i have always thought
it is not immigration that is the problem, but rather it's the free handouts. i don't care if you have just arrived from any country in the world or if your ancestors have lived here since pre-1066, if you are healthy and under 60, get a fucking job and contribute something!

if we didn't give everything away for free, we wouldn't be so attractive to the dregs that do wash up here from every other country in the world, whilst those who are hard working and looking for a different or better life would still come and contribute. meanwhile the little shites who run around in gangs knifing each other for straying onto their turf - hello, your turf? you own NOTHING because you don't earn anything, therefore you can't buy anything, never mind real estate -and holding their hands out to the government once a week for free cash would actually have to do something for it.

my friend was made redundant recently and was advised to sign on to keep up her NI contributions. she said it was crammed with people demanding "their" money. ffs. some of us get up at 6am every day and work 6, sometimes 7, days a week, from about 8am to 8pm at the earliest, and often well beyond midnight. and we pay about 3k a month in tax. why on earth should we do this just so that other people can scrounge free housing and free pocket money? argh!!! it's not "your" money, you are not entitled to free money, so why do we have a system that propagates this? if we all took that attitude, who would pay for it??

that being said, there are too many people in the country, it's a simple matter of mathematics not racism - it's a tiny island. you can't get a train or on a motorway or your child into school or into hospital or have a hosepipe in the summer or preserve greenbelt without it having hundreds of cheap new houses built on it because we are full. we should have a "one in, one out" policy for every country, just like nightclubs!
( rachelswipe with a fork, Mon 5 Apr 2010, 15:44, 3 replies)

You're correct, Miss Swipe.
That, of course, is the other issue. The fact that we're a small island with a dense population, and we do not have unlimited capacity.

Our roads are congested.
Our hospitals are full.
Our schools are full.

I remember when I was a child in the 1980s, I was in a primary school class of 25. That was considered the maximum at the time. 25 was a large class. Now these days I hear it's not uncommon for children to be in classes of 35 or more.

20 years ago, when you had a baby on the NHS they would keep you in hospital for a whole week taking care of you. Now, as I understand it, for your first child you'll be lucky if they keep you in for 2 nights - and any subsequent children you stay only one night.

I'm sure everyone has heard the tale about putting a frog in a pan of boiling water: it jumps out. But if you put it in cold water and heat it up slowly then it doesn't notice, and gets cooked where it sits. Actually I read this was not true - but it still serves to make a good point. This country is gradually being eroded away. There are fewer and fewer tax-paying contributors, proportionally - and more and more people who take and take. The change is gradual, but it is there.

Even for the "good" immigrants who come here to work, you need to understand that they're still allowed free healthcare and education for their children. It's not uncommon for a family with several children to come here - where one person is working and the rest are his/her dependants. They're perfectly legal, sure. And they're not bad people.. no way siree. I have nothing against these people as individuals. But if you account for the cost of healthcare and schooling, it is very common for this hypothetical family to actually be taking MORE from the public purse than the main wage earner pays in income tax. The result is a NET LOSS to the United Kingdom.

And none of the mainstream parties care about this - because of their "I'm alright Jack" attitude. The politicians live in their ivory towers with their duckhouses and moats, and because they can afford BUPA and private education, they don't give a crap on a personal level.

Young people today are faced with the highest house-price-to-earning ratio in history. It's impossible for a single person to get on the property ladder, if they're only earning an average wage. This is because of the simple laws of supply and demand: there are simply too many people in this country, and not enough housing. So what should we do? Concrete over all the green space in the UK to build housing? Some of the lefty brigade seem to think that we should, because they are under the illusion that we have unlimited space!
(EuroSong I love horse meat: best of all the animals, Tue 6 Apr 2010, 1:09, closed)

To correct you on just one of those points.
The NHS now doesn't encourage unecessary hospital stays. If you can go home you're sent home, it's for clinical reasons, you generally recover quicker at home than in a hospital it's got nothing to do with money/capacity.
(PsychoChomp, Tue 6 Apr 2010, 11:24, closed)

re: your friend
If she - and any of the other people she mixed with when she went to sign on - was made redundant from a job paying UK tax and NI, then the handouts she (and they) got in return for signing on *IS* "their money". That's one of the reasons "NI" is called National Insurance, ffs.
Why should you pay £3k a month in tax? Because tomorrow, or next month, or next year, you might be unemployed, sick, disabled, etc. and you might not be able to afford to eat unless someone else pays for your food, out of their taxes.
I've never understood the pride some people take in never having claimed any kind of benefits - it's like being proud because you've never been ill. Lucky you.
And we are not "full". While England is one of the most densely-populated countries in Europe, it is also one with the most thinly-populated areas (e.g. Devon and Cornwall, Herefordshire, Norfolk, Cumbria are all comparatively empty, and that's to say nothing about the huge empty spaces in Wales and Scotland). As a proportion of our total land area, Great Britain has one of the LOWEST percentages of built land in the EU.
Mostly because of sentimentalisation of the countryside as some kind of rural theme park rather than a working environment that ONLY looks the way it does because of farming and hunting. For example, the upland moors and mountainsides only have heather on them because the people that lived and worked there were booted off by landlords 100s of years ago to make room for grouse to be shot by them and their mates. Grouse eat heather shoots, so they planted heather there. Similarly, wool and meat form sheep made landowners more money than rent from smallholders (crofters), so they booted them off the land to make room for sheep.
There is no sensible reason why we still have this allergy to building on "greenfield land" other than that big landowners don't want to and sentimentalists don't like the idea of urban sprawl.
And if we had some sensible planning laws that stopped pretending that the only way to develop is to continue to act as if only London and the South East can be built on, and spread it out over the whole country, there's more than enough room for 80 or even 100 million people to live in the UK.
If that's what we need; and I'm not saying it is - all I am saying is that "we're full" is a bulshit reason to oppose immigration.
Competition for council housing (asylum seekers jumping queues, etc.) is caused by there not being enough council housing, not by there being too many immigrants. We've built next to bugger all new public housing since the early 1980s, but right-to-buy means the available stock has inexorably drifted down in quantity and quality. Forcing everyone into the private rented sector, or (more likely) driving up prices for house purchases.
And the "need" for immigration is caused as much by our "need" to keep large numbers of working people in their 20s, 30s and 40s so people can continue to retire in their early to mid 60s - their pensions are paid for by current workers, and will continue to be so in the light of the collapse of final salary pensions, underperformance of stock-linked pensions etc. If we just bit the bullet and admitted that the retirement age needs to go up to (at least) 70 (more like 75), we'd be doing more to fix the country's problems than by closing the doors to new immigration. When old age pensions were first introduced, the pensionable age was slightly higher than life expectancies were i.e. you'd be lucky if you lived long enough to claim it - ensuring that there were far more people working to pay for them out of taxation/NI than would ever claim them. But for nearly 50 years, the retirement ages didn't change at all while life expectancies shot up (to over 80 for women and late 70s for men, and those are life expectancies at birth, not for people already in work, which are always rather higher - infant mortality rates, and all that).
So now we have more pensioners than we do under 16s. Not because of any weird demographics, just because we didn't demand that retirement ages kept pace with life expectancy. In this regard, our expectations of wanting to retire while we're still active (it's legally possible to retire at 50, FFS) mean we are all aiming to be scroungers. Even if we have private pensions, the stock market (or other investment) growth we rely on to be able to retire in comfort depends on the work of other people, not just ourselves, so it's a kind of scrounging in a way.
So don't let's all pretend that scrounging is something we don't all intend to do, that the country is "full" for any reason other than the way we want it to look, or that benefits are only claimed by people who haven't earned them just because it absolves us of responsibility for the relative mess our country is in (and it isn't fucking "broken", just a bit bent out of shape, mostly through the unintended consequences of things we told successive governments that we wanted).
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Tue 6 Apr 2010, 13:01, closed)

I disagree with you
But I thank you for making some intelligent and reasonable points.

In stark contrast to a couple of morons within this thread...
(EuroSong I love horse meat: best of all the animals, Tue 6 Apr 2010, 19:24, closed)

Oh, 'Swipe...
... this post is so nose-deep in crap, it's difficult to know where to start. I'll try to keep it short.

1. It's not possible just to get a job from out of nowhere.
2. The idea that we give free stuff to the "dregs" of the world is false. Most immigrants get just about nothing by way of benefits. There was a survey recently of recently arrived illegals. Most had no idea that they were coming to Britain, and most of those who did know that they were coming to Britain had no idea that there would be any state benefits.

You call them immigrants; I call them entrepreneurs.

3. You pay tax and NI as a contribution partly to pay for the good things that living here provides, and partly out of minimal decency. Face it, if you're paying £3k a month in tax, you aren't exactly hard done by. Grow up.

4. By what standard are there too many? Only about 10% of the UK is built on, and even that land is ineffiently used. Moreover, the "too many" of whom you speak probably refers to the elderly and those who simply haven't died yet. The economy needs young immigrants to pay for them, given that the reproduction rate in the UK is currently about 1.6 children per family. (Replacement rate is 2.1.)

On the topic of overcrowding, though: presumably, if you're anti-immigtation, you're also pro-cancer, since cancer kills more people than migrate here. So to cure cancer would push up the population further. I take it you're pro-cancer, then?

Sorry, 'Swipe: we both know you're much smarter than this.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Tue 6 Apr 2010, 14:54, closed)

I'm going to add a bit of "this"
here.

I'm actually genuinely surprised and slightly depressed that the very original poster has got some agreement and support here. I really, genuinely thought this place was better than that. Oh well. Perhaps society really is fucked into a cocked hat, then. Let's burn this fucking world.
( the mighty badger Aphrodite, on a bar stool, by your side, Tue 6 Apr 2010, 17:20, closed)

Yes. This. In spades. And buckets.

( Wicca'd Witch needs ideas for a new sig on..., Tue 6 Apr 2010, 17:41, closed)

hmmm
1 yes it is. you can clean graffiti off trains and walls, you can visit lonely old people in homes or hospitals or shop/cook/clean for them, you can empty bins in the park, you can clean the leaves off the train lines, you can recycle, you can do something. then you have earned your money, the environment is a nicer place, and everyone wins!

2 with respect, i think it is a bit naive to say that most people who have just arrived illegally in britain had no idea this was where they were coming and it was just pure good luck that they didn't end up somewhere less hospitable. for example, look at the people in calais who risk their lives to cling under trains etc to get here. and every single one of them says "britain is where i am going". that being said, so what, i couldn't care less where someone comes from so long as they want to work when they get here!

3 well, i quite literally work my arse off for it. and i don't resent paying the tax; i am left with an extremely comfortable amount that no-one could complain about (although i will NOT be telling my boss that on pay review!!). but it does anger me that i feel it gets pissed away. i have always thought you should be able to nominate where your taxes go. in which case, my tax contributions would go on the NHS, education and transport in that order, before anywhere else. as it is, NHS staff who do an amazing job often get paid a pittance compared to the job that they do, ditto teachers... i am not saying i shouldn't have to pay that much in tax, i am saying i would like it to be used in paying higher wages to nurses, teachers etc, not be given to some little scrote to spend on beer and fags (or some braindead out of touch MP to feed his ducks, come to that!).

4 there are too many people when the services can't cope with them. schools, hospitals, roads, trains - all full. i like the fact that so much of this country is pretty and green. i don't want to see it carpeted with identikit housing estates. maybe the better answer is to spend the money on regenerating dying towns, but who is realistically going to want to move there until there is a reason to do so? my family are all from various parts of yorkshire where the town centres are dying off because the industry has gone. not one of their youngsters wants to stay, they all have their eyes on manchester or london or birmingham.

cancer? come on, you can do better than this hyperbolic argument!
( rachelswipe with a fork, Wed 7 Apr 2010, 9:57, closed)

Your fourth point is a bit scary
Other people should tolerate shit lives and conditions so you can see fields and squirrels? Careful there.

What if you have kids? Why do they have more right to take a little bit of that green field than someone who emigrates here? Or if the country is "full" by your reasoning, should they have to fuck off somewhere else the minute they turn 18?
( the mighty badger Aphrodite, on a bar stool, by your side, Wed 7 Apr 2010, 10:33, closed)

don't worry, i will never be inflicting my genes
on society!

i just meant that it seems pointless to build new things when there is so much that is already built that could be regenerated.
( rachelswipe with a fork, Wed 7 Apr 2010, 10:52, closed)

that I wholeheartedly agree with.
But it's not really an immigration issue. IMO.
( the mighty badger Aphrodite, on a bar stool, by your side, Wed 7 Apr 2010, 10:57, closed)