they are the figures used on the Wisbech Wikipedia page and were quoted by the Daily Mail in their report too.  We should have updated figures when the latest population data from the 2011 census is published this summer.  And this will only be accurate if it was completed by our new migrant population too. It might still be a guessing game.