Well @LDF some, perhaps most, people would describe blaming a group of people for all sorts of ills and then proving incapable of backing up any of those statements as “throwing mud” at them. Perhaps you wouldn’t. That’s cool.
you do seemingly love to create strawmen. For absence of doubt, I don’t regard your blaming of immigration for most of societies ills as immoral just wrong and I have never suggested your views are based on racism just ignorance.
It’s possible you may be racist of course but I have no evidence on which to reach that conclusion and without evidence I don’t make the accusation. See how it is supposed to work…….
@bargepole i couldn’t open your link but while polls bounce around, Britain elects Twitter account lists all polls and the “boats policy” so far seems to have had , perhaps surprisingly, little effect.
The “populists” like to claim they are the silent majority but actually I am not at all sure that is true. I agree though that the next election is far from won yet.
Did anyone see the latest news from Tower Hamlets? From that, it certainly sounds like London's full up - up to 23 people living in a two-bedroom flat!
"The man said he was only staying in the flat because he could not find anything else, adding: "Accommodation is very difficult. I am, every day, trying to find a room. I've been trying for six or seven months."
I have expressly not blamed immigrants for anything. I also disagree with you but respect your views and do not resort to calling you ignorant. You might want to have a think about that.
Of course. It's a return to the slum conditions that we spent the 20th century rectifying. So we either take measures to curb population growth or we build out into the Green Belt.
Once again @LDF you have built another strawman. I have never called you ignorant - I have no evidence for that - just said that your views about immigration seem to be based on ignorance.
I'll leave you to have the last word now - you can build a whole straw army if you wish....
No idea but as a child of an immigrant to the UK and someone who has spent most of his life working overseas I'm certainly not against people moving around. BUT I also appreciate people's concerns about cultural dilution and it's not fair that anyone who expresses concerns is immediately called racist. I know quite a few people who are very pro-immigration and who have visited Japan. They love the place and are full of cute little stories about their time there. When I point out the country is 99% Japanese and would sooner cease to exist than allow mass immigration then it all goes a bit sour.
Japan and the UK are very similar countries. Two little blocks of land that ignore their immediate neighbours and seek the love of the USA. Both have serious population problems with one trying to build robots as an answer and the other....God knows what this country is doing. Maybe we should copy the Japan of the 1570's and put all the 'expats' on a small island off the mainland. The Isle of Wight sounds the best solution.
For the record, @Kim_il_Swan, I'm a third generation immigrant and a high proportion of my friends and my partner are second generation immigrants. I work everyday with people from all over the world and the ones I've spoken to on the subject of immigration tend to agree with me.
If we take the fact that the NHS has somewhat gone to shit in the last decade or two as a starting point, and then try to examine the causes of that, I would start with the backdoor privatisation started by Tony Blair and accelerated by the tories ever since - building hospitals that are privately financed so that corporations can rent-seek and profit off people being ill is privatisation. Now, it's fairly easy to see what happens when something moves from being socialised to privatised, take a look at prisons in the USA - the need to declare larger and larger profits to shareholders takes over as the main driver of every business decision. The mere fact that people's health has become a "business decision" should be enough of a concern. The tory drive to fully privatise the NHS has meant that they've done everything in their power to run the NHS into the ground so that they can point at how shit it is and say "see, we need big business to come in and solve this".
So we get reductions in the number of available beds while Johnson lies on TV about building 20 new hospitals because what better way to demonstrate the NHS failing than to have his Russian oligarch friends print photos of people on hospital floors in the newspapers they own.
We've had 13 years of reductions in the NHS budget as a percentage of GDP. What better way to make the NHS look like it can't cope than to make sure the NHS can't cope.
Almost everyone who works for the NHS is now worse off than when the tories came to power. What better way to pretend there's a staffing problem and nobody wants to work for the NHS than to cut their wages enough that more and more people leave university and go into private healthcare either here or abroad, ensuring that the NHS has become completely dependent on an immigrant workforce.
So, I tend to look at the NHS's problems and see a systematic dismantling of its foundations in a bid to sell as much of it off as possible to people like Matt Hancock's pub landlord to ensure that money keeps flowing into the hands of people who really don't need any _more_ money. Other's look at all this and blame immigrants because it's easy.
Anecdotal evidence I know, but a couple of weeks ago I had an infection in the base of a fingernail, causing the finger to become red and swollen. It's known as Paronychia, apparently.
I went to the Wycombe Hospital minor injuries unit, where they dressed it, gave me a prescription for antibiotics, and said they were referring it to the Plastics Unit at Stoke Mandeville.
5 minutes after I got home, I had a call from Stoke Mandeville, saying to come in the next day, Saturday, at 10:30am. They took me in for a minor operation which involved cutting away part of the nail, and draining fluid. All done and dusted by 2pm.
So I would have to say my experience is that the NHS is wonderfully efficient, and I can't see how privatising any part of it could possibly be an improvement.
My mother's last few weeks on Earth in a NHS hospital in Slough was so bad I genuinely wondered if I should phone the police. A few minutes on Google showed I was one of many who thought the place should be bulldozed to the ground. So...I bit the bullet and had her moved to a private place where her last few days were spent with some of the finest staff I have ever encountered. Cost a lot but the subsequent house sale more than covered it.
As someone who works in the NHS and has done for 15 years, I’d argue the problem is the provision of decent social care for those who need it and public health work to improve baseline wellbeing. All health, physical and mental is moderated to some extent by one’s environment. If we take a bio-psycho-social model of health or lack of it then improving societal conditions may improve population health. Take lack of NHS bed space as one example. This is often down to lack of community care space or adequate social care to allow timely and appropriate discharge. Or hospital admissions for disease linked to lifestyle. Don’t just fund education, work to ensure people have access to affordable healthy food, safe places to exercise and work life balances to maintain mental and physical well-being.
The NHS is far from perfect and has a habit of change that isn’t always well thought through when it comes to the interfaces with social care and health education. That is where the well funded work needs to be done in my view.
As for immigrants being a burden on the NHS, I ask you to consider again the policies of the current government in housing people in hotels where there is no access to means to work and limited meaningful activity in towns where they feel under threat from the residents. The impact on their mental and physical health is profound and, of course, then requires NHS resource.
Not to worry though, we can send them to Rwanda and quietly forget about them.
Or we could treat all people with dignity and respect and work to promote ethical foreign policies.
I appreciate anecdotes mean little but in my work in a migrant hotel I’ve been repeatedly asked by migrants if they can work or volunteer safely to have something to do. I’ve also heard over and over again that they’d like to return home one day to a country that won’t shoot or torture them for working with allied forces or practising a different religion or demonstrating against the government by holding up a placard and posting something on a website. Of course they might all lying and just wanting a council house and £3k a month to sit around watching sky sports whilst they plot to blow us up. Ripping out their own fingernails and breaking all their fingers was just a ruse to fool us woke folk.
The NHS is problem beyond even the Gasroom I fear. I'm gonna go with my favourite problem on this one, but there are many. Inefficiency. I have worked for many years in NHS estates. I spent many years during my dads prolonged demise the other side too. Inefficiency is staggering. Eye watering. As a tax payer it is heart-breaking. Management is inept. Procurement is comical. Supervision is non-existent.
I recently had a visit to A and E. And as I'm a bit of a tw@t instead of sitting there staring at my phone I was doing a mental management audit of the people that were doing nothing. I mean nothing. And the amount of different uniforms as staff were from one agency or another. I reckon I could have fired half a dozen (non-frontline) staff and no one would notice.
But it is a beyond reproach. Anyone saying they were going in to shake things up would be accused of privatisation by stealth. But we need a private business attitude to a public sector organisation.
But we need a private business attitude to a public sector organisation
I couldn’t disagree more. The public sector is necessarily different and you can’t run it like a business. Businesses can and do fail, the public sector cannot be allowed to do so. The prime driver for business is profit, the prime driver for public sector is the public good.
Just picking up on @Manboobs post, it is important not to conflate the issue of immigration (which @LDF was blaming for the NHS woes) and the issue of asylum which you reference. The government and their allies in the press like to blur the issue but they are not the same at all. Asylum generally represents less than 10% of net immigration although may have been higher last year due to Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong (if you categorise them as asylum /refugees)
Equally, Ukrainian refugees in the UK are not claiming asylum - they are given visas (which ironically makes it easier to chuck them out, if the government felt the urge to do that). Its much messier for Afghans, there is a visa scheme but the application process is slow and the success rate is low. It's not surprising that many choose just to leave and claim asylum somewhere.
There's also a large group of Afghans who left and went to Iran during the Russian invasion and the ensuing mayhem. They are now being treated very badly by the Iranians. Some of the younger Afghans I've met while teaching in Greece were born in Iran.
I meant in terms of service delivery and efficiency rather than a strive for profit. We need to pay good people to do good jobs in management and not rely on flawed framework agreements etc that strip the NHS of cash and take away from frontline services.
Agree that there is some poor quality staff and wastage in the NHS but that starts at the top. Top notching experienced staff have been bullied and sidelined out of the service by poor quality 'business' managers who spend their time on meetings, away days and training on the government dollar and the rest of the time avoiding blame and scapegoating their overworked staff. Primary health care failings also play into problems. My GP surgery must have the best trained staff in Bucks as they are always closed for it. (I'm one those silly folk who would expect my doctors to already be trained.) I would back any government that had a fully planned and costed immigration policy but that needs massive investment. Pointing at people and saying its their fault and we are going to be very tough on them...to appease hang'em shoot'em right-wingers...is free.
No - I asked you a question about one of your comments and instead of replying you accused me of 'hysterical rhetoric'.
It's incredibly frustrating trying to have this entire conversation because my comments are constantly misconstrued, though whether by accident or design I can't tell. I see three possibilities: 1. My posts aren't being read properly 2. Others aren't bright enough to understand what I'm saying 3. Other posters are being intentionally disingenuous. I'm leaning towards option 3.
For the avoidance of doubt, I will say this one more time. Immigration and immigrants are not the same thing. Immigration is a policy, which one may, or may not agree with for whatever reasons. Immigrants a people. They are getting on with their lives as beneficiaries of immigration policy and why wouldn't they? I wish them all the best. Ironically, I have to explain this to racists too.
The reason so many of you make the arguments you do is because you equate opposing immigration with racism. Once you've done that, you cannot countenance any argument that (for instance) immigration might put a strain on services, because it contradicts your world view.
From a personal point of view, the fact that I'm arguing with both progressives and racists makes me hopeful that my pragmatic views fall in the centre ground and likely represent the majority.
One aspect of the debate I find interesting is the influence of longer life spans. As people live longer after retirement we need an increasing number of people to provide the necessary support, not just with health and care but also in hospitality as many retired people can afford to go out to restaurants, hotels, etc.
Given that the percentage of working age people would naturally decrease without an increase in population there seems to me to be 3 potential options:
1) Import the required labour
2) Increase the retirement age significantly
3) Try and reverse the increase in life-span
i don’t actually mind option 2 but option 1 is probably the most sensible.
As an aside @LX1, as you have been reasonably vocal and coherent in this debate, what is your view (if you wish to share it) on the proposed Asylum issue that sparked all this off (as opposed to immigration). (And apologies if you answered that several pages ago)
Comments
Not sure they do.
Well @LDF some, perhaps most, people would describe blaming a group of people for all sorts of ills and then proving incapable of backing up any of those statements as “throwing mud” at them. Perhaps you wouldn’t. That’s cool.
you do seemingly love to create strawmen. For absence of doubt, I don’t regard your blaming of immigration for most of societies ills as immoral just wrong and I have never suggested your views are based on racism just ignorance.
It’s possible you may be racist of course but I have no evidence on which to reach that conclusion and without evidence I don’t make the accusation. See how it is supposed to work…….
@bargepole i couldn’t open your link but while polls bounce around, Britain elects Twitter account lists all polls and the “boats policy” so far seems to have had , perhaps surprisingly, little effect.
The “populists” like to claim they are the silent majority but actually I am not at all sure that is true. I agree though that the next election is far from won yet.
Did anyone see the latest news from Tower Hamlets? From that, it certainly sounds like London's full up - up to 23 people living in a two-bedroom flat!
"The man said he was only staying in the flat because he could not find anything else, adding: "Accommodation is very difficult. I am, every day, trying to find a room. I've been trying for six or seven months."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64914885
I have expressly not blamed immigrants for anything. I also disagree with you but respect your views and do not resort to calling you ignorant. You might want to have a think about that.
Of course. It's a return to the slum conditions that we spent the 20th century rectifying. So we either take measures to curb population growth or we build out into the Green Belt.
Once again @LDF you have built another strawman. I have never called you ignorant - I have no evidence for that - just said that your views about immigration seem to be based on ignorance.
I'll leave you to have the last word now - you can build a whole straw army if you wish....
No idea but as a child of an immigrant to the UK and someone who has spent most of his life working overseas I'm certainly not against people moving around. BUT I also appreciate people's concerns about cultural dilution and it's not fair that anyone who expresses concerns is immediately called racist. I know quite a few people who are very pro-immigration and who have visited Japan. They love the place and are full of cute little stories about their time there. When I point out the country is 99% Japanese and would sooner cease to exist than allow mass immigration then it all goes a bit sour.
Japan and the UK are very similar countries. Two little blocks of land that ignore their immediate neighbours and seek the love of the USA. Both have serious population problems with one trying to build robots as an answer and the other....God knows what this country is doing. Maybe we should copy the Japan of the 1570's and put all the 'expats' on a small island off the mainland. The Isle of Wight sounds the best solution.
You've entered the realms of comedy. It's given me an early laugh, so thanks for that.
For the record, @Kim_il_Swan, I'm a third generation immigrant and a high proportion of my friends and my partner are second generation immigrants. I work everyday with people from all over the world and the ones I've spoken to on the subject of immigration tend to agree with me.
If we take the fact that the NHS has somewhat gone to shit in the last decade or two as a starting point, and then try to examine the causes of that, I would start with the backdoor privatisation started by Tony Blair and accelerated by the tories ever since - building hospitals that are privately financed so that corporations can rent-seek and profit off people being ill is privatisation. Now, it's fairly easy to see what happens when something moves from being socialised to privatised, take a look at prisons in the USA - the need to declare larger and larger profits to shareholders takes over as the main driver of every business decision. The mere fact that people's health has become a "business decision" should be enough of a concern. The tory drive to fully privatise the NHS has meant that they've done everything in their power to run the NHS into the ground so that they can point at how shit it is and say "see, we need big business to come in and solve this".
So we get reductions in the number of available beds while Johnson lies on TV about building 20 new hospitals because what better way to demonstrate the NHS failing than to have his Russian oligarch friends print photos of people on hospital floors in the newspapers they own.
We've had 13 years of reductions in the NHS budget as a percentage of GDP. What better way to make the NHS look like it can't cope than to make sure the NHS can't cope.
Almost everyone who works for the NHS is now worse off than when the tories came to power. What better way to pretend there's a staffing problem and nobody wants to work for the NHS than to cut their wages enough that more and more people leave university and go into private healthcare either here or abroad, ensuring that the NHS has become completely dependent on an immigrant workforce.
So, I tend to look at the NHS's problems and see a systematic dismantling of its foundations in a bid to sell as much of it off as possible to people like Matt Hancock's pub landlord to ensure that money keeps flowing into the hands of people who really don't need any _more_ money. Other's look at all this and blame immigrants because it's easy.
Anecdotal evidence I know, but a couple of weeks ago I had an infection in the base of a fingernail, causing the finger to become red and swollen. It's known as Paronychia, apparently.
I went to the Wycombe Hospital minor injuries unit, where they dressed it, gave me a prescription for antibiotics, and said they were referring it to the Plastics Unit at Stoke Mandeville.
5 minutes after I got home, I had a call from Stoke Mandeville, saying to come in the next day, Saturday, at 10:30am. They took me in for a minor operation which involved cutting away part of the nail, and draining fluid. All done and dusted by 2pm.
So I would have to say my experience is that the NHS is wonderfully efficient, and I can't see how privatising any part of it could possibly be an improvement.
My mother's last few weeks on Earth in a NHS hospital in Slough was so bad I genuinely wondered if I should phone the police. A few minutes on Google showed I was one of many who thought the place should be bulldozed to the ground. So...I bit the bullet and had her moved to a private place where her last few days were spent with some of the finest staff I have ever encountered. Cost a lot but the subsequent house sale more than covered it.
Anecdotal evidence is a bitch.
I think the root cause of the NHS problems is underfunding, as part of the cutbacks to the public sector under the ‘austerity’ programme.
And the worrying thing is the NHS is one of the better funded elements of the public sector.
As someone who works in the NHS and has done for 15 years, I’d argue the problem is the provision of decent social care for those who need it and public health work to improve baseline wellbeing. All health, physical and mental is moderated to some extent by one’s environment. If we take a bio-psycho-social model of health or lack of it then improving societal conditions may improve population health. Take lack of NHS bed space as one example. This is often down to lack of community care space or adequate social care to allow timely and appropriate discharge. Or hospital admissions for disease linked to lifestyle. Don’t just fund education, work to ensure people have access to affordable healthy food, safe places to exercise and work life balances to maintain mental and physical well-being.
The NHS is far from perfect and has a habit of change that isn’t always well thought through when it comes to the interfaces with social care and health education. That is where the well funded work needs to be done in my view.
As for immigrants being a burden on the NHS, I ask you to consider again the policies of the current government in housing people in hotels where there is no access to means to work and limited meaningful activity in towns where they feel under threat from the residents. The impact on their mental and physical health is profound and, of course, then requires NHS resource.
Not to worry though, we can send them to Rwanda and quietly forget about them.
Or we could treat all people with dignity and respect and work to promote ethical foreign policies.
I appreciate anecdotes mean little but in my work in a migrant hotel I’ve been repeatedly asked by migrants if they can work or volunteer safely to have something to do. I’ve also heard over and over again that they’d like to return home one day to a country that won’t shoot or torture them for working with allied forces or practising a different religion or demonstrating against the government by holding up a placard and posting something on a website. Of course they might all lying and just wanting a council house and £3k a month to sit around watching sky sports whilst they plot to blow us up. Ripping out their own fingernails and breaking all their fingers was just a ruse to fool us woke folk.
The NHS is problem beyond even the Gasroom I fear. I'm gonna go with my favourite problem on this one, but there are many. Inefficiency. I have worked for many years in NHS estates. I spent many years during my dads prolonged demise the other side too. Inefficiency is staggering. Eye watering. As a tax payer it is heart-breaking. Management is inept. Procurement is comical. Supervision is non-existent.
I recently had a visit to A and E. And as I'm a bit of a tw@t instead of sitting there staring at my phone I was doing a mental management audit of the people that were doing nothing. I mean nothing. And the amount of different uniforms as staff were from one agency or another. I reckon I could have fired half a dozen (non-frontline) staff and no one would notice.
But it is a beyond reproach. Anyone saying they were going in to shake things up would be accused of privatisation by stealth. But we need a private business attitude to a public sector organisation.
But we need a private business attitude to a public sector organisation
I couldn’t disagree more. The public sector is necessarily different and you can’t run it like a business. Businesses can and do fail, the public sector cannot be allowed to do so. The prime driver for business is profit, the prime driver for public sector is the public good.
It was based almost entirely on the inability to compute risk on credit derivatives resulting in a number of banks taking unsustainable positions.
Just picking up on @Manboobs post, it is important not to conflate the issue of immigration (which @LDF was blaming for the NHS woes) and the issue of asylum which you reference. The government and their allies in the press like to blur the issue but they are not the same at all. Asylum generally represents less than 10% of net immigration although may have been higher last year due to Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong (if you categorise them as asylum /refugees)
Hongkongers immigrating to the UK are not asylum seekers, they are overseas British Nationals eligible to apply for a BNO visa.
Equally, Ukrainian refugees in the UK are not claiming asylum - they are given visas (which ironically makes it easier to chuck them out, if the government felt the urge to do that). Its much messier for Afghans, there is a visa scheme but the application process is slow and the success rate is low. It's not surprising that many choose just to leave and claim asylum somewhere.
There's also a large group of Afghans who left and went to Iran during the Russian invasion and the ensuing mayhem. They are now being treated very badly by the Iranians. Some of the younger Afghans I've met while teaching in Greece were born in Iran.
This thread really brings home what a f<ck€d up world we live in.
Oh and @LDF you did sling mud at my posts fyi.
I assume that DevC meant I was slinging mud at immigrants, which I most certainly have not. Please can you specify where I've slung mud at you?
Well picked up @DevC you are quite right.
I meant in terms of service delivery and efficiency rather than a strive for profit. We need to pay good people to do good jobs in management and not rely on flawed framework agreements etc that strip the NHS of cash and take away from frontline services.
Agree that there is some poor quality staff and wastage in the NHS but that starts at the top. Top notching experienced staff have been bullied and sidelined out of the service by poor quality 'business' managers who spend their time on meetings, away days and training on the government dollar and the rest of the time avoiding blame and scapegoating their overworked staff. Primary health care failings also play into problems. My GP surgery must have the best trained staff in Bucks as they are always closed for it. (I'm one those silly folk who would expect my doctors to already be trained.) I would back any government that had a fully planned and costed immigration policy but that needs massive investment. Pointing at people and saying its their fault and we are going to be very tough on them...to appease hang'em shoot'em right-wingers...is free.
You claimed I said wwII was fought to facilitate immigration, I never did.
No - I asked you a question about one of your comments and instead of replying you accused me of 'hysterical rhetoric'.
It's incredibly frustrating trying to have this entire conversation because my comments are constantly misconstrued, though whether by accident or design I can't tell. I see three possibilities: 1. My posts aren't being read properly 2. Others aren't bright enough to understand what I'm saying 3. Other posters are being intentionally disingenuous. I'm leaning towards option 3.
For the avoidance of doubt, I will say this one more time. Immigration and immigrants are not the same thing. Immigration is a policy, which one may, or may not agree with for whatever reasons. Immigrants a people. They are getting on with their lives as beneficiaries of immigration policy and why wouldn't they? I wish them all the best. Ironically, I have to explain this to racists too.
The reason so many of you make the arguments you do is because you equate opposing immigration with racism. Once you've done that, you cannot countenance any argument that (for instance) immigration might put a strain on services, because it contradicts your world view.
From a personal point of view, the fact that I'm arguing with both progressives and racists makes me hopeful that my pragmatic views fall in the centre ground and likely represent the majority.
One aspect of the debate I find interesting is the influence of longer life spans. As people live longer after retirement we need an increasing number of people to provide the necessary support, not just with health and care but also in hospitality as many retired people can afford to go out to restaurants, hotels, etc.
Given that the percentage of working age people would naturally decrease without an increase in population there seems to me to be 3 potential options:
1) Import the required labour
2) Increase the retirement age significantly
3) Try and reverse the increase in life-span
i don’t actually mind option 2 but option 1 is probably the most sensible.
As an aside @LX1, as you have been reasonably vocal and coherent in this debate, what is your view (if you wish to share it) on the proposed Asylum issue that sparked all this off (as opposed to immigration). (And apologies if you answered that several pages ago)
The old Tommy Robinson "I'm anti-Islam not anti-Muslim" argument eh?