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EU, Immigration and UKIP

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ralphchadkirk

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As mentioned earlier, IPSA have the power to implement the MPs rise in May 2015 without agreement from the MPs themselves, I would assume that the NHS independent pay body does not have the same powers otherwise those that really deserve an increase would have had it 'forced' upon them

Agreed, but I wonder why IPSA have the power to implement pay rises without MPs agreements?
 
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Tetchytyke

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You should be a little more honest about the 11% rise for MPs, it isn't due to come into force until May 2015 and has been recommended by an independent watchdog, IPSA, not by the MPs themselves, many of whom have made their unhappiness quite clear

IPSA does not need the agreement of parliament, regardless of who is in power, to implement the increase

The NHS pay rise was agreed by an independent body and Jeremy Hunt just chose to ignore it. Why spend money on healthcare staff when you can spend it on your duck house, eh?

IPSA "not needing the agreement of parliament" is being disingenuous, given that MPs set up IPSA and IPSA works in conjunction with MPs. Setting it up this way was to enable MPs to get their pay rise- because every single last one of them is a greedy little trougher- but being able to say it wasn't their fault.

Presumably IPSA shredding all the MPs expenses' claims, to prevent any more unfortunate fraud cases misunderstandings, was also in the interests of transparent government.
 

Oswyntail

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The NHS pay rise was agreed by an independent body and Jeremy Hunt just chose to ignore it
Those who didn't get 1% already had 3%, in some cases simply because they had been around for a year. It was a better overall settlement than most Government employees
Why spend money on healthcare staff when you can spend it on your duck house, eh?....
Money is tight - anyone noticed that? When you have a workforce of 1.4 million, the money for pay rises takes a fair chunk out of budgets. It might be worth remembering that there are dedicated people working in this area, who are working their parts off to try to get the right balance between pay and services. The previous administration swung the balance towards pay (especially to doctors), but this created an expectation.
 

DynamicSpirit

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This is another story that shows a little of what the UK's immigration system is really like: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/nov/03/trafficked-women-horrific-stories-came-to-uk-turned-into-prostitute.

Warning: It's quite harrowing reading. It basically tells the individual stories of some women who were trafficked into the UK and forced to work as prostitutes. This in itself is terrible - I struggle to understand how the traffickers can do what they do. But the other terrible thing is how the immigration service tends to treat these women if they do manage to escape and then go to the police. In all the cases in this article, the women were simply put into detention, generally without any counselling or other assistance, with the expectation that they'd be deported back to the places they were trafficked from.

My understanding is that this kind of treatment of people by the Immigration Enforcement department is not unusual - and I'd argue that it's the consequence of an immigration system that's basically designed to get as many people out of the country as possible (in order to satisfy the anti-immigrant sentiment of much of the population, and which has been expressed by a number of people in this thread) rather than to compassionately and fairly consider individual cases.

(As an aside, it seems from Wikipedia that the journalist who gathered these stories is the wife of the Conservative MP for Orpington).
 
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Butts

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This is another story that shows a little of what the UK's immigration system is really like: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/nov/03/trafficked-women-horrific-stories-came-to-uk-turned-into-prostitute.

Warning: It's quite harrowing reading. It basically tells the individual stories of some women who were trafficked into the UK and forced to work as prostitutes. This in itself is terrible - I struggle to understand how the traffickers can do what they do. But the other terrible thing is how the immigration service tends to treat these women if they do manage to escape and then go to the police. In all the cases in this article, the women were simply put into detention, generally without any counselling or other assistance, with the expectation that they'd be deported back to the places they were trafficked from.

My understanding is that this kind of treatment of people by the Immigration Enforcement department is not unusual - and I'd argue that it's the consequence of an immigration system that's basically designed to get as many people out of the country as possible (in order to satisfy the anti-immigrant sentiment of much of the population, and which has been expressed by a number of people in this thread) rather than to compassionately and fairly consider individual cases.

(As an aside, it seems from Wikipedia that the journalist who gathered these stories is the wife of the Conservative MP for Orpington).

How do you feel about the clients who avail themselves of their services - if there was no demand there would be no trafficking.

Perhaps this should be a catalyst to legalise Prostitution and bring it under some form of control to the benefit of all involved.
 

ainsworth74

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Prostitution is already legalised. But pimping, running a brothel and kerb crawling/street walking are illegal. Though I agree with your general point that further legalisation followed by Government control seems sensible (along the lines of Germany or the Netherlands). Then again I'm one of those loons that thinks decriminalising drugs for users with a focus then on treatment and outright legalising (and then taxing) Cannabis is a good idea!
 

DynamicSpirit

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How do you feel about the clients who avail themselves of their services - if there was no demand there would be no trafficking.

It probably wouldn't eliminate trafficking altogether if prostitution was legal - since traffickers would could still make a profit by undercutting legal prostitution rates (or by trafficking for other purposes, for example domestic slavery), but it might reduce it.

As for how I feel about clients... I don't really know how easy it is if you go to a prostitute to tell if that woman has been trafficked, but I would guess it can't be too hard to notice if she is scared or doesn't speak English well, and I certainly wouldn't think much of anyone who ignores that.

I'm sure that legalizing and properly regulating prostitution would make it easier to identify victims of trafficking, but you would still need reform of the immigration system to make sure it deals appropriately with victims - so that instead being simply locked up, they are given proper counselling and protection, and it's then determined in a fair manner whether each victim can be reasonably returned to her home country - and unfortunately that seems unlikely to happen while the current anti-immigrant mania continues :(

Better training of border staff to spot possible victims coming into the country might help - though I don't know how much you can realistically do there.
 

Metrailway

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Back to UKIP...

It's fascinating how areas with high levels of xenophobia have the lowest levels of migration. Kent has an influx of barely 2000 people a year and it's a "swamping". There are suburbs in London that have a bigger influx of foreign immigrants than that.

I see this 'observation' on places like The Guardian rather frequently although it doesn't explain much.

A large proportion of the population in places like Essex and Kent are white British people who were born and bred in London.

Due to 'white flight', the white British popultation in places like Dagenham dropped from around 80% in 2001 to under 50% in 2011. A large proportion of these people have resettled in places like Clacton in the eastern Home Counties. These people are likely to have strong views on immigration.

There are other places, like Boston where the any other white ethnic group (a good proxy for EU migration excluding Irish) increased by over 11% between 2001 and 2011. There is little infrastructure in place to cope with a large increase of population in a very short period of time, meaning local services are stretched. According to some opinion polls, UKIP is very likely to win the Boston & Skegness seat in 2015.
 
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radamfi

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Obviously, people who have fled elsewhere are by definition anti-immigration and there's not much that can be done about that.

Conversely, white British who have remained in the capital are more likely to be happy to be living in a big melting pot.

Those people emigrating to Essex are more likely to be working class and not very well educated, compared to the UK average. The middle classes, including most people in 'middle England', where elections are usually won, are less likely to get that upset about immigration.
 
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21C101

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Back to UKIP...



I see this 'observation' on places like The Guardian rather frequently although it doesn't explain much.

A large proportion of the population in places like Essex and Kent are white British people who were born and bred in London.

Due to 'white flight', the white British popultation in places like Dagenham dropped from around 80% in 2001 to under 50% in 2011. A large proportion of these people have resettled in places like Clacton in the eastern Home Counties. These people are likely to have strong views on immigration.

There are other places, like Boston where the any other white ethnic group (a good proxy for EU migration excluding Irish) increased by over 11% between 2001 and 2011. There is little infrastructure in place to cope with a large increase of population in a very short period of time, meaning local services are stretched. According to some opinion polls, UKIP is very likely to win the Boston & Skegness seat in 2015.

As someone originally from south London who has moved tens of miles north of London (for all sorts of reasons, the strongest one being p***ed off with London traffic and taking hours to drive anywhere), I can identify with that. You grow up in an area where everyone speaks the same language and broadly speaking shares a set of core values.

Then there is an influx of people with a different language and very different values who the authorities champion and make clear that in any dispute they will be given the benefit of the doubt over you.

Worse, extreme elements in those authorities try and exploit them as a trojan horse to attack your culture (as part of a cultural marxist political agenda). I remember Lambeth Councils (eventually unsucessful) attempt to ban the public Christmas Crib on Streatham Common in the 1980s because it might offend religious minorities. They backed down after a local campaign (supported by wiser members of said religious minorites).

It's not just Kent and Essex. Significant chunks of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, north Buckinghamshire, Milton Keynes and Northamptonshire, significant parts of Sussex as well as parts of south west England (usually older residents retiring there) and even east Surrey, aided by house prices being a fraction of London house prices in these places.

I suspect the same has occured in and around Birmingham and the northern cities. To keep it on railway terms it is one of the major causes of the increase in long distance commuting in recent years and now costing the country a fortune in rail subsidies.

Perhaps if those in charge had listed to people like Ray Honeyford instead of hounding him out we would not be sleepwalking to division and segregation.
 
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radamfi

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As I said earlier in the thread, I live in the most ethnically-diverse district in the country. There is no division and segregation. Everybody just gets on.

The sort of people who aren't interested in 'getting on' have moved to Essex and other 'white flight' hot-spots.
 

EM2

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The sort of people who aren't interested in 'getting on' have moved to Essex and other 'white flight' hot-spots.
Yet I bet they still have a curry, a chow mein, a pizza or a kebab most weekends, washed down with some Dutch or German lager, sat on their Swedish sofa in front of their Japanese TV.
 

MidnightFlyer

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I grew up in a town where 70% were White British with 25% South Asian: socially and residentially there's very little integration and unity between those two demographics - some areas of town have well in excess of 95% Indian / Pakistani / Bangladeshi residents and others with 90% White British residents. It's been a while since I went to some ends of the town, but I can count on one hand the number of areas where the two demographics are anything near parity. There's not been any social unrest in a long while but similar I have never known mass bonding or socialising of the two communities. The closest I ever got was going to a mixed school, and even though both were heavily Asian (I'd guess around 60% at primary and 85% secondary), I made very few Asian friends. In the later years of secondary especially, there was a very clear divide of White British and Asian students socially.
 

radamfi

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I grew up in a town where 70% were White British with 25% South Asian: socially and residentially there's very little integration and unity between those two demographics

Sounds very much like my home town. I think there is better integration of the Asian communities in London compared to northern towns.

But I would have thought there was more likely to be better integration between EU immigrants and UK natives, given that the cultural differences are less. Three of my English born friends have girlfriends/wives from Estonia, Poland and Bulgaria.
 

21C101

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Sounds very much like my home town. I think there is better integration of the Asian communities in London compared to northern towns.

But I would have thought there was more likely to be better integration between EU immigrants and UK natives, given that the cultural differences are less. Three of my English born friends have girlfriends/wives from Estonia, Poland and Bulgaria.

The problem here is that the immigration from eastern Europe was so rapid that that in itself caused major problems in the most affected areas. Schools, doctors wholly unable to cope with the sudden influx etc.

Long term the major problem is with communities that frown upon cultural integration, especially intermarriage.

I think in London, with a few exceptions, you have atomised communities where no minority has a critical mass so it works as no one is in a position to start throwing their weight around. Also there is full employment for most and prosperity. London will hit problems if its economy tanks and in particular if its insane property prices crash.
 

EM2

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Thousands of Britons claim dole in Germany.
Ex-pats receive up to £23,318 a year from the German taxpayer at a time when many in the UK complain of EU “benefit tourists” heading here to drain public funds.

Those Britons claiming in Germany either moved there to claim handouts or had been working there but lost their jobs.

Under EU rules, countries must provide state handouts to EU citizens if their own member state has the equivalent benefit back home – a policy both Britain and Germany object to.

The claimant figure makes up around a tenth of the British expat population in Germany and many have praised the hassle free system in contrast to “patronising” officials in the UK who make people look for work.

One, a 28-year-old computer science graduate from Birmingham, worked for an IT firm in Berlin for two months before losing his job and claimed €560 (3474) a month for six months.

He said: “It's quite amazing that you can live here as a foreigner and claim benefits.

“In Britain I had to put up with patronising officials, some of whom tried to get me to accept a job as a cleaner despite my degree.”

He added: “I much preferred the German system because once you get on it, the money comes in regularly and there is no more hassle.”

Matt Johnson, 25, a musician from London, and his girlfriend use handouts to boost their income in Berlin.

"It sounds wrong to get on the dole for that reason but our generation has had it much worse than that of our parents," Mr Johnson said.

The UK claims it is funding up to 600,000 unemployed EU migrants here but that figure is disputed by the European Commission.

There also concerns the picture could worsen when Romania and Bulgaria formally join the EU next year.

And people have the cheek to complain about benefit tourism here!
 

Antman

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Yet I bet they still have a curry, a chow mein, a pizza or a kebab most weekends, washed down with some Dutch or German lager, sat on their Swedish sofa in front of their Japanese TV.

Talk about stereotyping people:roll:
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
The problem here is that the immigration from eastern Europe was so rapid that that in itself caused major problems in the most affected areas. Schools, doctors wholly unable to cope with the sudden influx etc.

Long term the major problem is with communities that frown upon cultural integration, especially intermarriage.

I think in London, with a few exceptions, you have atomised communities where no minority has a critical mass so it works as no one is in a position to start throwing their weight around. Also there is full employment for most and prosperity. London will hit problems if its economy tanks and in particular if its insane property prices crash.

Apparently the population of London is expected to hit ten million in the next 15 years or so, those of us who have to use the roads and public transport in London on a regular basis will know how over crowded it is now.
 

Oswyntail

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Talk about stereotyping people:roll:
I think you are missing the point slightly.:roll:


Apparently the population of London is expected to hit ten million in the next 15 years or so, those of us who have to use the roads and public transport in London on a regular basis will know how over crowded it is now.
How much of this is the result of immigration, and how much because of the overheating of the SE economy sucking the life out of the rest of Britain?
 

EM2

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Apparently the population of London is expected to hit ten million in the next 15 years or so, those of us who have to use the roads and public transport in London on a regular basis will know how over crowded it is now.
It's no more crowded now than it was seven years ago.
 

radamfi

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And people have the cheek to complain about benefit tourism here!

Unemployment benefit in many EU countries is far more generous than in the UK. You are usually looking at over 50% of your last salary for a year or more. Whereas in the UK you just get JSA of £72 a week for 6 months. Anything else is means tested.
 

gordonthemoron

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Thousands of Britons claim dole in Germany.


And people have the cheek to complain about benefit tourism here!

You can't just move to Germany and claim income related benefits although you may be inline for Harz IV which is less. Income related benefits are only payable if you elect to pay the related tax which is NOT compulsory (neither is the pension provision). There is at least some detail missing from that article. Also, if you get unemployement benefit, you MUST make efforts to learn German.

The big difference between UK and Germany is in family taxation, in the UK you get child benefit and potential tax credits for low earners. In germany families with children get lots of tax allowances so the more you earn, the more you save. Single people on the other hand are stuffed.
 

Antman

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Unemployment benefit in many EU countries is far more generous than in the UK. You are usually looking at over 50% of your last salary for a year or more. Whereas in the UK you just get JSA of £72 a week for 6 months. Anything else is means tested.

Looks like nobody has told the lawless mob in Calais that
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
I think you are missing the point slightly.:roll:


How much of this is the result of immigration, and how much because of the overheating of the SE economy sucking the life out of the rest of Britain?

Yes there are undoubtedly other factors but immigration clearly is another straw on the camels back
 

EM2

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Unemployment benefit in many EU countries is far more generous than in the UK. You are usually looking at over 50% of your last salary for a year or more. Whereas in the UK you just get JSA of £72 a week for 6 months. Anything else is means tested.
When I lived in Ireland, and was unfortunate to lose my job working in a bookshop, I was told that I could have unemployment benefit, and also rent benefit (which paid 80% of my rent).
I was actually €2 a week better off than working forty hours a week (€310 vs €308). In addition to earning more, I now also qualified for a medical card, which meant that my GP visits, prescriptions, A&E visits, overnight hospital stays, operations and hospital medication were all free.
 

GatwickDepress

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Unemployment benefit in many EU countries is far more generous than in the UK. You are usually looking at over 50% of your last salary for a year or more. Whereas in the UK you just get JSA of £72 a week for 6 months. Anything else is means tested.
It's capped at £57.35 if you're under 25, 25 and above it's £72.40.

Must be gut-wrenching being 24 and made jobless...

Perhaps claiming benefits is not the reason they want to come to the UK?
The Now Show, a few weeks ago, put a unique spin on it; saying they'd rather risk death than be French!
 
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