This government and their direction of travel, frightens me.

[Kendodd]

Teressa May (last government, but same party) with her 'go home immigrants' vans and hostle environment.
Immigration and Borders act.
Transportation to Rwanda.
Bringing laws in trying to limit our right to protest.
Lying to the queen to prorogue parliament.
Lying in the house of commons.
Trying to change the law to get one of your MPs off.
Pretty much ripping up the ministerial code.
Windrush.
Admitting that they're just going to break international law.

I bet they will come after the human rights act and try to get us out of ECHR.

Worse, I think a great many of the public love the fact they've done all the above and would cheer loudly at the ripping up of the human rights act and ECHR membership (wtaf?)

How did we get to this?

The reason many asylum seekers try to come to UK is often because they have connections and family here or can manage a bit of English— there are sadly also gangs of usually home grown arseholes taking their cash and lying to them about how easy it is here. The idea they all head to UK though is bollocks— we get a ton of it here in Denmark as does Sweden and Germany— more than the UK— they just don’t make such a political hoo ha about it and some get accepted and some get deported.

I think though in all the hoo ha about asylum seekers , it’s very easy to overlook one of the things that has actually contributed to high numbers and that is overstayers— so they don’t come in on dinghies— they come in as students and don’t go back or tourists to see family, initially getting visas etc— this has been very poorly managed by successive governments and ends up with people working in the black market and often unable to leave UK . However even with all this, it isn’t the reason we have problems with health and housing— it’s straight down to UK government policy and poor investment and priorities. It’s no secret they want to sell off the NHS, so underinvestment, say it isn’t working— and they don’t go a bundle on social housing either— the other countries I’ve mentioned have more immigration per head than the UK but don’t have the same social issues because they don’t have hard right wing governments prioritising making money for their mates- and I’m not some rabid hard left winger either. As @Alexandra2001
Said— it’s a far better thing to get to the root cause , root out the gangs and provide legal ways of applying from their own country. If they are refused after that and then try secondary ways , then they are simply returned back to their home country

@woodhill

We are never given the chance to see

Well, thats not true is it? In the 80s & 90s (long before FOM and mass immigration) the NHS waiting lists where terrible too, the numbers waiting for treatment were proportionately longer than pre CV.

Blair trebled NHS spending, built loads of new hospitals and got them down.... yes PFi isn't great but neither are the alternative of no hospital.

If you want better public services than cutting income tax isn't the way to do it.

Why don't you understand that by accepting refugees (most of whom travel through several safe countries to get here) the country is getting more and more overcrowded, and our services can't cope with it, to the detriment of those already here. It's not rocket science fgs

Legal migration far far outstrips so called illegal migration and who has increased legal migration? Clue its the Tories.

There was still immigration in the 90s.

However, not the amount now.

I think things like affordable housing was much better then

@woodhill

There was still immigration in the 90s.

However, not the amount now.

I think things like affordable housing was much better then

So why don't you campaign for more social housing. It was intended to be affordable til the council houses were sold off.

@woodhill in the 90’s I was was working for £2.50 p/h and there was no such thing as minimum wage. Housing certainly wasn’t affordable for me.

You may be remembering housing as cheaper but there are a lot of factors I think you’re missing.

To add, if memory serves correctly back in the 90’s single mothers were the reason it was hard to get social housing, well according to the media anyway.

And us benefit scroungers who were hording bedrooms, I had an extra 5 in a cupboard I was keeping for special occasions

@woodhill

I also despair at the lack of housing, health care, educational opportunities but instead of blaming external factors, i hold the Govt to account, they choose not to spend enough on education or health and its their policies that sold off social housing, leaving us 99% reliant on private landlords.

What our most recent governments are very good at is blaming their failings on others, first it was the EU, now its Migrants, the cost of energy due to Ukraine, cost of living crisis due to world inflation....... but its their policy decisions that make the situation worse for us in the UK i.e public sector wage freezes, cutting in work benefits, failing to tax energy companies, failure to reduce vat on fuel.... yet the rich get richer under their stewardship.

Um, one of the great things about our country is precisely that we're allowed to be 'dissidents' without having to seek asylum in a freer country. Let's not emulate the Soviet Union or Putin's successor to it.

I would have more sympathy for this argument if most right-wingers in government and the media were actually bothering to help poorer people in this country. But the very same people who are most anti-immigration are often the ones who when actually challenged to improve housing, etc. here, will suddenly start accusing the people who need it of being lazy, skivers rather than strivers, etc. They supported Thatcher's sell-off of council houses in the 80s which set the scene for a lot of the current lack of affordable housing; and supported later policies such as the bedroom tax, which aggravated the situation.

As regards NHS waiting lists: they'd be even worse without immigrants. People of immigrant origin make up a higher proportion of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers than would be expected from their numbers in the population.

Tory Britain

And if you hate migration so much, why is your instant suggestion for anyone who disagrees with you, that they should...migrate?

Beautifully written! So true! Great Britain is not so great anymore! It's just an advanced third world country with poverty, homelessness, weak infrastructure, and many other challenges found in developing countries. People are entitled, especially the younger generation who are lazy and difficult to train, thereby low skilled and unemployable. UK will be doomed without immigrants. For example, imagine a scenario where all foreign workers in the NHS are not there anymore. NHS will come to a standstill! I support asylum seekers as majority of them come here for a better life, work hard, contribute to domestic output and GDP, and pay taxes on their earnings.

People are entitled, especially the younger generation who are lazy and difficult to train, thereby low skilled and unemployable

As much as i agree with your sentiment, i do disagree with this, the people i find who are intransigent are the older generation, most whom couldn't hold a candle to a migrants worth ethic & keep voting Tory!
so the young people i know are working hard in the NHS, law, construction, advertising, the military, science... yes as always there are lazy ones but ime the minority.

UK will be doomed without immigrants. For example, imagine a scenario where all foreign workers in the NHS are not there anymore. NHS will come to a standstill!

absolutely! as i ve said before my mum was cared for by a former Syrian migrant, working Stroke specialist in NHS.

Many seek to work in the public services as a means to pay back the help we've given them.

I would say a country full of wonderful, compassionate people of which many are ignorant too. Easily manipulated by factually incorrect news and propaganda on immigration, refugees, etc.

I don't think you should work with charities if your attitude is "you know where the door is if you don't like it".

Mrs Thatcher's great sale of council housing was only open to those who owned and occupied their properties. The Right to Buy was granted at discounted prices, because councils were struggling with the burden of maintaining them. They were not put on the open market. And guess what? When the newly minted home owners were able they began improving their homes to do all the work councils couldn't afford. Yes it was a great deal for all parties at the time, but 40 years on councils haven't replaced the social housing so we now have a huge shortage, which has also been exacerbated by social and demographic changes, and in particular the tendency of households to fragment into smaller units.

The NHS would be hamstrung without immigration, but it actively goes to countries like the Philippines, Ghana and Nigeria to recruit instead of investing in training enough doctors and nurses here. If there are Syrian migrants with medical training and a sufficient command of English to work here, then it's a no-brainer to fast-track them into jobs for which they're qualified. But let's not delude ourselves that every young man on a rubber dinghy is on a burning mission to work as a hospital porter or crop picker.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hardline-denmark-has-spent-20-years-deterring-migrants-flfjs5rxr

A PP suggested upthread that Denmark is more welcoming, but this article from the Times last Sunday suggests otherwise.

The NHS would be hamstrung without immigration, but it actively goes to countries like the Philippines, Ghana and Nigeria to recruit

The Philippines deliberately trains far more nurses than it could ever employ specifically to export them. If they didn’t come here they’d go to another first world country. A lot go to Australia and New Zealand.

@Blossomtoes, and they are highly valued. DMIL had Philippino carers before going into residential care, who were moonlighting from their day jobs with the NHS.

The Thatcher Right to Buy fire sale was limited to those renting their houses. Apologies.

A much better plan, if the government genuinely wants to prevent deaths and put people smugglers out of danger, would be to put in place a system for processing asylum claims before people arrive here, and/or a safe and legal means of crossing. A plan which clearly involves major human rights breaches is never going to be a good plan.

So presumably the people you speak to don't inform themselves of the facts, which is a pity, because it would save them from getting into such a lather about immigration. For example, the fact that we actually only take a very small minority of asylum seekers the world over, and way less than most other countries in Europe, and are anything but a soft touch.

The problem is that the government and its supporters, particularly the Mail, are assiduous in keeping the population in a froth about immigration by spreading an awful lot of misinformation about illegal immigration, which really is nothing like the problem you and others on here think it is. There really is no "tidal wave", we don't make illegal immigrants welcome nor do we give them any benefits at all (the clue's in the word "illegal"), and we don't take nearly as many refugees, asylum seekers and legal immigrants as other countries in Europe or indeed Africa. Nor do we house them in luxury hotels, if they're lucky they get housed in a shared dormitory in a hostel or a run-down B&B.

If the government really wanted to do something about the situation, it would process investigations, visa applications, applications for citizenship and asylum appeals much more quickly than it does - as matters stand it takes at least 18 months to process an asylum claim that realistically could be turned around within 3 months, which is a ludicrous waste of time and money.

Unfortunately you do not see that the government is gaslighting you. If you doubt it, do you own research - but do use reputable sources.

@Alexandra2001 that's a very sweeping statement about the older generation.