UKIP second in Eastleigh...anyone from Eastleigh care to comment?

Not really. We are in so much debt and we need people here who are economically viable. If he works part time and needs top ups it seems too generous.

That's just mean, feeltheforce.

I understand your point about my friend working in the UK but he only works part-time so I am guessing (though not sure) that he also receives some kind of benefits to top up. My point is he is not a UK citizen, he came here because by his own admission you can get more in the UK. Then we are now also supporting his estranged family who live in another country. We just cannot afford this. Clearly we can't because otherwise my CB wouldn't have been stopped this year.

Why should the fact that she's never been to Britain come into it, though? Her child's father is working in the UK.

If your DH went abroad to work, then depending on the situation you'd get either CB from the UK or CB from that country plus a top-up from the UK if the UK's CB is higher.The various scenarios regarding who pays CB when one parent is working in another country etc. are here.

David Cameron won't be able to change the freedom of movement rules without leaving the EU.

vesela Sorry but I still feel the CB situation is wrong. My DH earns good money - he pays a lot of tax and we get bugger all in return. As a SAHM I really welcomed my CB. But anyway I accept that if it helps people in the UK then cuts have to be made but really, why should someone who doesn't speak English, isn't British and has never been to Britain (and is never likely to from what I can tell) get a proportion of our tax revenue. It's not like her father is British either. All because of EU rules. Do you really think for one minute that if DH went to Portugal/Poland or anywhere else that I would be getting CB from that country? I can tell you having lived in Italy that that is definitely not the case.

Like alemci says - who knows if the mother is getting CB in Portugal or even Poland (where she originates). She may be remarried (I haven't asked).

This is what UKIP tap into and they have a point.

I think it is the tip of the iceberg Lainie.

Yes, alemci, I do have a problem with these marriages.

I was at Heathrow recently and a flight from India came in. I couldn't help noticing the numbers of very young pregnant girls who got off this flight, all accompanied by older women. Were they brides from India? Or were they girls who had been taken out of school here and sent off to India to get impregnated in order to facilitate the entry of other people? It really made me feel uncomfortable, because, as I said, it wasn't one or two, but twenty or so.

Then maybe there should be more atttention given by politicians to clamping down on the men who marry someone from the subcontinent who does not speak English etc and it may be a forced/arranged marriage etc. Perhaps he has to prove he can look after her and not just go off etc when he loses interest. It is not really helping the economic situation by having more incomers who rely on benefits.

Vesela I don't agree with the CB situation that Feelforce outlines. Does the mother claim CB in Portugal as well

Whilst I believe in open EU borders - I think perhaps we need to consider how far east (and south) we intend to go. With Turkey's admission in contention - who might be next? Syria? The Lebanon? Down as far as Egypt?

We simply can't let everyone in who "needs" it. No matter how sad their sob story. Take for example the awful treatment in Africa of the homosexual population - life imprisonment or death. But, if one in ten of the population is gay, can we really take in 100 million gay men from the east coast of Africa alone? Can we take every hungry child globally? These are hard decisions, ones which perhaps people don't wish to actually have to think about - it's easier to say "come, come" than to sit and think about the realities of our global population.

It's interesting to me, as a realist with a "go-getting attitude" that both OP and zamantha who she commended live in a Left Wing Utopia where they believe that immigration should be welcomed - after all, Zamantha says "some of my best cleaners have been immigrants".

Crikey - champagne socialism at its finest - "All hail the minimum wage worker to do all those "icky" things - Little Jocasta doesn't have ANY migrant children in her class! so I say it's not a problem."

I wouldn't expect to get UK child benefit, obviously, but then I'm not working in the UK. Instead I get to deduct my daughter from tax here (in the Czech Republic).

It's right because it's his child and he's working in the UK. Child benefit is paid to the dependent children of people working in the UK. What's wrong with that?

I am not anti immigration if it is managed. There are loads of people who could bring so much to this country. But there are of course quite a few that come and don't. So it needs to be looked at.

I hate to say it but NF does have a point. Example, I've just lost my child benefit due to Dh earnings. A Polish guy I know has a wife from whom he is separated living in Portugal. She has never stepped foot in England. They have a child and you've guessed it.....she gets child benefit from our government. How is that right? and I guess that is the tip of the iceberg. I have got lots of Euro blood in me and nothing against the Poles or any others but you can only manage so much and surely people already residing in this country should come first.

All well and good about the Polish people working hard etc and I don't dispute that but where does that leave the English/British people who do work hard and want jobs. Isn't that stereotyping the British people implying that they are lazy etc.

To a certain extent yes it is stereotyping but like with most stereotypes there is an element of truth there.

There are of course many British people who do work hard. But there are also a great many who lack the self discipline, mentality and ethics to keep down a job.

I'm sure that in Poland you will find some people who bimble along without much ambition, happy to do whatever.

But of course they are the very same people who can't be arsed to move to a foreign country either.

So what we're seeing is the most motivated coming over to the UK and understandably taking jobs from locals who are unable to show the same level of motivation.

Oh stop it - the CSA can't get the funds from anyone not willing to pay maintenance for their children. That's when the mother is British born, & Uni educated, & the father has a fixed abode, straightforward job and isn't trying to avoid the authorities. The CSA is not fit for purpose and has't been for decades now.

A woman whose English is substandard, with not much information to hand about how to negotiate the system doesn't stand a chance of getting a penny via the CSA. (Assuming of course she has the funds to pay for the fees and phonecalls needed to apply to the CSA in the first place!)

Parents generally shouldn't be allowed to just abandon their children and with it any sense of financial obligation towards them but it happens in every community within Britain, not just specific ethnicities. There is not the will power to rectify this situation within any of the mostly male dominated political parties.

alemci
Don't the men have to pay maintenance for their children if they are married to the mother

Only if the mother goes through the CSA system,
is willing to have the court appearances to prove they are separated
realises that the CSA exists
knows where her husband is and what he calls himself
knows that she was actually married
the shame of the women and their lack on understanding (due to not speaking English) is shocking

alemci - I agree (on reaction to drunkenness etc). I wasn't suggesting that it was a reasonable reaction. It's basically vigilantism.

I agree Vesela that the people being drunk isn't a good thing but it is their choice and don't want people telling them they cannot and it is a no go area for them.

Don't the men have to pay maintenance for their children if they are married to the mother. I agree they like the women to be powerless and be limited by not speaking English which is a real shame and limits their choices but I think more should be done to make the men cough up. Afterall they brought the women to the GB and should support them. Does need clamping down on.

Mis
yup, the vast majority round here come from small pockets : when I was doing work papers for a batch, 15 came from the same village
AND
all of them saved every penny they earned and have now gone back to Poland rich men and set up businesses there

Poles from London comment that the ones round here all have the Southern (their equivalent of scouse) accent.

(by "general cultural issue" I don't mean "an issue of Muslim culture").

Xenia
its not just Muslims who are deeply intolerant - parts of North London are ribboned off by the Hasidim each week ..... and some of them have been here for 300 years.

Actually, its interesting to have you on this thread because many of the benefit claimants among the immigrants are non working uneducated women and their children - after the men have wandered on to the next relationship -
and religious bigotry has stopped those women being able to work.

Many Pakistani Muslim women who arrived in the UK as child brides barely speak English - and their husbands like it that way ...

IMHO the answer to the vast majority of indigence is education (of the taxpayer funded variety) - which of course UKIP would merrily cut if they came anywhere near power

Are you talking aboutSouthern Poland in saying thats where the latest migrants are from?

I had the fortune in my teens to travel with a Southampton family to Southern Poland (almost as far South as you can get ) to stay with their relatives whose paths had sent them in a different direction. The father of the group I travelled with had been born in a concentration camp, I believe it was in Germany. His parents were definitely from Southern Poland though.

We need the right for women in as few clothes as they choose to wear to walk on any street even Muslim in the UK. Perhaps we are going to have to arrange bikini walks through Muslim areas and become like those awful fat ugly Irish men and their stupid marches in Northern Ireland who take themselves so seriously. There should be no no go areas, no areas with notices up saying you cannot buy alcohol etc. Mind you Scottish islands can be a bit like that too - no playing in playgrounds at the weekends. Plus ca change.

We are one of the most tolerant countries in the world and must fight hard to keep our free speech.

Most immigrants have benefited the UK. However those relying on benefits are the ones we don't want as indeed we don't want our own citizens on benefits either.

I know, Talkinpeace - it (the popularity of Sharia law) seems to me to be a general cultural issue rather than one of immigration. A lot of it seems to be a reaction to high levels of public drunkenness etc., some of it coming from men who feel threatened by women, some from women who feel unsafe...

The proponents of Sharia Law in some of the Muslim ghettoes around the UK are often British Born ....

Misformum
1950's poles were northern. 2000's poles are southern. the first batch are on record as voting UKIP cos they do not like the latter!

and yes, UKIP are arses who will fade away soon.