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, 1 reply)

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)