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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

to think if the country is already 'too full up' we should probably stop having so many children?

207 replies

IceBeing · 24/08/2015 13:00

After listening to a discussion on a bus between two women, it would seem that the country is far to stretched to take in any refugees at the moment! We are full to busting and not enough money for services for those already here.

AIBU to wonder where the concerns of these people were when they had the (apparently) six kids that were along with them?

The refugees are already alive and in need of shelter, food, medical aid etc. Our unborn need not come and add to the problem....

So, maybe a China style policy...although we could probably afford to do 2 kids per family....unless we really are full to busting as indicated.

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Werksallhourz · 27/08/2015 14:04

I tell you what is full of vitriol, discrimination, and racism, Myrtle.

War.

My DH's home country went through civil war in the 70s. He has relatives that saw civil war in the 80s, and others whose home country is currently going through a war that is so revolting it beggars belief.

My own family barely escaped complete annihilation. I have relatives in mass graves that they cannot exhume because they are a biohazard. I was in Bosnia in the mid 90s and saw the utter devastation.

All of it came down to population and control of resources. All of it. Everything comes from these two factors. They will tell you it is about "religion"; they will tell you it is about "ethnic hatreds"; they will tell you it is about "class".

That is just a blind designed by the western mass media to portray "the other" as "uncivilised". When you actually look the situation, it will be actually about control over trade routes and shipping, or access to powerful public sector or political positions, or control over commodity-producing areas, or control over fertile or commercially-important land.

What fucking really pisses me off is the arrogant, patronising notion that this will never happen in Britain. That there is something so bloody special about Britain that something like this would never occur, no matter how much the population increases, no matter how much you disenfranchise people, no matter how much you fragment cultures, no matter how fraught you make access to resources, public services, homes and jobs, somehow Britain will never succumb.

Because implied in that belief is a very "racist" notion that it happens to other people because they are somehow savages. That they are stupid. That they are blood-thirsty. That they are inferior. That Britons are superior.

The reality is that civil conflict has not occurred in Britain for four hundred years because we haven't had the ingredients for it (though we came close in the 70s). We kept population increases slow, we absorbed and naturalised immigrants fairly well into the general social fabric until the late 1970s (who now knows immediately which Britons are descended from Yemeni Muslim sailors that settled in Liverpool in the 1920s?), we have had no severe resource scarcities, we have had a stable establishment. Crikey, we even cleared slums and built "homes for heroes" after WWI and created a welfare state after WWII to stop things kicking off.

But we seem to be in the process of destroying all that in the fastest way possible. And I look out at the general situation, and I think things are starting to crack. And no amount of calling people racists is going to stop the process if the trends continue as they are.

People look at UKIP and think "xenophobe". I look at UKIP and think "omen".

We have to take control of the situation. Migratory flows need to calm. Population figures need to stabilise. Access to resources needs to be just. We need to consider infrastructural capacity.

Otherwise, we are asking for serious trouble.

Incidentally, Queen Rania of Jordan has just said that 100 million jobs need to be created in the Middle East by 2020 in order to prevent disaffected youth from joining jihadist causes and devastating the region.

I ask you this: how the fuck do you create a 100 million new jobs?

And I will ask you another question: what the fuck are we going to do when these 100 million new jobs fail to materialise and the consequences begin to affect Britain?

IceBeing · 27/08/2015 14:32

werk well that is a post I can get 100% on board with.

The problem is not really an actual decrease in lifestyle standard due to immigration...but a perceived one...

Or more likely an actual degradation in lifestyle caused by the government diverting funds to the rich...being blamed on immigration.

How can we change this knee jerk response of humans to blame any sort of change in circumstances for the worse on anyone that looks or talks or thinks a bit differently from them?

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IceBeing · 27/08/2015 14:39

As for creating 100 million jobs...I wonder if we can sort two issues at once...one possibly solution to global warming is to increase the albedo of the planet by for instance covering the sahara desert in something reflective. Maybe the global economy could stump up the cash for it. 100 million * 30,000 per year is hmmm 3x10^12...that is actually genuinely a lot of money....

It is unusual to come up with a number larger than the yearly profit of tescos but there we have it...

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IceBeing · 27/08/2015 14:43

profits of Exxon mobil would almost cover it though...bloody hell!

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Werksallhourz · 27/08/2015 16:15

Ice it seems you are seeing the problem through a very narrow lens here -- that of discrimination. In reality, the discrimination is often a consequence of resource scarcity. The resource scarcity comes first.

If you want to get rid of discrimination, you need to get rid of resource scarcity first. You cannot do it the other way round. To do so would contravene the principles of supply and demand, which have been, pretty much, fundamental social behaviours since time began, because discrimination is embedded in those principles.

Lets look at this from a different perspective. I have two bananas. There are ten people that want one of my bananas. How do I choose which people to give a banana? I can do it in a number of ways: by how much they are willing to pay, by whether I know them, by whether they seem more in need of a banana than the others ... but what ever I choose, I am discriminating against the others on grounds of price, tribalism, or perceived need. No matter what I do, I am discriminating in some way.

The only way for me to not discriminate is to have ten bananas. The problem is that, in the real world, we never have ten bananas. Or we do, but they are in the wrong place. Or we have them at the wrong time.

The further problem then comes when those ten people that want bananas suddenly become twenty, thirty, forty, fifty people wanting bananas.

Now take this concept through into healthcare. The NHS is finite. It is two bananas. It has to discriminate. And it did this from the beginning. It discriminates at the first point of call on the basis of "tribalism" and "price" -- i.e for the British residents, paid for through the British tax system. Then, once in the system, it discriminates on the basis of need, so the woman with a high risk pregnancy gets more ultrasound scans than a woman with a low risk pregnancy and so on.

What you appear to be asking for is for the NHS, say, to discriminate entirely on need, disregarding tribalism or price. There's an immediate problem here. You no longer just have ten people that want bananas; you have hundreds of millions. How will you then discriminate? Because you will have to. You can't say "on need" because there will be more people with "severe needs" than the NHS can cope with.

The second immediate problem is that you've already got a system that discriminates on price and tribalism. People have already paid for the service through the tax system by virtue of being from the same tribe (British residents paying tax). This is akin to taking a banana from someone that has already bought one and giving it to someone else because you think they deserve it more. There is a word for this: theft. Grin

The issue is that, for many British public services, the person that you think deserves the banana more than the person that paid for it will inevitably be of another "tribe", by default of the fact that the service is set up to discriminate on price and "home tribe". So when these banana-removed people complain, you are seeing it as "racism", when, in reality, it is about access to scarce resources that have already discriminated on price by virtue of tribe.

So then you are saying that, well ... these people aren't actually getting their bananas stolen or, if they are, the rich are stealing them.

I would say, in return, that we have an NHS funding crisis, we have a housing crisis, we have a schools crisis, we have an infrastructure crisis (sewage in London, spare electrical capacity is at warning levels, water reserves are very problematic) ... these are shrinking bananas. They are not "stolen", but they are definitely getting a lot smaller than they used to be.

As for the rich stealing the bananas? Well, yes. Imv, a lot of the global super rich are stealing bananas left, right and centre, but when it comes to British key public services, such as the NHS, the budgets have increased YOY. Then problem here is that the increase in the supply of bananas still does not match the increases in numbers of people wanting bananas.

And we can't cover the sahara in something reflective. It's someone's else sovereign territory, ice. It would be like covering one of your neighbour's roof in tin foil without their permission. And good luck trying to get permission from Libya at the moment.

Sothisishowitfeels · 27/08/2015 17:25

This is a subject which confuses the hell out of me. I see pictures of refugees on the news and feel awful for them but at the same time by allowing them into Britain in such large numbers surely that just creates a conveyor belt if people born in war torn countries and moving to the UK. Thousands Nd thousands every year. I don't see how this solves anything at all for anyone.

IceBeing · 28/08/2015 15:12

werks I do see what you are saying...but I don't agree that we are actually in a global scarcity situation.

Its more like you have 100 people, 200 bananas and you are using all the bananas to fund the development a new even faster method of removing brain tumours (that on average not even 1 person in your 100 has) while 40 out of 100 of your people won't make it to adulthood due to drinking dirty water and dying from treatable illnesses like TB.

We have the billions to spend on health. How do we justify spending the majority of that cash on those who already have the highest life expectancy?

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