The UKIPs.

[Martin]

When you go on holiday, what language do you speak in? What's wrong with hearing foreign languages? Paranoid they're talking about you? Plotting a terrorist attack?

This conspiracy of Labour opening immigration to win votes is a great piece of tin foil hattery. And even if immigration was stopped, wages would not go back up. It's exploitation from the employers, they saw they could pay people less and did it. Businesses want to make money and will do all they can to, growth of capital is the point of capitalism.

Free movement and exploitation of labour is built in to the system, don't blame people, blame the system they live in. It's a harsh reality, but there's two choices, you either support the system and accept its downsides, or support a different one. I'm staying neutral because like it or not, this is the system we have and we have to understand that before we can start dreaming up ways to improve on it.

You can try to make a new system, like both the far right and left have done, or you can try to reform the system to make it better. Or in UKIP's case, you can try taking the system further, but only if you were born inside some imaginary lines.

EDIT
Unrelated, but on the subject of immigration and the media:
http://i100.independent.co.uk/artic...mmigrant-hostel-really-looks-like--x1n_mfyZ9l

 

[GaryH]

Nothing wrong with hearing foreign languages, but, when parts of the UK all speak it and become segregated from the rest of the country, then I do have a problem with that.

When I go abroad I tend to hear the language spoken by the people who live in that country. If i go to Spain, I hear Spanish, Italy Italian etc . Yeah there will be elements who speak other languages, but generally, you expect to hear the native language in that country.

I do have a problem where we have nurses and to done extent doctors in the health service who can hardly speak English . (Just one example)

If I go to live in Spain, do I therefore, expect everyone to speak English? No, I would make a concerted effort to speak their lingo and integrate into their society.

 

[BigT]

I think you make some salient points there @BigT

I'd caution here on one thing though, supermarket profits etc; of course people will take to get cheaper food, all cheaper products in general - but when marketed at, I don't think it's fair to blame the public.

I don't think when the supermarkets alone are making billions in profits that we can say "Oi, consumer, it's your fault!"

No I say it is all our fault, we got what we asked for.
It's easy to blame these companies making billions of pounds but let's take a look at the figures they are hardly profiteering.
Tesco turnover £64000million, profit £2600 million.
That's about 4% or put another way 4p profit for every £1 received.
Personally I wouldn't say that was excessive and most companies could not operate at that low profit to turnover ratio.

 

[Tom]

They key word isn't racism when it comes to UKIP and many of its supports, it's xenophobia. Plain simple fear.

If you take the ferry to Holland or Belgium, for a start everyone can speak fluent English and even in the non-touristy cities you will hear many different languages. It is also worth considering ho many of the 'foreigners' you hear can actually speak English as a second or third language, it is just not their language of choice. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, unless you're talking about forcing people to speak English in public. Conversely I do not think there is anything wrong with (and plenty right with) someone being asked to prove they can converse in English before being allowed to reside here.

When the paranoia is dropped, it is staggering how people can integrate and the vibrancy of multiculturalism can help form a city. Rotterdam is bright and modern, while Amsterdam is more traditional but they are both inherently Dutch - yet they are still hugely influenced by foreign cultures. Just as London's China Town is part of the city's identity.

 

[Plastic Person]

I dislike that Farage and UKIP sell themselves as radical alternatives to the current system, when in reality, they're simply a more extreme version of the establishment appealing to some of the country's pettiest prejudices, regurgitated again and again throughout history. In regards to language, in the vast majority of cases, even if first generation immigrants don't speak English as a first language, their children inevitably always do, and become enriched by British culture. I have always felt more European than British, and to be honest probably identify even less with British 'values' than most of our immigrant population. Nonetheless, I suppose we must, as a people, respect the beliefs and wishes of the populace, but I do wish they would stop falling for such desperate and easy scapegoating by those in charge.

This recent short film, shot in a Burger Van in Lincolnshire, is a fascinating insight into the current psyche of the regional public:

 

[Adam]

I have to laugh at the people who are disgusted to hear people speaking in different languages here and think all immigrants should be fluent, but then spend their holidays in heavily Anglicized and very tourist-centric places like Benidorm and couldn't string a sentence together in spanish to save their lifes. (Or even worse/cringier, the ones who just start every sentance with "el" and end every noun with an o and pretend that's spanish)

I do think that anyone coming here should speak atleast a decent level of English at first, and really don't understand the international students at my uni who haven't made an effort to learn it, but I also think that it should work the other way around, and I wish that more English people took the effort to learn other languages as opposed to just expecting everyone to speak English wherever they go.

 

[GaryH]

I dont think people are saying they must only speak English in public, I think what people are saying is that in order for people to come here and integrate into our society, then, as you and others rightly say, there must be a certain level of English they must be able to speak. Likewise, if someone wants to get employment, such as a Dr or Nurse, then they should of course be able to speak English.

If you allow segregation and areas where people do not integrate then we will see ghettos appearing, Romanian, Muslim, Polish, etc where others will not be able to enter, where there will be conflict, and in some cases, extremism taught.

To some extent this has already happened in some parts of the UK which is unfortunate, and no doubt, while other political parties stay quiet about this, UKIP gain votes as they speak out about it.

Adam, I totally totally agree with your last comment, it ashames me just how good everyone else's English is when you visit other EU countries - many people being able to speak 3 or 4 languages. Us, here in the UK, many have the opinion that if English is the universal language then why should we learn any others, and maybe its not pushed enough in schools anymore - however, when you have some schools with 10-15 different languages, how do you push forward a syllabus where kids are taught German, or French or Spanish!!

 

[BigT]

So I go into a factory where all the signs are in Polish, all the workforce speak Polish including the skilled jobs (even though they are clearly not qualified), everyone speaks Polish all of the time and to stand any chance of getting a job there you have to be Polish.
Where am I? England that's where, and it's not just one factory it's a lot of them.
Try going out on a Saturday night and talking to one of these very attractive Polish girls see what happens, you will end up using A and E that's what.
The ghettos already exist and they are getting bigger and stronger.

Pull the blinkers on if you like but this is happening now in the UK and I think it stinks.
We used to be a great country proud of our origins and what we stood for, then came New Labour and ruined it all by lowering the drawbridge and pandering to the EU's every whim then educating an army of left wing wimps that won't get off there backsides to do anything about it.
Yes a few got richer including myself but at what expense? House prices out of the reach of many and jobs going to non Uk citizen's, but we can't go back now it's too late.

Blair and Brown should be tried for treason and hung from the tower, they destroyed this country and ran up huge debts and I fear we will now never get it back.

Again this is why the working classes are turning to UKIP even if they talk Bollox.

 

[Tom]

Great video above, but the majority of people in it weren't from the area. If you're talking about swamping and taking jobs then Lincolnshire is a great example, because its industry is sapped dry by Teessiders and Scots that have come down to work on the oil refineries and chemical plants, taking a lot of jobs from local people. This goes on on regional, national, continental and international levels all the time - it's the way of the world and protectionism of any kind has never been particularly successful, other than in France possibly.

@BigT - you're saying that all Polish women cause fights base don your experience, well on mine they are all hard working and keep themselves to themselves.

 

[Martin]

Tesco turnover £64000million, profit £2600 million.

Only £2600 million? #PrayForTesco

If you allow segregation and areas where people do not integrate then we will see ghettos appearing, Romanian, Muslim, Polish, etc where others will not be able to enter, where there will be conflict, and in some cases, extremism taught.

Hahahahaha I've never walked through an area and been kicked out by the residents because I can't speak Polish or don't pray to Allah. It's fearmongering. My city is full of Somalians, I've never had any problems with them. We also have the oldest black community in the country and Europe's oldest Chinese community. Loads of cities have Chinatowns dating back decades, but the talk of 'ghettos' always ignores them because they're not Polish or Muslim. Thirty years ago it was the Irish that were treated like this, before them it was blacks, before that Jews, before that the Irish again. Today it's Muslims and Eastern Europeans.

Try going out on a Saturday night and talking to one of these very attractive Polish girls see what happens, you will end up using A and E that's what.

Maybe it's not who you're talking to, but the way you talk to them? A friend of mine is dating a Polish girl he met at a bar, he never got beat up, what's he doing wrong?

Pull the blinkers on if you like but this is happening now in the UK and I think it stinks.
We used to be a great country proud of our origins and what we stood for, then came New Labour and ruined it all by lowering the drawbridge and pandering to the EU's every whim then educating an army of left wing wimps that won't get off there backsides to do anything about it.

When people talk of how 'great' we were they normally mean 'I miss when we ruled half the world'. We were great when after the second world war we rebuilt the country and introduced workers rights, health care, social security and build loads of schools. If you think we were still great by 1997 after we'd sold ourselves to the world, you're mistaken. The only reason we're not great is because we allowed immigration and gave the EU more powers? "Left wing wimps" made me laugh though.

It's a shame we can't have a sensible debate about immigration in this country, but when the anti-immigration side come out with blatant lies like 4 in 5 new nurses being foreign, then having to quietly apologise and point out that it's actually 1 in 5, and when the anti- side is represented in politics by people too swivel-eyed for the Tories, it's never going to happen.

 

[GaryH]

Just one example.

http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/new...mingham-that-are-no-go-areas-for-white-237564

Another, where a group was patrolling the streets, attacking people who didnt abide by their beliefs:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/06/muslim-vigilantes-jailed-sharia-law-attacks-london

There are no go areas in some cities, no doubt about it. You mention Chinatown and the Polish, well the difference is that while some communities can integrate with others, Chinese and Polish are two good examples, others do not. And before someone says it, yes, its not just down to religion or country of birth, there are plenty of housing estates in the UK with British people living on them I wouldn't feel comfortable walking through!

Basically, Trevor Phillips was right in his warning's from a few years ago:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/1896134/Trevor-Phillips-warns-of-immigration-cold-war.html

 

[Martin]

Attacking people for having different beliefs? You mean like the EDL?

It's hard for people to integrate in an area where they feel threatened, so they stick to their own and suspicion grows on both sides.

What does 'integration' really mean? It sounds so fascistic, forcing other people to bow to some imagined collective culture. So what exactly should immigrants integrate to? Should they all become punks or goths? Both valid British cultures. What extent are they supposed to integrate to? Is selling takeaways enough? Are we demanding they strip themselves of all their culture and heritage or just the bits we don't like? We seem to mistake immigrants preferring to stay around people of similar backgrounds as them refusing to be part of wider society.

"Immigration is bad because there's rough areas belonging to just certain groups" is reactionary and makes no attempt to really understand why these places come to exist. It's also funny how this issue never mentions the many areas full of nothing but middle class white people where anyone different, be they poor, black, Muslim, foreign, whatever, is looked down on.

 

[BigT]

@BigT - you're saying that all Polish women cause fights base don your experience, well on mine they are all hard working and keep themselves to themselves.

It's not the women that cause the fights it's the Polish men that don't like you talking to "their" women.
I know of one ex squaddie that went down for standing up for himself against two Polish thugs after he had the cheek to talk to their women.
Granted there are exceptions but in my experience a lot of young Polish men seem to have a serious chip on their shoulder.

You don't have to go back to the war Blaze for the last time we were great.
I just look in my old toy cabinet or book shelf, everything says made in England.
Now our thirst for cheap goods has left the suppliers looking for the cheapest sweatshop to produce them, at the moment that's China but before long it will be India then Pakistan and so on.

You can of course just keep kidding yourselves it's not happening or maybe your not that bothered about it, but the truth is there has been and will continue to be a large influx of mostly young Eastern Europeans taking the jobs that a lot of the young people on this forum and in general would be doing which accounts for the large number of young unemployment.
It makes little difference to me I've hopefully only got 10-15 years of working left but if I was 18 I would be fuming with rage.
The young and the poor have been let down and directly effected by Labours immigration policy and if they ever get back in power god help us all.

 

[Martin]

It wasn't Labour that sold off industry or outsourced jobs...

Immigration has always existed. We're an island. Wind a clock back a few hundred years, they came over with swords and killed the people they found. And of course after that we went and built an empire. And now the children of the people who's countries we exploited want to come here, and suddenly it's bad to move from country to country.

There's bigger, more important things going on in this country, Europe and the world. While UKIP are crying about immigration they seem to have completely ignored the new VAT law that's going to destroy people like small online businesses and bands who rely on digital transactions. On the other hand the EU are trying to limit banker bonuses, while our Chancellor is trying to stop them. America is on the brink of full out race war and 100k children are estimated to have spent Christmas without a home. I think these things are much more important than where my colleagues and the people competing for any role I apply for in future originally come from. And I highly doubt I'd earn more if we didn't employ some people from the Philippines. My pay rise was only 13p this year, shall I blame the new Italian bloke?

 

[BigT]

It wasn't Labour that sold off industry or outsourced jobs...

It was the unions that destroyed our industry's by making the UK uncompetitive and unproductive.
And they are the militant wing of the Labour Party so yes they as good as did.

 

[Adam]

You can of course just keep kidding yourselves it's not happening or maybe your not that bothered about it, but the truth is there has been and will continue to be a large influx of mostly young Eastern Europeans taking the jobs that a lot of the young people on this forum and in general would be doing which accounts for the large number of young unemployment.

It makes little difference to me I've hopefully only got 10-15 years of working left but if I was 18 I would be fuming with rage.
The young and the poor have been let down and directly effected by Labours immigration policy and if they ever get back in power god help us all.

I find that a bit, well, condescending. The main employers of Eastern Europeans are industries such as food processing and manufacturing, because the people who have immigrated over to the UK to do those jobs still find them much more economically beneficial that staying in Poland, where the economy is much worse than here. (That said, many of them are often exploited by the third parties that get them those jobs, but sadly it's still the best opportunity they can find in this current economic system)

So what you're basically saying is that I, a university student from a fairly working class background, should be annoyed because a lot of the people that do manual labour jobs aren't British? (Not that I'm some kind of snob who sees anyone doing a job like that as some sort of "peasant" (because if I was, then I'd probably be a UKIP voter), but I couldn't care less about people from abroad taking less desirable/skilled jobs, because they're doing it to improve the lifes of themselves and their families, and I sympathise with them and respect them for doing it.)

Thing is, my generation is full of people from all range of socio-economic groups with further ambitions that involve university and not just leaving school to work in fields for the rest of our lifes. Just because a young person comes from a working class background does not mean that all they want to do in life is spend it working in steel mills, many of us, believe it or not, have aspirations that don't end with us being racist because the polish have taken all our cabbage picking jobs.

All this "UKIP will increase apprenticeships and labour jobs for the British youth" talk just seems like an attempt from the top to repress social mobility to me...

 

[Martin]

It was the unions that destroyed our industry's by making the UK uncompetitive and unproductive.
And they are the militant wing of the Labour Party so yes they as good as did.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA

Bloody unions, demanding better conditions, winning us rights.

We were unproductive because we were striking, and we were striking because we wanted better conditions, and didn't want the industries closed. We were 'uncompetitive' because our unions had won us better pay than the countries we outsourced our work to. Want British jobs for British workers? Blame the people who outsourced and sold for profit. You can't be pro-business and against the consequences of business.


If unions are the militant wing of the Labour Party, then billionaire, tax avoiding, soulless businessmen are the mililitant wing of the Tory Party. I wish the unions still mattered to Labour, but arch Blairite Miliband wants them to have even less influence.
of

 

[Tom]

I must say that Unions have evolved and most of the ones in heavy industry now have severe elements of fascism and xenophobia. They have undertaken strikes based on the use of foreign firms legitimately winning contracts etc.

I think the Unions in terms of their 1970s concepts are outdated and ineffective now. The concept of protecting worker's rights is one of the most important things, but being aligned to a Labour-backing-comewhat-May organisation is no way of achieving what's best.

 

[GaryH]

Attacking people for having different beliefs? You mean like the EDL?

No, like thugs. Anyone who attacks someone else because they have different values, beliefs, religion, colour, whatever is just thuggery.

It's hard for people to integrate in an area where they feel threatened, so they stick to their own and suspicion grows on both sides.

Sorry but I seriously dont believe that where this occurs its because the people feel threatened. Its partly due to councils grouping people together in the same area, and its also due, in some extent to gangs fighting each other over differing beliefs.

What does 'integration' really mean? It sounds so fascistic, forcing other people to bow to some imagined collective culture. So what exactly should immigrants integrate to? Should they all become punks or goths? Both valid British cultures. What extent are they supposed to integrate to? Is selling takeaways enough? Are we demanding they strip themselves of all their culture and heritage or just the bits we don't like? We seem to mistake immigrants preferring to stay around people of similar backgrounds as them refusing to be part of wider society.

Ok, my stand on integration is this. If someone comes to live in the UK, they must abide by UK law, they should be able to support themselves, have a basic grasp of the lingo, they should respect our traditions and beliefs which have existed in this country for thousands of years in the same way that we are expected to respect theirs, and they should be here to contribute to the country, by that I mean, they may have a particular skill which they can bring to the country, such as being a doctor, or an engineer, for example and not come here to basically sponge off the state. That's what I would expect of me if I went to live in another country and I dont think those demands are too stringent in any way.

It's also funny how this issue never mentions the many areas full of nothing but middle class white people where anyone different, be they poor, black, Muslim, foreign, whatever, is looked down on.

Oh I agree, living down in the South West i've seen first hand how people from "outside" are looked down upon. Even British people coming to live here experience it in some form (from what I have seen since living here for the past 4 years and coming from Cardiff which was a more diverse city).

 

[BigT]

I find that a bit, well, condescending. The main employers of Eastern Europeans are industries such as food processing and manufacturing, because the people who have immigrated over to the UK to do those jobs still find them much more economically beneficial that staying in Poland, where the economy is much worse than here. (That said, many of them are often exploited by the third parties that get them those jobs, but sadly it's still the best opportunity they can find in this current economic system)

So what you're basically saying is that I, a university student from a fairly working class background, should be annoyed because a lot of the people that do manual labour jobs aren't British? (Not that I'm some kind of snob who sees anyone doing a job like that as some sort of "peasant" (because if I was, then I'd probably be a UKIP voter), but I couldn't care less about people from abroad taking less desirable/skilled jobs, because they're doing it to improve the lifes of themselves and their families, and I sympathise with them and respect them for doing it.)

Thing is, my generation is full of people from all range of socio-economic groups with further ambitions that involve university and not just leaving school to work in fields for the rest of our lifes. Just because a young person comes from a working class background does not mean that all they want to do in life is spend it working in steel mills, many of us, believe it or not, have aspirations that don't end with us being racist because the polish have taken all our cabbage picking jobs.

All this "UKIP will increase apprenticeships and labour jobs for the British youth" talk just seems like an attempt from the top to repress social mobility to me...

And you accuse me of being condescending! What makes you think that all of these Eastern Europeans are happy just to be cabbage picking?
Read my earlier post, they are now taking over middle management jobs, skilled engineering jobs and going to university during the evenings as well.
They are like a cancer taking over from within, they only employ other poles once they get into a management position.
Like I said I'm glad I'm not young any more, I genuinely feel for today's youth.