To be increasung concerned about Restore Britain.

Yes - and that fractured landscape is really threatening our stability. I do worry about things getting completely out of hand, in part stoked by bad actors. How do we know who's genuine or paid troll/paid protestors these days? It's hard to even properly gauge who's truly popular and what's essentially a manufactured spike in popularity.

Read my original post. We’re being asked to choose between the situation as it is now which is untenable and Restore’s stance, which is also untenable.

BUT, if this government don’t get a grip on quality and quantity soon, more and more people will be caught between a rock and a hard place when casting their vote.

We need to follow the money on this one:

What's Maria's work history and how much tax has she paid?
Now she is 'a carer' - is she claiming carer's allowance? What other benefits are Maria & Tom claiming?

I'm sure the Home Office would be more sympathetic to Maria's story read something like; Maria arrived at 17, trained as a nurse and spent 35 years working for the NHS (and paying tax) instead of living in squats, selling stuff on market stalls, running 'a friend's hotel....'

The Guardian, as usual not asking the right questions but going hard on the 'poor Maria' angle.

I agree with this.

People are feeling more annoyed with the current gov.

Apparently Kemi, as good as she is, isn’t enough to overturn the annoyance of the last gov, so it’s all leading to a fractured vote.

I mentioned this upthread. We are already losing high skilled immigrants.

But they still can go through the Interpol and the standard visa process on the cases they actually have in UK soil.

The websites with the visa data.... what for does UK need access to the whole website? Those visas are EU visas with the EU citizens movements between EU countries.

The one about criminal tracking, it sounds more reasonable that it would be shared. I think they should renegotiate that one.

Also, before supporting a fascist revolution type 'reset', I suggest talking to people who come from countries that actually experienced it. The 'it can't get any worse' rhetoric is more than naive.

It absolutely would be.
Politics is the accumulation of individual decisions by every citizen. You support this, the consequences are on you personally.

So the solution is to kick out these decent hardworking migrants? Because that seems to be Restores plan. Or is that not enough and we should have masked men set fire to their house with them and their children inside?

Citation needed.

@Persephonia1966 The people in question did everything "right" followed the system and jumped through all the hoops and were told they can stay and arranged their life accordingly.

and this is why immigrants who have followed legal channels are becoming increasingly vocal about economic migrants coming here illegally, claiming asylum and being handed a life on a plate. Everyone is hacked off with it, not just native Brits.

Yes.

The health surcharge is unconscionable for people who ALREADY PAY TAX through their employment. They are taxed extra just because they're foreigners. And visa renewals have become extortionate (£4K for one year renewal??). One expat from a North Eastern Asian country told me this week 'congrats, foreigners really don't want to come here or be here any longer'). They've given up on working here although they are very qualified because of the disgusting way they've been treated here in the past couple of years. Some Restore trolls on here will applaud this, but with the departure of those people, some very interesting economic opportunities will also leave our shores. In the long run this will make us small and embittered.

So you’d kick out my SIL, who works as a consultant physician for the NHS? Who came long here long before Brexit and now has ILR? Or would that depend on the colour of her skin (she’s white as it happens)?

By do something wrong do you mean break the law?
The article you posted is about an eu citizen who came here on a holiday visa in 1976 (9 years before the shengen agreement was signed and 19 years before it came into effect) and never went home. Then allowed her rented home to be used as a brothel pled guilty to doing so and is now complaining that she's being deported for being a criminal.
I don't know why you think anyone should feel sad for this woman shes an admitted criminal who should be deported.

My own specific fault? Really?

I think the country is headed that way anyway and, in truth, wonder if it would really be such a bad thing?

It would make a for a clean slate, a fresh start as it were - this would hold a lot of appeal, considering where the country is now:

• 2 tier laws and policing, where only white people are fully accountable before the law
• our government is useless and has no control over anything, such as our borders, and only exists to keep raising taxes
• demographic change on overdrive, making parts of the country completely unrecognisable (a multi-cultural society is a good thing, if it is arranged around common values and citizenship, but instead we have a balkanised system where different groups rarely mix and have very different values)

I could go on and on.

Oh yes, I want immigration to be stopped. All of it. Stopped. Legal, illegal. Stop it. We’re approaching a time when deaths outnumber births. Let it.

I have a bit of an issue with declaring that millions - millions - must just vanish though.

@Charlize43 that needs stopping I've seen that re the pension access despite paying little or next to nothing in tax. Yes it is our welfare system, the benefits need to be stopped and handing out ILR like smarties.

When I temped in an education/immigration type environment, I was quite surprised as the number of immigrants with Italian & Spanish passports who had African birthplaces and now had UK ILR - which gave them full access to all the state benefits. Some were only a few years away from retirement and would be eligible for pension credit despite having paid little to no tax?
Why is there a trajectory to head from Africa to Europe via Spain & Italy with the ultimate goal the UK? The welfare system?

I've worked since I was 16 and am well past the 35 years needed to get a full pension so why should someone who has never worked or barely paid in get pension credit?

Answers on a postcard, they should not.

It was a case of "be careful what you wish for" for people like my MIL.

She voted for Brexit mainly because she objected to immigration, particularly from Poland and Lithuania, especially after a hospital stay during which she was mostly nursed by non-UK staff from EU countries. She thought the NHS "deserved better" and that UK nurses were going to work overseas because "their" jobs had been taken by immigrants, when in fact the two she knew of had emigrated to Australia for better weather and a better life.

Her next in-patient stay was a couple of years post-Brexit, when she spent 5 days in ICU being nursed almost entirely by Fillipino nurses. She banged on and on about it, her main gripes seemed to be that she couldn't understand what they were saying and they didn't give her sugar for her Weetabix.

The saddest thing about it is she's an intelligent, well-educated woman who just can't get her head around the fact that, without some immigration, some of our essential services would be a bit fucked.

I live in a country where most migrants who are granted leave for more than six months are required to pay the Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS) as part of their visa application so they aren't at risk of sponging of the state. People who are there for less time have to pay for healthcare themselves or through insurance. Asylum seekers are only given a small amount of living expenses every week plus a room and aren't entitled to benefits. Other migrants don't even qualify for regular benefits until they have been living there and paying into the system for a set number of years. To get a student visa you have to put a substantial amount into the economy. And they are looking at tightening up rules even further so that only actual citizens qualify for benefits at all.

I live in the UK. We already have a less generous benefits system than much of the EU (and much less generous than it was historically) and migrants are already restricted in accessing it. The new proposals. If they went through would be icj more radical than in most places.

The idea that Restore are at one extreme and Labour at the other and the middle ground is where we should be aiming is misleading "let's meet in the middle said the unreasonable man. And you take a step forward, he steps backwards and repeats "let's meet in the middle".

What people?

'If millions have to go, millions will have to go' (quoting Lowe) is objectively entering ethnic cleansing territory. I'm not saying that Lowe is proposing to actually kill immigrants - at least that's not what he's saying now- but think about what the statement implies if taken seriously, which it should be. An endeavour of that magnitude (MILLIONS for Christ's sake!) cannot happen without a shocking amount of violence. Pointing out that fact isn't intolerance, it's ringing a very overdue alarm bell! Ethnic cleansing isn't a mere 'point of view'. It's evil that needs to be contained.

Are there a million small boat men here?
Who exactly are these millions you want to evict?

What bothers me is that some people who will vote for Restore/Reform will only vote for them because of their stance on immigration and will not look at their other policies.

Really?

Back to their country of origin. Of course.

Failing that, my "blast them into space" scheme is worth a look.😉

The small boat men destroy their papers on purpose, to try to prevent being deported.

In those cases I would take them to the shoreline, hand them a dingy and tell them to get cracking.