>>97283 I suspect it's more to do with the colour of their skin. We can tolerate a bit of yellow from a place we used to own, but apparently the black and brown lot can quite literally get in the sea.
Though we absolutely 100% should abolish the Home Office.
73,000 people is a lot to literally wash up on the beaches of small towns on the south coast, but it's basically nothing in relation to the population of Britain. The thing that interests me about the Hong Kongers isn't so much that nobody is bothered, but that nobody even knows they're here. I was talking about this with some colleagues and there was a slight sense of disbelief - all those people arrived in the country from Hong Kong, but there was no real sign of their existence.
I'm imagining an alternate reality in which the Home Office were actually on top of their brief. Asylum seekers could apply at a processing centre in Paris, cross the channel on the Eurostar, and immediately be housed in suitable accommodation in the UK. Their claims would be efficiently processed so that they could either start settling in their new lives in the UK or be deported back to their country of origin within a matter of weeks. In that reality, would anyone care about asylum? Would anyone even notice that it was a thing?
I used to suspect that the Home Office were deliberately shit at handling asylum seekers for opportunistic political reasons, but after the Manston fiasco I'm starting to think that they're just shit.
Migrants tend to form enclaves, e.g. Iraqi Kurds are concentrated in Hull because that's where Whitehall sent them, so the Hong Kongers are probably all in flats in parts of London as they've generally got money. I'm sure people would be complaining about them if they'd been sent to fill up hotels up and down the country like the boat people have.
I doubt anyone would notice the boat migrants if the shitrags didn't make such a fuss about them. Something of a similar scale happening and nobody noticing seems unbelievable because they make such a big deal out of it otherwise. It just demonstrates the ability of the press to skew perceptions. That's on top of what you've said there, not instead of.
Brexiteers gonna brexit (Reform party will beat lib dems next election, you heard it here first!) and remoaners gonna re-moan (and call brexiteers racists).
>>97287 I was in Manchester city centre last weekend, and was shocked at the invading hordes of Chinese people everywhere. Maybe they were actually all from Hong Kong?
I still haven't met a single Ukrainian. Not one. Someone shared something on Facebook about two blonde Ukrainian sisters in their early 20s who need a new host family until the war is over, but I know a scam when I see one.
My mum was asked by one of her bigoted, incessantly virtue-signalling neighbours if she couldn't take in some Ukrainians, given that she's got her whole house to herself these days.
My mum is getting more frail every day, and she already needs loads of help from me and NHS carers to be able to stay in her house. The last thing she is able to do is be the host for a group of foreign war refugees.
Not saying that Ukrainians like that don't desperately need our help, but you kind of get the feeling that taking in Ukrainian refugees is now the new eating vegan or driving an EV.
>>97292 I don't think anyone was expecting elderyly women with several health conditions to house Ukrainian families, m8. What are you even talking about? Did an AI write this or are you just weird?
>I suspect it's more to do with the colour of their skin. We can tolerate a bit of yellow from a place we used to own, but apparently the black and brown lot can quite literally get in the sea.
That's naturally an easy and tempting explanation to fall back on, but I do get the feeling that if you're still determinedly banging this drum after everything that's happened over the last 6-8 years, you're either stubborn or a slow learner. It seems to be pretty well agreed upon now, even in the most liberal lefty circles, that if we hadn't just handwaved and dismissed anti-migrant sentiment as plain old racism for the past several decades, we might have avoided the rise of right wing populism that ultimately (and misleadingly) gave us Brexit.
Without wishing to justify or excuse racism, because it certainly exists and plays a role in the public's perception of these matters, we have to be more honest with ourselves about whether there are in fact clashes in cultural values and social attitudes that make people less accepting of the brown ones. Actually, it got me thinking recently, I find it a bit funny how the same sorts of people find it so easy to openly condemn and criticise the Quatar world Cup right now for being backward desert tribe religio-nuts who chop up their women's bits and cut your hands off for being a bumder or whatever it is, are usually the ones holding up migrants as saints. There seems to be a weird blind spot where somehow it's fine to criticise them for not letting us wear rainbow hats to a footy game in their own country, but when those people get on a boat to come here, they're saints of virtue beyond reproach and the only possible reason you'd have to be critical of their culture is that you're a racist.
The fact of the matter is we simply don't have that clash of values with Poles and Czechs and Lithuanians and what have you. If it had just been them I think we'd have a lot less bad blood around immigration these days. My Czech missus fucking hates Poles though, it's weird.
I'm not sure that I fully buy that argument. We have got into a bit of a muddle about being able to discuss meaningful cultural differences, but there's also a lot of knee-jerk reactionary sentiment.
My neighbourhood Facebook group is a good example. Some of the people who were most strenuously arguing that we should support Ukrainian refugees were exactly the same people who moaned for months when a Polski Sklep opened on the high street.
I know these people, they're my neighbours and most of them aren't worried about having their wages undercut by cheap immigrant labour. Most of them are comfortably retired, a lot of them are currently outraged that people are going on strike, most of them would agree with the sentiment that British workers are just lazy and entitled. I've tried to understand it, but the only explanation that makes sense is that some people just want something to be excised about.
>>97294 >I find it a bit funny how the same sorts of people find it so easy to openly condemn and criticise the Quatar world Cup right now for being backward desert tribe religio-nuts who chop up their women's bits and cut your hands off for being a bumder or whatever it is, are usually the ones holding up migrants as saints.
I think the biggest disconnect I've ever felt along those lines was when people years ago kept going on about how female refugees in places like Calais were highly at risk of rape and sexual abuse before saying a few sentences later that we should let them all in, seemingly unable to join the dots that it was the male refugees committing the sexual assaults.
I used to have a Czech colleague and she said neighbouring countries took the piss out of them for being cowards during the Second World War and rolling over for the Nazis, so she had a bit of a chip on her shoulder about that.
>>97294 >if we hadn't just handwaved and dismissed anti-migrant sentiment as plain old racism for the past several decades
You'd have a point here were it not for the inconvenient fact that it was just plain old racism.
Absolutely, but I think there's an element of classism as much as racism there. It's more about the snobbery of comfortable middle class homeowners who care about their property values, it's bad enough when the new-build estate allows 10% of the builds to be used for social housing for our own poors to come in and lower the tone of a neighbourhood, let alone foreign ones.
Even if we accept the argument that refugees are a threat, the Home Office is still the problem. As it stands, people applying for asylum in this country often spend years waiting for a decision, trying to live on £40.85 a week. Only 4% of the people who applied for asylum last year have had their claims processed.
When people have their application for asylum rejected, they're rarely deported - not because of "lefty lawyers" holding up their deportation with spurious legal arguments, but because the Home Office keep cocking up the paperwork. When we were in the EU, we had a streamlined mechanism under the Dublin Regulation to send people back to the EU. We rarely used this, again because of incompetence by the Home Office, and we chose not to include equivalent provisions in the EU Withdrawal Agreement. We don't actually know how long it takes to deport people, because the Home Office choose not to publish the statistics.
>>97301 >trying to live on £40.85 a week
Is that really an issue? I managed a week of food on £12.50 once, which would leave £28.35 for toiletries and other essentials. You're not going to be living organic and buying a pot of anti-aging cream every week, but it's more than do-able.
I guess replacement clothes might be an issue, but you could save for a month and buy a new wardrobe across multiple charity shops. Learn to sew patches and you're golden.
What am I not considering? These people don't pay rent or utilities, right?
>>97302 One week is much easier to do than every week. It's doing it every week that fucks you up. At some point, you're going to need a haircut, for example. You don't need a haircut every single week, so the money doesn't include anything for haircuts. But this means that at some point, in the week when you do need a haircut, you can't afford one.
Most asylum seekers arrive in the UK with little more than the clothes on their back. Asylum seekers often wait years for a decision, during which time they're not allowed to work. They can be sent anywhere in the country, they have no choice over their accommodation and they have no rights as tenants. The government recently tried to accommodate asylum seekers in a hotel that had been derelict for 17 years until Liverpool City Council intervened.
There's a big difference between managing a week of food on £12.50 once and surviving on the bare minimum indefinitely. It's just inhumane that people who have fled war and persecution might have to go without a decent coat or a pair of shoes, especially considering that so many of them are skilled people who could be contributing to society. It's absurd that we have Syrian doctors and Iranian nurses who are scrimping to afford a charity shop coat on their meagre allowance, while we also have people dying due to a lack of NHS staff.
It all goes back to the hostile environment policy. The government lacks the competence to manage the flow of refugees and migrants effectively, so they've decided to make life as hard as possible for them in the hope that they'll just stop coming. It's a strategy based entirely on cowardice, ineptitude and wishful thinking that benefits absolutely no-one.
>>97304 Most asylum seekers arrive in the UK with little more than the clothes on their back
And I bet they're not paying the proper import taxes on those goods either.
I actually had three pairs of counterfeit Levi's jeans in my suitcase. Quite well made as far as I was concerned. Bought them at a tourist bazaar in Turkey for about 15 quid a piece. I'm not sure how they singled me out when we got back into Luton, or how they were able to tell from x-raying my suitcase or whatever. One of their counterfeit experts then pointed out flaws to me which he said were characteristic of fake jeans. I also had no receipt from a halfway plausible appearing clothes shop, which they told me would also have been important.
They confiscated them and I was let off with a warning because it was my first offence and three pairs still allowed the assumption that they were for my personal use and that I wasn't smuggling them commercially. They also said they would fine me if they caught me again.
Scary, not really. I was approached by customs on the way to the exit after picking up my suitcase and they just said politely, "Could we have a little chat with you about the contents of your suitcase today?". I then had to open and half unpack it in the customs area and they asked me all kinds of questions about the purpose of our trip to Turkey, and they were especially keen to know where exactly I had bought the jeans and under what circumstances. I would imagine that they collect that information and relay it to anti-counterfeit authorities abroad. Or something.
Border force are there for every inbound regardless, so it's not really a waste of manpower in that sense. As for why they bother to question 3 pairs of jeans, either because they have targets to meet or maybe it's as simple as building a case against the supplier or whatever. Or they have fuck all else to do and pick out the stuff with the least amount of paperwork so they can go back to sitting on their arse / taking 40 minutes to arrive at a medical to check their passport, useless cunts
>The government plans to change the legal definition of wine following Brexit, to reflect demand for low-alcohol versions of the drink.
>Under rules the UK inherited from the EU, wine typically has to contain at least 8.5% alcohol by volume (ABV) to be marketed as such. It means low and alcohol-free versions have to be sold as a "wine-based drink", or a similar product name.
>That rule will now be scrapped in England next year. The change is part of a wider package of measures designed to boost British winemaking in the wake of the UK's exit from the EU.
British grown grapes have a poor must weight, they lack flavour and are very acidic. Despite global warming so far, because grapes need a kind of warmer climate that even the south of England struggles to provide.
By lowering the threshold of what constitutes wine in order to boost British winemaking, you're allowing very poor quality fermented grape must to be passed off as something similar to what you and I think of as wine.
English wine has to be made from English grapes. British wine can be made from any old shit.
The cheapest bottles of plonk in your local corner shop aren't technically wine - they look like bottles of wine, they probably taste vaguely of wine, they're taxed as wine, but they can't legally be labelled as wine because the alcohol content is too low.
>but they can't legally be labelled as wine because the alcohol content is too low.
And the alcohol content is too low because grapes don't do well in our climate and produce too little sugar that can be turned into wine.
Some wine growing regions in continental Europe have laws that allow vintners to top up their must with sugar before fermentation during years with cooler summers. But it's only meant as a temporary fix to help them produce and sell wine at all that year. But to produce wine in the English or British climate that deserves that name, you'd have to top up sugar every year. And because sugar content isn't the only mark of quality of your grapes, you're still left with acidic, flavourless wines that can't even hold a candle to the sourest German riesling.
The point is that "British wine" can be (and invariably is) made from imported grape concentrate, rather than "English wine" that's made from grapes grown in England.
>Germany is considering deporting migrants to Rwanda, where it could use asylum facilities paid for by the UK.
>Joachim Stamp, Germany’s migration commissioner, proposed using Rwanda as a third party country for migrants amid growing pressure on the coalition government to restrict and deter asylum seekers from entering the EU. He suggested it could be part of a wider move by the EU to use existing asylum facilities in Rwanda, initially intended for Rishi Sunak’s scheme to deport illegal migrants to the East African nation.
>Sir Keir Starmer scrapped the Rwanda scheme immediately after winning the election in July, with the money saved by doing so switched to creating a new Border Security Command with then intention of smashing people-smuggling gangs using anti-terror style powers. The UK has already spent at least £318 million to pay for asylum facilities and boost economic development in Rwanda, which cannot be recouped.
>>99917 I read a rumour that the reason Rwanda is the location of choice for re-settling migrants is because the UK is housing a general which fled a failed military occupation during the Rwandan genocide - a basic threat to deport him back if they don't take migrants.
>>99918 That would seem like bollocks, mostly because given Kagame's near-total control over government, it wouldn't matter whether they wanted him back or not, or whether they got him back or not.
Where the Rwandan government has won out of all this is that an agreement to take asylum seekers in exchange for a massive bung would be blatantly illegal, and so they've been able to insist on receiving the bung regardless of whether the scheme happens or not.
The real problem is that because there's such high demand for holiday homes, residential properties where the locals used to live have been converted into tourist properties on a massive scale, and tenants who are resisting plans by their landlord to do the same are put under pressure by rising rents to get them to move out. Which does make life difficult for the locals, because in many well-known tourist areas, it's now almost impossible for somebody to earn a living wage to pay rent for a flat or even buy their own home. And that's also the main reason for the backlash against overtourism which you now see in much of Spain.
It would be much more effective to ban the conversion of residential flats and houses into tourist accomodation, and to set limits for rent increases. Or impose very high taxes on people who convert their property or charge drastically higher rent. While at the same time limiting new builds for tourism, so that land can be used for residential housing. There are actually proposals in some autonomous regions of Spain to do just that.
Also, why just impose that tax on non-EU residents? Are some German, Norwegian or Dutch buyers not buying up property for the exact same reason, i.e. to profit from rising property values and rent, and scarcity?
According to Statista, around 23 percent of foreign property buyers in Spain in Q4 of 2023 were non-EU citizens (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/774802/households-bought-by-foreign-in-spain-by-nationality-of-the-buyer/ ). Even if a 100% tax for non-EU residents virtually eliminates those 23 percent of buyers, you've still got 77 percent of EU buyers eligible to buy property without that tax, who are free to speculate with it as they please.
This is only going to disrupt the property market, and punish everybody equally who owns property, even those who have done nothing wrong and didn't take an active part in the speculation bubble, as they'll see the value of their home go down. Maybe that's part of the point of this proposal. Because it'll be good for buyers. But it's still bad for current owners.
>Because they aren't allowed to impose it on EU residents
Where does it say that? You already pay around ten percent stamp duty in Spain regardless of where you are from when you buy property there. All they'd have to do is raise that to 100% for everybody (who isn't a Spaniard).
My guess is more that Spain's socialist government wants to make sure the don't piss off literally everybody with the proposal. There would otherwise be a lot of moaning from other EU member countries.
A blanket 100% stamp duty for all non- Spanish residents, or whatever else you want to call it, would also cause the entire tourism industry to collapse, which would drag down much of Spain's economy. Altogether, it only accounts for about 12 percent of Spain's entire GDP, but in tourism-heavy zones and regions like the Balearic Islands or the Canaries, that figure is often 70 percent or more. Property prices would go down drastically, but most people would also be out of a job.
Discrimination on the grounds of nationality is prohibited in both the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the Agreement on the European Area; case law has established that this applies to the taxation of real estate investments. Spain would have to demonstrate that any discriminatory treatment was necessary and proportionate to the public interest, which has historically been interpreted very narrowly. If they tried it, the courts would basically say "fuck off and come back when you've built some more houses, you melt".
>>100916 >If they tried it, the courts would basically say "fuck off and come back when you've built some more houses, you melt".
Depends on who's bringing the challenge. There are two possible opposing strategies here. Interests in opposition could bring a test case that goes as far as it can in the domestic courts, which may well decide that it's necessary and proportionate, to get a reference to CJEU, which may well decide that it isn't. Interests in support could bring a test case that only goes as far as it needs to set precedent in the domestic courts that it is necessary and proportionate, and then accept that result, making it harder for any subsequent challenge.
Of course, this assumes that stare decisis is a thing in Spain, which it might not be.
Emmanuel Macron has caused some drama following his comments to reporters while he and Keir Starmer were meant to be announcing their new "one-in-one-out" approach to tackling illegal immigration.
>He suggested Brexit was to blame in the uptick in the number of crossings, arguing that the UK's departure from the European Union meant there was no way for people to be returned to mainland Europe after people crossed the Channel.
>He was referring to the Dublin regulation, which the UK was signatory to when it was a member of the EU, but is no longer.
>"Many people in your country explained that Brexit would make it possible to fight more effectively against illegal immigration," Mr Macron said.
>"But it's in fact since Brexit [that] the UK has no migratory agreement with the EU.
>"It creates an incentive to make the crossing, the precise opposite of what Brexit had promised."
>He added that the British people were "sold a lie…which is that the problem was Europe, but the problem has become Brexit".
>His words sparked condemnation from Reform UK leader Jimmy Savile
It's like Macron is deliberately trying to torpedo Starmer's attempts to do good, just for banter.
