Latest Moan From You and Me 2024

Here are two examples of people who arrived in UK and started businesses. Those businesses have now been destroyed. Who is the problem, the man who opens a computer shop and a cafe or the man who sets fire to them?

Belfast: 'My life is threatened - there is no hope here'

I am a regular visitor to my local hospital. I need quarterly assessments of my blood, which has a chronic form of cancer. Of the eight consultants that I have dealt with over the last eight years in that unit five are foreign. Iranian, Polish, Chinese, Hungarian, and Pakistani. They are all tip top doctors. I trust them with my life and have every reason to be happy in doing so. They are not a problem.

 

And I presume they all turned up on the beach at Dover in rubber boats.

 

Maybe they did. Why do you assume that everybody who is desperate to land on our shores has no qualifications?

 

Why do you presume they do?

 

Here are some facts about refugees.

The truth about asylum

 

I fail to understand why nobody is condemning us yet, for stealing all these countries doctors, surely they are needed in their own countries just like our own doctors are needed here but end up in Australia etc.

There just seems to be this mass movement of people all chasing the top dollar all around the world.

I'm sure in years to come it will all be our fault that the third world has no doctors because we stole them all.

 

From the refugee council.
Hardly an impartial view.

I think the thing you are missing is that the ones in rubber boats are not all refugees, lots of them are economic migrants, they have all paid criminal gangs large amounts of money to get themselves dumped here.
They throw away their passports so they can never be deported even if refused entry.

Which is the question Cooper hasn't yet answered, what do you do with the ones that are not accepted for asylum.

 

The apparent problem of asylum seekers would be reduced considerably if they could be processed much more quickly. There's a backlog of 95,000 awaiting a decision on whether they can stay or not. Someone needs to get their finger out...

To anyone expressing disgust at someone who's so desperate to escape poverty or persecution that they are willing to pay their last penny to a "people trafficker" and cross the channel in an overloaded boat - words fail me.

 

Re economic migrants, we have our very own Fiona Hill, who is now advising our current government on the future needs of our armed forces. She has written an autobiography called “There’s nothing for you here”, which were the words that her father said to her in order to make her leave her impoverished family home and seek a better life. And what a life she’s had…

 

Personally I have grown to think there are gradations on being a foreigner within a society.

I have found that there are preferred and non- preferred countries of origin, and have shamefully flown my Finnish flag watching the other white foreigners (East Europeans, Russians...) being treated rudely when I was engaged in a friendly conversation with the paperwork proceeding smoothly. I see this much less here in the UK than in the countries I lived before, but it's there.

Then there are the people of colour or with foreign names who will always be slightly foreigners in the country they, and possibly their parents and grandparents were born. My colleague gets regular racial abuse and well meaning "where are you from?" questions- she is third generation Geordie of Indian heritage.

There is also not enough information on the reality of integrated immigrates who work and pay taxes. We need workers and taxpayers, and must have some balanced view on how especially the younger population gets employed or draws benefits, regardless of background.

Immigrants are not solely "takers and gainers", but a resource. In a society where we have a large population already on benefits we need to understand the balance the movement of people is creating- are we actually on positive or negative side?