Immigrants, house prices, it's all here

[gingerjedi]

Yes, but those immigrants were white, innit?

I was going to say post colonisation as I knew someone would pick up on that.

[expat]

Turns out locals prefer to be on unemployment benefits rather than pick strawberries or hard labour work like this. If job rate for picking up strawberries would go up to satisfy those lazy on-benefits-locals then it would result not in boost to inflation, but simply local producers will go bust as they would have no chance of competing with imports. In effect in this case cheaper imported labour helps save remnants of local manufacturing.

The preferred solution of course would be got Govt to tell people on benefits that they have to work or lose benefits.

So the answer is that workers should be ready to work for less, except in IT where the answerr is that employers should be ready to pay more.

[Churchill]

The idea behind UK Citizen test is that those who can't understand English wont' get passports. I took it and it is fairly easy, IMO, they should have replaced it with Cambridge Proficiency test - if you pass that well then you are probably good enough.

Cycling - Shirley?

Btw, with your penchant for squirrels, are you in the "Tufty Club"?

[lilelvis2000]

I spoke to someone today who took the UK Citizen Test - a pile of politically correct twaddle that is either trivial, irrelevant, advertising welfare and a deliberate sleight of hand to disguise the real problem of not having a proper border security system.

So he snuck in did he?

[bogeyman]

Don't panic! we're still going to get the immigration we need! Brown has decided to ignore the report:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7324485.stm

But to be fair. He's got to get his voters from somewhere, hasn't he.

I hear rumours that he'll hauling Mugabe on board to manage the next Zanu-Labour electoral campaign.

[AtW]

Btw, with your penchant for squirrels, are you in the "Tufty Club"?

No, next...

So the answer is that workers should be ready to work for less, except in IT where the answerr is that employers should be ready to pay more.

In low skilled jobs the unemployed should be prepared to do them or lose the benefits. Frankly, anyone who gets benefits should be doing at least 20 hours a week of community work even if it just involves going around to pick up garbage to keep streets clean, if anything this would be useful to teach them not to throw rubbish around.

For high skilled jobs the situation is this - if you don't get the best people who know that craft from abroad, then it would make offshoring your jobs easier. This will probably reduce local wages, but not by as much as they would be reduced in case of offshoring. It may well be that giving work visas to Indians actually helped give really crap reputation to Indian outsourcing - personally I'd never outsource anything IT related there at all even if they offer to do it for free.

[hyperD]

So he snuck in did he?

(s)he walked it in minutes and was telling me how irrelevant it was (she's working, married local etc).

Should be 2 questions:

1. Can you read/write/speak English?
2. Have you got a job or sufficient funds?


And as for workshy dolescum between the ages 18-65 who use the phrase "...I chose benefits because I want to spend more time with my 9 kids...", picking tuliping strawberries should be mandatory or withdrawal of the priviledges of 40%+ of my taxes.

We pay for old and sick first. Young jobless couple want more than 1 child? Good, make sure you can afford it out of your own pocket then.

[bogeyman]

Top recommended post from BBC HYS...

How many of us will have to vote for the BNP before the big 3 get the message?

545 others recommended that post, at time of writing.

Much as I loath the BNP, the poster has a point.

The mainstream 'political classes' won't listen until the electorate really kicks them hard up the arse.