The immigrant barge - what’s actually wrong with using it?

[NC523]

Educate me!

I looked at pics from the inside, it all looks very much like standard student accommodation to me, including common rooms/relaxation areas/health support on board. Residents can go on & off the boat, it’s passed fire etc safety and been used to house people in lots of other situations. I don’t understand why people think it’s not ok. Can anyone explain please?

But the rate of processessing has been falling dramatically - giving people the impression that the numbers of arrivals is arriving at that rate, which is simply not true -no need to recruit and retrain if they simply retained the staff they had, so forget spending all this time and money or barges, improve the working conditions of the people you are losing, and recruit and retrain more!

It doesn't take more than a few weeks to train someone for this job, and this situation has been left unaddressed for more than 5 years!

it could all be resolved by Christmas - that is what needs to be done. No need for barges at all.

Really! listen to yourself!

"increase processing capacity so quickly"

what do you mean by that? You have swallowed the fantasy hook line and sinker!

processesing capacity needed to be increased? no it didn't, it needed to stop being decreased.

processessing capacity needed to be increased "so quickly"?? so quickly as what? Nothing has happened quickly, nothing at all - why do you think it has?

The students are paying for this or their parents are. Why shouldn't they have decent facilities

I'll quote in full because yes, this is the ground level, at the coalface, living experience

Quite, it won't happen though and you'll get the bleeding hearts who don't have to deal with the reality in their local area condemning anyone who dares to suggest there are big issues.

The problem won’t be solved until there are safe, legal routes for asylum seekers. The problem won’t be solved until asylum applications are being efficiently processed.

Any talk of barges, hotels, Rwanda etc etc is all just noise - a pathetic attempt to whip up hate as a distraction from the Government’s incompetence.

There wouldn’t need to be huge numbers of Asylum seekers warehoused anywhere in the government were processing applications properly.

I don’t really understand how the standard of student accommodation is relevant. Asylum seekers aren’t in charge of student accommodation.

Where would they go though? Council lists are years long, renting privately is expensive and requires references etc, if they were processed quickly does that really make everything fine?

Well, for starts if claims were actually processed anyone who was not a genuine asylum seeker would not be able to stay. In cases where asylum was granted, those people would be able to work & contribute to society - including in jobs where there was a shortage of workers.

@0021andabit Well, for starts if claims were actually processed anyone who was not a genuine asylum seeker would not be able to stay. In cases where asylum was granted, those people would be able to work & contribute to society - including in jobs where there was a shortage of workers.

If only everything was so wonderfully efficient. Rejected asylum claims would be subject to spurious appeal after appeal that would drag on for years. But you already know that.

As for successful claims, where is all the property - private or social - suddenly going to be conjured up from? Every day there are threads about MNetters unable to afford their homes or being kicked out by landlords or unable to secure council houses despite being on waiting lists for years. And the majority of these MNetters will be employed in steady jobs with good credit ratings and family support networks.

So where then are all the well paid jobs that successful asylum seekers will walk it into, allowing them to affordable vacant property not currently available to the existing population?

They need to pull their finger out and process. The only media outlet giving a voice to the people kicked out of their hotel jobs is GB News. Im not a fan but i did watch when i heard they were going to be interviewing the husband of a woman who lost her hotel job BECAUSE NO OTHER FUCKER IN THE MEDIA WAS DOING IT. apart from Talk TV They also did a report on what was happening in the flats in Chelmsford. Residents in the area did approach other media outlets. THEY DID NOT WANT TO KNOW.

Im saying this as a Remain voter but what is happening AGAIN here is people ignoring and treating working class ppl with disdain. THAT is how we ended up with Brexit and history is repeating itself here with working class people turning to outlets like GB News because others dont want to know. And people living in mouldy crap housing while waiting for social housing was mentioned by a PP Well some of the mouldy crap housing IS social housing. Also covered by GB News in the same report.

Here........ Unfortunately its Farage. But see above!!!

Never known a student to be forced to share accommodation, in fact in all the Uni's my DD looked at, it wasn't even an option, its a recipe for disaster!

On the wider point of "where to put migrants" well, as i pointed out, we would need 276 barges, i don't know how many port cities and towns there are in the UK with suitable moorings, let alone the number of available barges but clearly, the Govt's chosen option is not a good one.

I think we need far better returns agreements, paying countries to take back economic migrants, Nigeria is a member of the commonwealth, as is Pakistan, India.

If these places are unsafe, why are we trading with them? accepting them as equals in the Commonwealth?

Sorry I don’t understand what you’re saying - that we just should not honour our international commitments to people fleeing war, torture and persecution?

I agree that under this government the system really, really isn’t efficient: the number of people waiting for an asylum decision has increased by 408% since December 2017 -which is 5x more than the number of annual asylum applications has increased by. So, the problem isn’t the increase in people coming here - it’s the slow processing. Incompetence by an incompetent government more interested in stoking culture wars than actually running the country.

I also agree that there is absolutely an affordable housing shortage but that’s not because of asylum seekers - it’s because the government hasn’t and still isn’t building enough affordable housing.

We claim to be a developed country on the world stage & yet you’re saying we can’t support as many asylum seekers as France, Italy, Germany, Spain?

The issue with people who are migrants getting placed in hotels is absolutely scandalous. At least two hotels in a local tourist town are filled with Ukrainian families and asylum seeking refugees, so tourists have nowhere to stay and the local community gets upset despite the fact that the Ukrainians are welcomed and do work and contribute to the economy.
This is in Scotland, so the Scottish government or the council has no jurisdiction and basically the Home Office decides where to send these people, although they do supply some funding.
Who is profiting from this ? The hotel companies are obviously making more money than they would otherwise ( and if they are 4* hotels that's outrageous).
The other question is who makes a political gain from this? The migrant boats on the Channel aren't a problem for anyone except locally in the South. But spreading migrants across the whole country, using up hotel accommodation, taking forever to process asylum so legitimate and dodgy people are housed together for years....
I'd be interested in seeing a map of where most migrant hotels are. My guess is a lot of them are in marginal constituencies where they can sow division in the voting public.
The barges are just a distraction. But anyone who thinks that not having a chair of your own to sit in, and only a bed is acceptable should consider if they'd accept that as a care home for their parents, or in a hospital ward.

@0021andabit No matter whose fault it is the result is the same. The housing isnt there.

well if you are living in London, then there is a good chance that your children's maths education is dependent on refugee teachers - and there is a desperate need for more maths and science teachers, and many asylum seekers have the qualifications to fill these vacancies.

Thats just a start.

We are not getting out bins collected regularly at the moment, as our council cannot recruit enough drivers....

Two desperate needs in our society right now that refugees could potentially plug - I could easily list 20

Do you not think the demand for housing pushes up the prices in owned and rental markets so there is a correlation surely

So people get angry at the asylum seekers who can't come here by legal means, who are not allowed to work or contribute to society until their claim is processed by a government who are deliberately holding up proceedings and then suggesting that the solution is putting them on barges, not actually processing their claims.

Then you have people complaining that the people on barges are getting a better deal than people in shitty social housing or private rentals that are unfit for human habitation and being angry at the asylum seekers for living off the taxpayer.

And yet it's all the bloody fault of the government. The state of housing, the asylum backlog, the token barge, the Rwanda plan, the lack of policing that means the crimes people are complaining about aren't dealt with. They're in control of the lot of it. And they're deliberately (and openly) stirring up this anti asylum seeker sentiment because they think it will benefit them come the general election.

This barge is a concentration camp. I only looked up the definition because another poster was scorning the suggestion, and I found it full fills the definition exactly.

The British invented concentration camps - something we would prefer everyone else in the world to forget.

Hands up anyone happy today to be supporting a policy of placing vulnerable minorities in concentration camos in our country today

It will be interesting to see the polls in the coming weeks as I imagine the gap between conservatives and labour is going to decrease ( the support for conservatives will go up purely based on this issue).
I think a lot of people commenting on these threads live in their idealistic bubble and are completely removed from real life and from what’s happening in town and cities around them.

Support for the Conservatives has been pretty static (and very low) for months, despite all the posturing about Rwanda and stopping the boats. Not sure why this would make any difference, no one actually thinks it will stop the boats, and the only way to reduce the numbers waiting for asylum claims to be processed is to bloody speed up processing them.

Then you have people complaining that the people on barges are getting a better deal than people in shitty social housing or private rentals

Thats not what i said at all so pack it in with the gaslighting.

They obviously ARE trying to pit asylum seekers against working class Brits which is why the former are mostly sent to working class areas. The MSM need to pull their finger out and REPORT it in this way

Oh and my DM came here in 1960