[h=1]Mother who dared to tell the truth about immigration on the BBC: Granddaughter of a Polish airman explains why she HAD to speak up and reveal how her High Street has become a 'foreign country'[/h]
By Barbara Davies
PUBLISHED:22:52 GMT, 20 January 2013| UPDATED:08:15 GMT, 21 January 2013
Voice of the people: Rachel Bull spoke out on the BBC's Question Time
When she arrived at Lincoln Drill Hall for BBC1’s Question Time last Thursday, Rachel Bull took a seat towards the back of the audience, never imagining that she would speak during the live television debate.
At first, 35-year-old Mrs Bull listened quietly to the panellists discussing issues such as the future of the High Street and the scandal of supermarket burgers contaminated with horse meat.
But when the topic shifted to immigration in her family’s home town, Boston in Lincolnshire, she found she could remain silent no longer.
After hearing Cambridge University professor Mary Beard airily dismissing claims that migrant workers were overwhelming the market town, office manager Mrs Bull almost leapt from her seat, waving her hand frantically in the air until she caught the attention of presenter David Dimbleby.
‘Boston is at breaking point. All the locals can’t cope any more,’ she said, her voice trembling with emotion and outrage. ‘You go down to Boston High Street and it’s just like you’re in a foreign country. It’s got to stop. The services are at breaking point.’
When she finally finished speaking, there was a moment’s silence and then rapturous applause.
In less than a minute, this ordinary working mother had given a snapshot picture of a town at the end of its tether and voiced the fears of huge swathes of the population.
After the show had finished, audience members were still feting Mrs Bull like a heroine, shaking her hand and congratulating her for daring to speak out about the lasting impact of mass immigration.
Since then, Mrs Bull, who was born and brought up in Lincolnshire and lives with her marine engineer husband Steven and their ten-year-old son Luke, has had time to reflect on her impromptu television appearance.
While she is rather overwhelmed by the attention her impassioned outpouring has attracted, she has no regrets about speaking ‘from the heart’. ‘It was an opportunity I couldn’t let pass,’ says Mrs Bull, who left school at 16 and trained as a secretary.
[h=4]More...[/h]
‘I couldn’t just sit there and say nothing while Mary Beard said that she couldn’t see there were any problems in Boston. I may not be as clever as her or have been to university, but this is my family’s home town and I wanted to say how it really is for the real people that live here.
‘I don’t blame the migrants. It’s not their fault. They are only doing what the law allows them to do, which is come over here and work. I blame the Government for not realising the impact it’s having on ordinary people — or managing it.’
'I couldn't just sit there while she said there were no problems'
Rachel Bull
There is little doubt that Boston, where her family’s retirement-home business has been running since the early Sixties, has changed almost beyond recognition in recent years.
Over the past decade the population has increased by 15 per cent, swollen by an influx of mainly Eastern Europeans who come looking for work picking cauliflowers, leeks, sprouts and beetroot in Lincolnshire’s vast fields.
Officially there are 61,000 people living in this market town in the midst of the Fens, which in medieval times was at the heart of the English wool trade, although with so much immigration, it is hard to keep count. The borough council believes the true figure is more like 70,000.
While the gargantuan 15th-century tower of St Botolph’s Church still dominates the skyline, the town’s main shopping thoroughfare, West Street, has been nicknamed ‘East Street’ by locals because of the number of Baltic stores that have suddenly appeared there.
Russian and Lithuanian cafes, Polish delicatessens and Eastern European hairdressers jostling for space alongside the town’s long-standing department store, Oldrids, are a stark reminder of the tensions that exist.
Scroll down for video
Response: Mrs Bull couldn't keep quiet after hearing Mary Beard deny that there were any problems
Anyone suggesting that Mrs Bull was over-reacting when she spoke of the town being at breaking point need only glance through the Borough Council’s tactfully named report Social Impact Of Population Change On Boston, which was published last October.
The report, which followed a four-month inquiry, acknowledged the pressure placed on Boston’s education and health services and looked into concerns such as street drinking and urination in public as well as unemployment among local people.
A month later, hundreds of Bostonians took to the street to protest about the effects of mass immigration, carrying placards with slogans such as ‘Get back our country’, and ‘Free us from the shackles of Europe’.
‘No one can blame them for wanting to come here for a better life,’ says Mrs Bull. ‘But you can’t blame the locals who are seeing their town at breaking point. The politicians in London and the academics are living in another world. They have no idea of what effect their policies are having.’
What makes her despair so poignant — and her views worth listening to — is that Mrs Bull herself is partly descended from immigrants whose experiences of life in Britain couldn’t be more different to those of their modern counterparts.
'Politicians and academics live in another world'
Rachel Bull
While one set of grandparents were born in Boston, her paternal grandfather was a Polish airman who served in the RAF during World War II and settled in Lincolnshire with his wife, another Pole, who was an RAF chauffeur and mechanic.
Mrs Bull never got to meet Kazimierz — he died from cancer in 1972 aged just 52 — but she is unmistakeably proud of the man who escaped from Soviet-controlled Russia to Palestine where he joined the Polish Air Force and became a flight sergeant in one of the RAF’s Polish squadrons.
As an air gunner, tucked away in the rear turret of a Lancaster bomber on raids across Germany and France from bases in Lincolnshire, his was one of the most dangerous jobs of World War II.
He took part in No. 300 Polish Bomber Squadron’s final and most daring raid in the spring of 1945 when they launched a devastating attack on Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden.
After the war, Kazimierz worked on the railways and at a foundry while his wife, Halina, who had also made her way to Palestine and volunteered for the British war effort, worked nightshifts in a chicken and turkey processing factory.
‘They saved up and bought a little terraced house and had my father and his younger brother,’ says Mrs Bull. ‘They were incredibly hard-working. My grandmother also worked in the laundry at the local hospital and for British Rail, cleaning the carriages three times a day.
Ruth Bull's late Polish grandfather Kazimierz D and grandmother Helena D who both served in World War II
‘There wasn’t the segregation then that there is now. They learnt to speak English and mixed with English people, not just with Poles. They completely integrated. Their experience of immigration was very different to those of many of the immigrants I see in Boston today.’
And Mrs Bull has seen, close up, the realities of the EU’s ‘Freedom of Movement’ legislation which opened the floodgates for thousands of Poles and other Eastern Europeans in 2004. Working alongside her father, mother and brother, she describes how on several occasions the family has come face-to-face with desperate immigrant workers sleeping rough on their land with nowhere else to go.
‘Many of them come to England thinking it’s a land of opportunity,’ she says, ‘but they find the reality is very different.
‘Some of them have nowhere to live and understandably, they find anywhere they can to sleep.
‘Even though they were trespassing we didn’t mind the odd one or two camping on our land — some of them cleaned up after themselves — but there were some that left beer cans, vodka bottles, human faeces, damp sleeping bags.
‘We were under pressure from Environmental Health because of the mess, but the situation was very difficult.
‘My dad and brother used to patrol the land, but it’s frightening. They’ve been threatened with the knives these men use for cutting cabbages. We asked the police to move them on, but they said that because it was private land it was a civil matter.
‘My dad would go to speak to them, but they’d be out during the day, so we’d leave notes, asking them to move. My dad even gave one family some money to go. They were a married couple and you could see they were distressed. They said they’d been dropped in Boston, but there was no work and they had no money, no passport.
‘We gave them money to get some food and told them to go to the Council to see if there was anything they could do to help. It makes my heart bleed to see these people coming here with false hope. They come over because they want a better life. Some are lucky and they get jobs. Some can’t, or they can’t find accommodation.
'Many immigrants turn to drink out of desperation'
Rachel Bull
‘There are a lot of them crammed into bunk beds in tiny terraced houses. Locals call it bed-hopping. One worker will use the bed during the day and then go to work a night shift — and another will use it at night after doing a day shift. You see people sleeping in garages and cars as well.’
To resolve her family’s problems, Mrs Bull eventually went to see her local MP, Conservative Mark Simmonds, who wrote to the police and local Environmental Health Services explaining her plight.
‘After that they were a bit more supportive,’ she says. ‘They advised us to put up signs in different languages and clear the land and put fencing around to stop them coming in.’
More recently, the family has had to enclose an open porch area by their office after they discovered that migrant workers were also sleeping rough there. ‘They’re all coming over with a dream and unfortunately not everyone has got a piece of that dream,’ she says.
One consequence of these broken dreams is an explosion in alcohol-related problems in the town.
Boston’s streets are littered with empty bottles of vodka and discarded tins with Eastern European writing. Signs in several languages have been erected as a reminder that street drinking is illegal. There are even signs warning that urinating in public is a criminal offence.
‘Many turn to drink out of desperation,’ says Mrs Bull. She recalls the explosion that ripped through an illegal bootleg vodka distillery being run from a lock-up unit near Boston railway station in July 2011, killing five Eastern European workers and leaving a sixth with serious burns.
Inevitably, with such a dramatic increase in the town’s population, local services are also under intense pressure. Mrs Bull tells how her local doctor’s surgery has fitted a touch-screen check-in system for those unable to speak English.
‘There are lots of different flags on the screen and they touch their country’s flag and it allows them to check-in in their own language.’
'At breaking point': Mrs Bull said facilities in her Lincolnshire hometown are overstretched because of the influx of workers from overseas
She also has a close relative who is a midwife at the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston. ‘They are under so much pressure because of the population boom,’ she says. ‘On top of that, they have to find translators to assist during the birth and afterwards
when they need advice on accessing child services.’
She fears that the situation will get dramatically worse when Romanians and Bulgarians are granted the same freedom of movement rights as other EU members on December 31, 2013.
The campaign group MigrationWatchUK has predicted that as a result, 250,000 extra migrants will arrive in the UK over a five-year period — akin to the population of Newcastle-on-Tyne.
‘We are just a little town and can’t cope with these influxes,’ says Mrs Bull. ‘Unemployment is increasing. Jessops has just closed. The staff will be looking for work at the same time all these new workers coming in. It’s going to get worse.’
There are, of course, no magic solutions to this problem. Nor does Mrs Bull claim to have the answers.
‘What I want is for the policymakers to come to Boston and speak to us,’ she says. ‘Don’t speak to the council, speak to the ordinary people, to the locals and to the migrant workers. Come and see Boston for yourselves.’
A reluctant warrior she may be, but there is little doubt her Polish grandfather Kazimierz would be proud to see her fighting to preserve the values that he so firmly embraced seven decades ago.
‘I’m just an ordinary woman,’ she says.
But that is exactly why her plea on Question Time came like a cry from the dark, echoing the feelings of many ordinary Britons, struggling to cope with the consequences of mass immigration.
And why politicians and academics in their ivory towers like Professor Mary Beard should be listening to her.
By Barbara Davies
PUBLISHED:22:52 GMT, 20 January 2013| UPDATED:08:15 GMT, 21 January 2013
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When she arrived at Lincoln Drill Hall for BBC1’s Question Time last Thursday, Rachel Bull took a seat towards the back of the audience, never imagining that she would speak during the live television debate.
At first, 35-year-old Mrs Bull listened quietly to the panellists discussing issues such as the future of the High Street and the scandal of supermarket burgers contaminated with horse meat.
But when the topic shifted to immigration in her family’s home town, Boston in Lincolnshire, she found she could remain silent no longer.
After hearing Cambridge University professor Mary Beard airily dismissing claims that migrant workers were overwhelming the market town, office manager Mrs Bull almost leapt from her seat, waving her hand frantically in the air until she caught the attention of presenter David Dimbleby.
‘Boston is at breaking point. All the locals can’t cope any more,’ she said, her voice trembling with emotion and outrage. ‘You go down to Boston High Street and it’s just like you’re in a foreign country. It’s got to stop. The services are at breaking point.’
When she finally finished speaking, there was a moment’s silence and then rapturous applause.
In less than a minute, this ordinary working mother had given a snapshot picture of a town at the end of its tether and voiced the fears of huge swathes of the population.
After the show had finished, audience members were still feting Mrs Bull like a heroine, shaking her hand and congratulating her for daring to speak out about the lasting impact of mass immigration.
Since then, Mrs Bull, who was born and brought up in Lincolnshire and lives with her marine engineer husband Steven and their ten-year-old son Luke, has had time to reflect on her impromptu television appearance.
While she is rather overwhelmed by the attention her impassioned outpouring has attracted, she has no regrets about speaking ‘from the heart’. ‘It was an opportunity I couldn’t let pass,’ says Mrs Bull, who left school at 16 and trained as a secretary.
[h=4]More...[/h]
- Our town's like a foreign country: Locals can't cope with all the immigrants, says mother after TV clash with academic
- Oliver Letwin is rapped over 'gaffe' on the impact of Romanians and Bulgarians coming to Britain
- Up to 70,000 Romanian and Bulgarian migrants a year ‘will come to Britain’ when controls on EU migrants expire
‘I couldn’t just sit there and say nothing while Mary Beard said that she couldn’t see there were any problems in Boston. I may not be as clever as her or have been to university, but this is my family’s home town and I wanted to say how it really is for the real people that live here.
‘I don’t blame the migrants. It’s not their fault. They are only doing what the law allows them to do, which is come over here and work. I blame the Government for not realising the impact it’s having on ordinary people — or managing it.’
'I couldn't just sit there while she said there were no problems'
Rachel Bull
There is little doubt that Boston, where her family’s retirement-home business has been running since the early Sixties, has changed almost beyond recognition in recent years.
Over the past decade the population has increased by 15 per cent, swollen by an influx of mainly Eastern Europeans who come looking for work picking cauliflowers, leeks, sprouts and beetroot in Lincolnshire’s vast fields.
Officially there are 61,000 people living in this market town in the midst of the Fens, which in medieval times was at the heart of the English wool trade, although with so much immigration, it is hard to keep count. The borough council believes the true figure is more like 70,000.
While the gargantuan 15th-century tower of St Botolph’s Church still dominates the skyline, the town’s main shopping thoroughfare, West Street, has been nicknamed ‘East Street’ by locals because of the number of Baltic stores that have suddenly appeared there.
Russian and Lithuanian cafes, Polish delicatessens and Eastern European hairdressers jostling for space alongside the town’s long-standing department store, Oldrids, are a stark reminder of the tensions that exist.
Scroll down for video
Response: Mrs Bull couldn't keep quiet after hearing Mary Beard deny that there were any problems
Anyone suggesting that Mrs Bull was over-reacting when she spoke of the town being at breaking point need only glance through the Borough Council’s tactfully named report Social Impact Of Population Change On Boston, which was published last October.
The report, which followed a four-month inquiry, acknowledged the pressure placed on Boston’s education and health services and looked into concerns such as street drinking and urination in public as well as unemployment among local people.
A month later, hundreds of Bostonians took to the street to protest about the effects of mass immigration, carrying placards with slogans such as ‘Get back our country’, and ‘Free us from the shackles of Europe’.
‘No one can blame them for wanting to come here for a better life,’ says Mrs Bull. ‘But you can’t blame the locals who are seeing their town at breaking point. The politicians in London and the academics are living in another world. They have no idea of what effect their policies are having.’
What makes her despair so poignant — and her views worth listening to — is that Mrs Bull herself is partly descended from immigrants whose experiences of life in Britain couldn’t be more different to those of their modern counterparts.
'Politicians and academics live in another world'
Rachel Bull
While one set of grandparents were born in Boston, her paternal grandfather was a Polish airman who served in the RAF during World War II and settled in Lincolnshire with his wife, another Pole, who was an RAF chauffeur and mechanic.
Mrs Bull never got to meet Kazimierz — he died from cancer in 1972 aged just 52 — but she is unmistakeably proud of the man who escaped from Soviet-controlled Russia to Palestine where he joined the Polish Air Force and became a flight sergeant in one of the RAF’s Polish squadrons.
As an air gunner, tucked away in the rear turret of a Lancaster bomber on raids across Germany and France from bases in Lincolnshire, his was one of the most dangerous jobs of World War II.
He took part in No. 300 Polish Bomber Squadron’s final and most daring raid in the spring of 1945 when they launched a devastating attack on Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden.
After the war, Kazimierz worked on the railways and at a foundry while his wife, Halina, who had also made her way to Palestine and volunteered for the British war effort, worked nightshifts in a chicken and turkey processing factory.
‘They saved up and bought a little terraced house and had my father and his younger brother,’ says Mrs Bull. ‘They were incredibly hard-working. My grandmother also worked in the laundry at the local hospital and for British Rail, cleaning the carriages three times a day.
Ruth Bull's late Polish grandfather Kazimierz D and grandmother Helena D who both served in World War II
‘There wasn’t the segregation then that there is now. They learnt to speak English and mixed with English people, not just with Poles. They completely integrated. Their experience of immigration was very different to those of many of the immigrants I see in Boston today.’
And Mrs Bull has seen, close up, the realities of the EU’s ‘Freedom of Movement’ legislation which opened the floodgates for thousands of Poles and other Eastern Europeans in 2004. Working alongside her father, mother and brother, she describes how on several occasions the family has come face-to-face with desperate immigrant workers sleeping rough on their land with nowhere else to go.
‘Many of them come to England thinking it’s a land of opportunity,’ she says, ‘but they find the reality is very different.
‘Some of them have nowhere to live and understandably, they find anywhere they can to sleep.
‘Even though they were trespassing we didn’t mind the odd one or two camping on our land — some of them cleaned up after themselves — but there were some that left beer cans, vodka bottles, human faeces, damp sleeping bags.
‘We were under pressure from Environmental Health because of the mess, but the situation was very difficult.
‘My dad and brother used to patrol the land, but it’s frightening. They’ve been threatened with the knives these men use for cutting cabbages. We asked the police to move them on, but they said that because it was private land it was a civil matter.
‘My dad would go to speak to them, but they’d be out during the day, so we’d leave notes, asking them to move. My dad even gave one family some money to go. They were a married couple and you could see they were distressed. They said they’d been dropped in Boston, but there was no work and they had no money, no passport.
‘We gave them money to get some food and told them to go to the Council to see if there was anything they could do to help. It makes my heart bleed to see these people coming here with false hope. They come over because they want a better life. Some are lucky and they get jobs. Some can’t, or they can’t find accommodation.
'Many immigrants turn to drink out of desperation'
Rachel Bull
‘There are a lot of them crammed into bunk beds in tiny terraced houses. Locals call it bed-hopping. One worker will use the bed during the day and then go to work a night shift — and another will use it at night after doing a day shift. You see people sleeping in garages and cars as well.’
To resolve her family’s problems, Mrs Bull eventually went to see her local MP, Conservative Mark Simmonds, who wrote to the police and local Environmental Health Services explaining her plight.
‘After that they were a bit more supportive,’ she says. ‘They advised us to put up signs in different languages and clear the land and put fencing around to stop them coming in.’
More recently, the family has had to enclose an open porch area by their office after they discovered that migrant workers were also sleeping rough there. ‘They’re all coming over with a dream and unfortunately not everyone has got a piece of that dream,’ she says.
One consequence of these broken dreams is an explosion in alcohol-related problems in the town.
Boston’s streets are littered with empty bottles of vodka and discarded tins with Eastern European writing. Signs in several languages have been erected as a reminder that street drinking is illegal. There are even signs warning that urinating in public is a criminal offence.
‘Many turn to drink out of desperation,’ says Mrs Bull. She recalls the explosion that ripped through an illegal bootleg vodka distillery being run from a lock-up unit near Boston railway station in July 2011, killing five Eastern European workers and leaving a sixth with serious burns.
Inevitably, with such a dramatic increase in the town’s population, local services are also under intense pressure. Mrs Bull tells how her local doctor’s surgery has fitted a touch-screen check-in system for those unable to speak English.
‘There are lots of different flags on the screen and they touch their country’s flag and it allows them to check-in in their own language.’
She also has a close relative who is a midwife at the Pilgrim Hospital in Boston. ‘They are under so much pressure because of the population boom,’ she says. ‘On top of that, they have to find translators to assist during the birth and afterwards
when they need advice on accessing child services.’
She fears that the situation will get dramatically worse when Romanians and Bulgarians are granted the same freedom of movement rights as other EU members on December 31, 2013.
The campaign group MigrationWatchUK has predicted that as a result, 250,000 extra migrants will arrive in the UK over a five-year period — akin to the population of Newcastle-on-Tyne.
‘We are just a little town and can’t cope with these influxes,’ says Mrs Bull. ‘Unemployment is increasing. Jessops has just closed. The staff will be looking for work at the same time all these new workers coming in. It’s going to get worse.’
There are, of course, no magic solutions to this problem. Nor does Mrs Bull claim to have the answers.
‘What I want is for the policymakers to come to Boston and speak to us,’ she says. ‘Don’t speak to the council, speak to the ordinary people, to the locals and to the migrant workers. Come and see Boston for yourselves.’
A reluctant warrior she may be, but there is little doubt her Polish grandfather Kazimierz would be proud to see her fighting to preserve the values that he so firmly embraced seven decades ago.
‘I’m just an ordinary woman,’ she says.
But that is exactly why her plea on Question Time came like a cry from the dark, echoing the feelings of many ordinary Britons, struggling to cope with the consequences of mass immigration.
And why politicians and academics in their ivory towers like Professor Mary Beard should be listening to her.
wait kana tangkup chia lim kopi!
the more the merrier...haha
