To feel sick about this RE Tony Blair and Immigration, apparently it didnt interest him.

[EatenEasterChocsAlready]

I am staggered to have come across these articles this morning. Someone has written a book about him and immigration, interviewing people in office at the time, and so on.

Staggered I actually feel sick.

I expect the backlash over this, BUT I feel ill, because I live in an area that was really suffering in 2007 and I had my first child then.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3466499/Conman-betrayed-Britain-immigration-utterly-amoral-PM-led-conspiracy-let-MILLIONS-migrants-breaking-rules-deceiving-public.html

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3466512/The-Eastern-Europeans-shouldn-t-worry-numbers-Blair-turned-blind-eye-impending-migration-crisis.html

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3466485/How-Blair-cynically-let-two-million-migrants-Explosive-biography-reveals-PM-s-conspiracy-silence-immigration-debate.html

[EatenEasterChocsAlready]

Rafa I am sensing you have a problem with the Daily Mail full stop which may be causing you a problem with digestion of what has gone on.

Or maybe you don't care. Hey ho, thats OK we cant all care about every single issue in the world can we

But here is an article from the local paper at the time 2007.



www.getreading.co.uk/news/local-news/maternity-unit-rbh-fails-deliver-4258498


The department is struggling to cope with a rising number of expectant women in Reading, and closed its doors on five occasions in April and May.

Each time nurses were too busy to take any more patients and were forced to redirect mums in labour to hospitals elsewhere.

The crisis has been caused by a huge increase in the town’s population and it is pushing maternity staff to their absolute limits.

The Evening Post has had a number of complaints from women who have recently given birth at the hospital, who all say the ward is under-staffed and overworked.

"“I know there is a national shortage but I complained to the midwife in charge and she apologised and said there had been a massive influx of people having babies in Reading, especially teenagers and foreigners.”"

The hospital delivered 5,363 babies in 2006, an increase of 2.6 per cent since 2005 in a maternity department with
70 beds.

Mrs Allen, 38, from Wokingham, said: “I cannot stress enough how frightening it is when you are in labour so I would have been furious if they had been closed when I arrived.

“As it was, the staff didn’t even know which bed I was in and they were being called away to do deliveries so they could not look after the postnatal patients. I have to say my experience backs up the fact that they cannot cope.”

[EatenEasterChocsAlready]

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7215624.stm

another article from 2008 again these are my local hospitals

The NHS is spending £350m a year to provide maternity services for foreign-born mothers, £200m more than a decade ago, the BBC has found.

Immigration has raised the birth rate so fast that some units have closed, so that midwives could be moved to areas of urgent need.

A unit in Ascot, Berkshire, shut for two months in 2007 because staff had to be transferred to Slough.

The NHS says it is working to "build in" the extra capacity needed.

Other maternity units have turned expectant mothers away because they could not cope with unprecedented increases in the local birth rate.

When Labour came to power, the NHS spent around £1bn a year on maternity services, with one baby in eight delivered to a foreign-born mother.

Ten years on, spending has risen to £1.6bn, with almost one baby in four delivered to a mother born overseas.

While the number of babies born to British mothers has fallen by 44,000 since the mid-1990s, the figure for babies born to foreign mothers has risen by 64,000 - a 77% increase which has pushed the overall birth-rate to its highest level for 26 years.

Graph
In central London, where six out of every 10 babies born has a foreign-born mother, senior consultants and health managers blame the lack of resources to deal with the pressures of migration for unacceptably poor standards.

Professor Philip Steer, editor of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, said: "The Department of Health has been taken by surprise. The demographic change, the sheer numbers, has in some areas increased very substantially without there being any forward planning really to allow for that."

[AugustaFinkNottle]

Are you suggesting that the only way we can recruit staff is by having a totally open door policy to the whole of Europe!

It depends what staff you mean. If you're talking about NHS staff, the simplest way to answer the question is to look at what is happening now: it is understaffed even under our current immigration policies.

OP, if your local hospital was in that state it wasn't the fault of immigrants, it was down to poor planning and inadequate funding

I do not like the implications of that sentence, Augusta, and its inference. I do not blame any immigrant on wanting to better their lives and come to a country that can help with that.

OK, unclear phraseology. How about "It wasn't the fault of immigration"?

How could the local hospitals possibly plan and fund, when Blairs government was not head counting. Its all there in the slough council memorandum to Parliament. How can you set a budget and know how many staff to employ when your not given a heads up on how many people will need to use the service!!

Immigrants really don't all turn up at local hospitals overnight; there is information about the local population readily available, including information about likely increases given the need to plan housing. Inasmuch as the issue was down in part to inadequate funding of hospitals, that is clearly the government's fault combined with our own reluctance to pay more taxes, but it still does not mean that immigration is an unmitigated evil.

What puzzles me is the perception that leaving the EU will resolve the problem. We will still undoubtedly have immigration, we will still give priority to people from former Commonwealth countries, we will still grant asylum, and we will still have to accept a large volume of immigration from Europe if we want to survive as an economy. Leaving the EU won't be a magic bullet, and such benefits as there are in terms of immigration won't come anywhere near compensation for the financial disadvantages. For all that we don't want to pay extra taxes to keep the NHS, we won't have a choice but to pay hefty extra taxes for the country to survive.

[evilcherub]

Well, Tony Blair is the ultimate hypocrite. He didn't have to worry about finding his children suitable, affordable housing since he doesn't have to compete with millions of others on similar wages/benefits. He didn't have to worry about whether his children could get into the local school or would end up having to travel miles due to lack of places. He didn't have to worry about whether his children would be able to access the NHS or see a doctor in a reasonable time. And he has benefitted incredibly from his own biased policies. He is a vile, disgusting, amoral, money-grabbing creature as is his wife.

[AppleSetsSail]

Well, Tony Blair is the ultimate hypocrite. He didn't have to worry about finding his children suitable, affordable housing since he doesn't have to compete with millions of others on similar wages/benefits. He didn't have to worry about whether his children could get into the local school or would end up having to travel miles due to lack of places. He didn't have to worry about whether his children would be able to access the NHS or see a doctor in a reasonable time. And he has benefitted incredibly from his own biased policies. He is a vile, disgusting, amoral, money-grabbing creature as is his wife.

He has profited so beautifully from the violence he has brought upon the Middle East, TB as a 'peace envoy' is an insult to humanity everywhere.

His wife is a world-class fucker, she's been in the news again for her cozy, profiteering relationships with more human-rights abusers.

And yes naturally their children will face no hardship from overcrowding in the UK, they are enormously priviledged despite having attended 'state' school (the ho-hum bog standard comp that is the Oratory).

[evilcherub]

Yes, Cherie Blair's latest "human rights" cause is Buy-to-Let landlords who apparently are having their human rights abused because they are being asked to pay a little more tax on their rental income. Mrs Blair is a landlady herself, even though she is a multimillionaire and doesn't need rental income. Still if she can squeeze some more pennies out of the taxpayer (via housing benefit) or from a few low paid Eastern Europeans, I am sure she will be happy. She's a perfect Socialist - do as I say, not as I do.

[AppleSetsSail]

She's a perfect Socialist - do as I say, not as I do.

Absolutely.

Has she actually spouted out about her rights as a landlord? Please. These people are so vile. I'm gather you're fully briefed on her penchant for selling state gifts on Ebay.

[TinklyLittleLaugh]

Um, but as posters have said up thread, we were already actually signed up to a treaty allowing mass immigration. Tony Blair wasn't in a position to do anything to change that. It is nonsense to blame him for immigration, it is part of the Eutpean Union package.

Yes, personally I think mass, uncontrolled imigration is a very bad idea, but I do not see how that can be laid at Blair's feet. It must be laid at the feet of those who signed up to the original agreement, ie the Tory party, and their backers who have a vested interest in keeping labour costs low.

[MissMarpleCat]

Let's not confuse economic migrants with immigrants.

[BillSykesDog]

Blair carried out a huge con on the left which is ongoing to this day and has been hugely damaging. Labour was a party which represented the poor, in particular the working poor, no matter what colour, race or religion they were.

The left's shift to identity politics has mean that the working poor have essentially lost their representation because Labour has become a party obsessed with people who are non-White British, the less white and British you are the more they value you. They will pursue policies which they know are damaging to the existent poor here if it benefits their favoured groups.

They've become almost a single issue party, because no matter what they say they it's obvious that they will throw their traditional voters under a bus in favour of multiculturalism and diversity.

When Labour were elected in 1997 wages were reasonable, housing was relatively cheap and plentiful and even in the South East people who weren't loaded had a decent standard of living. Labour screwed that all up and hit it's core voters hardest in the process.

The left is now the party of wealthy middle class people who like migration because it means they can pay the people below them less so they can keep more for themselves. And as a bonus they can still think of themselves as being 'good' because they're patronising a few of those nice brown people at the same time as economically shafting the rest of the country.

Aside from that the only people I know who still vote Labour from working class backgrounds are people who aren't really interested in politics and still think Labour have the same policies they did in the 1980s.

I believe Blair deliberately focused on migration and multiculturalism because it allowed him to abandon the poor whilst still allowing him to keep the halo of being the 'good' party. Until Labour becomes the party of the working poor regardless of race, religion or nationality and shrugs off Blair's con I believe they will remain a spent force.

[BillSykesDog]

Tinkly, because non-EU migration massively expanded under Blair, plus he didn't use controls we could have used as part of the EU (restrictions on ascension state workers). To pretend it was out of his hands is laughable.

[TinklyLittleLaugh]

Blair has been gone for nine years now.

A hell of a lot of imigration has happened since he has been gone.

To scapegoat Tony Blair for everything is to absolve those who currently have the power to deal with the imigration issue and prefer not to.

[BirthdayBetty]

My local hospital have just recruited 70 nurses from the Phillipines and India. DC in the last 6 years he's been PM hasn't done much to change things.

[GooseberryRoolz]

Um, but as posters have said up thread, we were already actually signed up to a treaty allowing mass immigration. Tony Blair wasn't in a position to do anything to change that. It is nonsense to blame him for immigration, it is part of the Eutpean Union package.

The allegation is that he massaged the figures my quietly issuing work permits to 350,000 asylum seekers.

[Sophia1984]

Were you able to give birth safely and healthily at the hospital of your choice? I think if I relied on the Daily Mail for my news on childbirth and health care (and in fact anything) I would be in a permanent state of terror. That is what they do; it's how they sell papers.

[SpringingIntoAction]

The more people you have in an area, the more their trade, labour and taxes stimulates an economy.

Blair knew. Lord Mandelson admitted: “In 2004 when as a Labour government, we were not only welcoming people to come into this country to work, we were sending out search parties for people and encouraging them, in some cases, to take up work in this country.” (Daily Telegraph)

Cameron has told us repeatedly that he wants to reduce immigration to "the tens of thousands" but in each of the last few years the net immigration figures have been in the hundreds of thousands. We welcomed an additional 325,000 (of which 257,000 are EU nationals)additional people to the UK last year.

That number is equivalent to the size of a large town. But we didn't build a new large town to accommodate, we just stretched our existing housing, schools and healthcare, and hospitals to try to provide them with the services they will need.

And there's now some serious doubt about the accuracy of the Govt's own figures as in the past 5 years 2.25m EU nationals have registered for NI numbers but official figures show inly 1m EU immigrants over that same period.

257,000 EU Nationals came to the UK in the year ending Sep 2015, but in that same period 630,000 EU citizens registered for NI.

The suggestion is that the number of immigrants is actually much higher than the Govt's statistic show.

But the Govt refuse to release the full statistics on National Insurance claiming that it would "influence the referendum". When challenged, the said they didn't have the data available". Odd. FOI requests are still being persued in order to attempt to get the Govt to release the figures they are holding.

[EatenEasterChocsAlready]

Were you able to give birth safely and healthily at the hospital of your choice? I think if I relied on the Daily Mail for my news on childbirth and health care (and in fact anything) I would be in a permanent state of terror. That is what they do; it's how they sell papers

I don't think you have read any of the links.

Why comment on a thread if you have not read them?

There was also a link from the BBC at the time and the local Reading Paper.

Could you also point to your evidence that I only read the Daily Mail?
The only paper I could link from about this was The DM the Times is behind a pay wall.

I was a living breathing person at the other end of this mans policies. I didnt need to read anything about it, I was there living it.

Tony Blair was my Prime Minister he was supposed to put his own citizens first and take descions with our welfare as the top priority.

He clearly failed this.

He put my life, my babies life and many many others lives at risk in this one aspect of his decision to allow EU workers to come here.

As stated very clearly in the two articles mentioned this caused a massive unprecedented strain on NHS services, notably maternity services.

It may be a joke to you or not important, that a woman in Labour is turned away from her Maternity ward and sent miles to somewhere else.

Its something I take very seriously. At the time in 2007 unfortunately many women had horrific experiences in under staffed over subscribed maternity wards.

[AugustaFinkNottle]

OP, the fact that the articles said that immigration caused strain on NHS services doesn't mean it's true. It's the sort of mantra the Mail trots out all the time because it likes to keep its readers in a state of fear. As pointed out above, the birth rate in 2007 was in line with what it was in the 1980s and 90s, so you (and the Mail) can't possibly claim that it was unprecedented.

[BillSykesDog]

As pointed out above, the birth rate in 2007 was in line with what it was in the 1980s and 90s, so you (and the Mail) can't possibly claim that it was unprecedented

The birth rate may be in line, but there's an extra 350,000 people per year on top of that, with little extra funding available.

[AugustaFinkNottle]

But as we're talking about maternity services, it is the birth rate that is relevant.

[SpringingIntoAction]

AugustaFinkNottle

OP, the fact that the articles said that immigration caused strain on NHS services doesn't mean it's true.

1 house + 1 family = happiness

1 house + 4 families = overcrowding, lack of space, resulting in UNHAPPINESS

1 hospital + one carefully planned for set of NHS users = happiness

1 hospital + one carefully planned for set of NHS users + 325,000 unexpected additional NHS users = pressure on services, shortages, waiting lists, reduction in availability of healthcare, resulting in UNHAPPINESS

Alternatively

You cannot pour a quart into a pint pot

Only a fool, or someone utterly intent on deluding themselves, would continue to vexatiously argue that an extra 325,000 people sharing a service level that was planned for 325,000 fewer people would have no effect on that service.

[AppleSetsSail]

OP, perhaps consider a thread without the Daily Mail in its OP (bad call). Otherwise, all you'll get is this: It's the sort of mantra the Mail trots out all the time because it likes to keep its readers in a state of fear.

[AugustaFinkNottle]

Springing, as pointed out above, the issue in this thread is maternity services. and specifically the allegation that immigration was causing unprecedented strain on maternity services in 2007. The facts demonstrate that it wasn't unprecedented.

[AugustaFinkNottle]

Or, Apple, consider simply working on the entirely logical basis that it is never wise to accept what the Mail says unless it is fully backed up somewhere more reputable. Which sadly these days doesn't necessarily include The Times.

[AppleSetsSail]

Springing, as pointed out above, the issue in this thread is maternity services. and specifically the allegation that immigration was causing unprecedented strain on maternity services in 2007. The facts demonstrate that it wasn't unprecedented.

This doesn't consider local effects, though. Immigration happens in pockets.