Read a very interesting news article today on Reuters news Britain lures talent: sci-tech entrepreneurs move in

LONDON (Reuters) – It took only a few weeks of research for Romanian entrepreneur Emi Gal to decide where to base his digital media firm, and his choice confounds a fairly enduring set of stereotypes about Britain’s global appeal.

As my regular readers know I own a number of websites including one on the 2010 UK General Election where supporters of a fringe right-wing political party, The British National Party (BNP) are consistently arguing ALL immigration is bad for Britain (they want to close our borders and pay legal immigrants to leave!).

I know the hard core BNP supporters (and the BNP politicians for that matter) are extremists (the BNP have neo-Nazi/fascist/racist roots) and are NOT representative of Britain, but the issues the BNP focus on are real.

British people are concerned at the level of economic immigration into Britain, especially when economic migrants that enter Britain lack skills: I think the majority of British people see the value of economic migrants that brings skills to our economy that we are lacking, but do not understand why we need foreign workers for untrained jobs. Many British people over look how reliant we are on foreign investment, the world is a heck of a lot smaller than it used to be with international businesses owning many British businesses (looks like Kraft will be buying Cadbury for example) with money flowing freely around the globe.

When I read the “Britain lures talent” article it was a bit of a pleasant surprise to read such a positive article about economic immigration and foreign investment into Britain after all the negativity from BNP supporters on my politics site.

I realise the article doesn’t mention immigration per se, but the Romanian entrepreneur mentioned in the article is an economic migrant and good for Britain. His digital media firm will bring investment into Britain and create jobs for British people (all good for our economy).

This sort of thing is great news for Britain’s economy:

International experts agree there has been genuine progress in the country which a few decades ago was fast fading as a magnet for the science, health and technology brains and entrepreneurship that also drive the knowledge economy.

And

According to the Legatum Institute, an investment-led think tank which ranks 104 nations on a Prosperity Index of a variety of business and social measures, Britain is second only to the United States for entrepreneurship and innovation — ahead of Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Ranked second out of 104 countries regarding entrepreneurship and innovation, I thought we were doing quite badly, just goes to show how the British media tend to concentrate on the negative.

The report referred to is at http://www.prosperity.com/rankings.aspx Britain is ranked number 12 out of the 104 countries overall, which is pretty good IMO.

After reading the article and the ranking report I feel more positive about Britain’s future economic prospects and can only hope the negative image groups like the BNP send to potential foreign investors and skilled economic migrants wanting to invest/settle in Britain doesn’t cause too much damage.

I always like to see good news, there’s never enough of it on the news. My wife is that fed up of it she recently took another one of my sites (had to move the few articles I had on it) to post positive things on called Happy People Good Karma Blog, (bit of a mouthful, testing some SERPs before settling on a permanent name) that’s four domains she’s ‘acquired’ now :-)

David