Dialogue: London's lure not money

PAUL GREGORY* says that life for most expatriates in London delivers few of the benefits supposedly enjoyed by our voluntary young exiles.

Apparently, I'm an economic refugee. I came to London four years ago because I was driven from New Zealand by a repressive regime. And I'm still here because of institutionalised fiscal hardship. You have been drained of my brain, and it's the fault of the Government - or all governments.

But aren't you better off without me? According to the scenario the knights of the Business Roundtable would have you accept, this grey matter of mine you are so sorely missing solved my enforced economic straits by having me shift to a country - and a city - where tax and the cost of living are higher than in New Zealand; where a minimum wage has only just been introduced; and where they would only let me in if I first officially agreed to support myself without any recourse to the state. Brilliant. Good riddance to my brain.

The supposed cause for the "brain-drain" outlined by the Business Roundtable is not only silly but mildly insulting. No New Zealander comes to London to escape. Short of political asylum-seekers, no one else does, either. It is probably the poorest choice for a bolt-hole of any city in the world. There are better and closer places for New Zealanders to fulfil that particular emigrational prompt - just ask Australia.

Tax here is 24p in the pound, and that's if you can remember - or be bothered - to undergo the glacial process of registering for national insurance. It's 25p otherwise. You can expect, in London - and that's where most of us go, 150,000 at last count - to pay £1500 to £2000 ($4500 to $6000) up front for setting up anything more than the most abject hovel to live in, before you ever set foot in it. Beer averages £2.50 a pint. Britain's GST - value-added tax - runs at 17.5 per cent. The cheapest tube fare is £1.50 one-way.

My first job here, in 1996, was picking up rubbish. There followed work behind a bar, a disastrous turn silver-service waiting, several months of typing and running with pieces of paper in a merchant bank, and then a penniless Hell when a new magazine that was to have been my long-awaited professional salvation spluttered and died before a single copy had hit the shelves.

Okay, so now I write for a glossy international motoring magazine and get paid to drive Ferraris. But it was a long time coming, and convincing proof that if I'd come here to elude economic misery, it was the wrong place.

As a refuge, London stinks. It is the worst place to pay dues, particularly - as it was for me and so many like me - when it's the second time around. Even now, I'm paid (forget the exchange rate; it's the cost of living that's the basis for comparison) less than I got as a journalist in New Zealand in 1996.

So it was a bad route out of the frying pan for us economic fugitives as the Business Roundtable asserts we are.

Except, of course, we're not. Even if London ran with milk and honey, we wouldn't be. We've come to, not run away from, something. We're here because of wanderlust, to prove ourselves, to answer some professional or personal ambition. Because we're just curious, or visiting. It's not disillusionment, or bitterness, or disaffection; the two-finger after-burner did not propel us this way. There is little other than a deep, pervasive affection for New Zealand among expatriates.

Moreover, when I came back for a holiday earlier this year, economy-sourced misery was conspicuous by its absence, as were queues of the ragged destitute fleeing poverty and jamming the airports. I saw ambitious, talented friends doing important and interesting jobs, living in beautiful houses, driving expensive cars and eating, often, in crowded, costly restaurants.

They felt confident enough in their own futures to plan, and have, marriages and children. They had done, and are doing, better than me. And all of them could have come to London. Some did come, and went back without a cowed tail among them.

But, yes, there is money and professional value to be found in Britain - in some cases a lot. Chasing it isn't really a drain on New Zealand though, is it?

Most of the young New Zealanders who come here to work - they lose eligibility at 28 - are in the early stages of a career, or have yet to decide on one. If there is a loss, it's more of potential, of skills and talents, than of established professional, commercial and intellectual resources.

And, as pointed out by Richard Gillies in a Dialogue article, because the vast majority of us come back, having increased the value of our brains with some international experience, the sum total of the exercise is surely a net gain for New Zealand. The wait isn't even that long.

And that's the crucial point which will soon make the whole issue academic. Under British immigration law, two years is the most that the vast majority of us get, and full-time work is forbidden. The only reason that I and other people can stay longer and have full-time jobs is that our parents or grandparents were born in Britain, and before 1980 when the rules got significantly tighter.

Before long there will be no one left who is the right sort of parent or grandparent, just because they were born in New Zealand, or in Britain at the wrong time.

Right now, if you were born in Britain before 1980, or have an English passport through British-born parents from before 1980, your children and grandchildren have the option of "draining" off there to work full-time. But under present law - and the British Home Office has no tradition of relaxing its requirements - they are the last generations of New Zealanders who will have that choice.

Because of that, the 150,000-strong Kiwi population in London, while still growing, is nearing its plateau and will start shrinking.

A large portion of them, the ones that won't be coming back, arrived in London quite some time ago, when British immigration laws were laxer and when New Zealand was in far finer economic fettle (which makes it clear that how well or poorly New Zealand is doing has little effect on its young deciding whether to leave).

So, while New Zealand's youth always has headed and always will head this way, things will change. In just two generations there will be less motivation for them to leave for Britain because they'll be prevented from properly pursuing a career. And those who do go won't be able to stay as long, will be back sooner, and in greater numbers. A brain flood. Something else for the Business Roundtable to complain about.

* Paul Gregory is a former Herald reporter.