The People demand that the Boats are Stopped.

[noblegiraffe]

I keep reading about the Tory government working hard to deliver the people's priorities:

"Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Government are focused on five immediate priorities. We will halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut NHS waiting lists and stop the boats."

Halve inflation (will happen anyway), grow the economy (vague), reduce debt (vague), cut NHS waiting lists (maybe by paying nurses and doctors more?), stop the boats (what?).

Maybe it's just where I live, but I'm not seeing this immediate urgent need to "stop the boats". It's certainly nowhere near my top 5 priorities for the government to be immediately tackling. If it was, I'd probably look at creating legal routes for genuine asylum seekers as a first step rather than shipping them to Rwanda.

Is it in your top 5 urgent government priorities? Are they speaking to the people and I've just completely missed it?

YABU: Stopping the boats is in my top 5 government priorities.
YANBU: I'm more concerned about something else and would bump Stop the Boats down the list.

What benefits?

There are only legal routes for very limited categories. If you are being persecuted but are not in one of the countries the Tories find it politically expedient to favour, there is no safe route available.

Does it come above education, crime, and social care for you? Why it in your view more of a priority than those?

I live in the SE, just 7 miles from the south coast and my net income is quite a bit below the average.

Not only do I not care about "the boats", I recognise the contribution that refugees make to our society and think that any humane nation should welcome those fleeing war and persecution.

I also think it's important that the UK honours its obligations under the UNHCR 1951 convention on refugees, especially since the UK played a significant role in drafting it. Countries that are member states and don't honour the international agreements made in the UN are little better than rogue states imo.

If the government is genuinely concerned about the costs of accommodating those seeking asylum, they could get their arses into gear and speed up the processing of asylum applications. Then they could repatriate those found not to be genuine refugees and the genuine ones would be able to start work and contribute to the economy much more quickly.

What a PP was saying about people on here going 'if you lived on the SE coast you'd care' and then people on the SE coast voting against the Conservatives in the local elections despite it being a Tory priority is certainly an interesting point.

(maps in this article) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2023/may/05/local-elections-2023-results-live-council-england

I certainly do. I work in welfare rights in a coastal county in the SE and see the evidence for myself every working day.

"The boats" still aren't in my top 5 concerns. I doubt if they're even in my top 10.

I don't think that is the general MN position in fact. I'm perfectly happy for immigrants who are genuinely illegal to be deported. What I would like is for the Home Office to set up a system where they progress asylum claims and appeals efficiently so that the non-genuine can be weeded out and returned quickly to their country of origin. Instead, we have an incredibly inefficient system where asylum claims can take years to process, where the relevant papers regularly get lost in the system, and where full capacity in the immigration appeals system isn't used meaning wholly unnecessary delays there as well. We also have a stupid system where people with valuable skills are left twiddling their thumbs for months and years, unable to work, because they are waiting for asylum claims to be processed.

However, addressing those problems isn't as popular with the Bufton-Tuftons of the Tory party as is leaving people in boats to drown or sending them off to Rwanda. So pouring money into the pointless, doomed-to-fail Rwanda scheme is of course the chosen option of this government, combined with beating up the RNLI for daring to rescue drowning immigrants.

This.

It's not even in my top 10...off the top of my head I'd say NHS, education, the CoL crisis and how it is impacting on the poorest and most vulnerable, Brexit (reversing it?), the removal of our rights to free protest, crime and policing (especially the Met), government corruption, climate change, housing...shall I go on?

We know what this is about - it's about lowest common denominator politics.

Are you confusing immigrants with asylum seekers?

can you not see that all the things you care about are closely linked to population density, and therefore immigration?

The vast majority of immigrants in this country enter entirely legally - >500,000 last year on various visa schemes. Odd that this topic never comes up, despite the fact we "had" to leave the EU to stop being "swamped" with economically active EU citizens

This. Absolutely.

What proportion of people entering the country do you think are doing so on small boats?

Can you not see that all the things I care about are caused by massive underfunding and/or incompetence by this government who are more keen to get their noses in the trough than look after the population?

So for those who are advocating more open borders, do you have a proposed yearly immigration figure in mind? How many is too many? Or do you think that we should have completely open borders? This is a serious question. I'm not baiting.....

Asylum seekers???

Open borders is not equal to a legal and safe asylum system.

Why are you talking about immigration and open borders on a thread asking about stopping the boats?

Is stopping the boats one of your top 5 priorities?

That poster was right though. Very few people had a problem with the EU. The Tories had a problem with it in that it was splitting their party. Instead of dealing with this problem in their party, they spilt their internal psychodrama out into the country and ballsed it up.

Of course it's important. Every way you look at this it is awful.

From a financial perspective. Do you know how much the government is spending to house the boat people? Provisional figure for last year is £3.7 billion.

What about the humanitarian aspect? The criminal gangs that prey on these people? The criminality coming into the country (people trafficking and drugs) via places like Albania.

The impact on communities who are already struggling with poor or broken infrastructure, lack of dental and health provision, poor schooling, lack of housing and on and on.

There's nothing good about any aspect of this and of course it should be an absolute priority.

No one arriving here and claiming asylum is entitled to benefits or social housing until they are granted refugee status. They're not permitted to work, either.

My friend arrived in the UK in the boot of a car on a cross channel ferry. She fled her home country, where she was a member of a persecuted ethnic minority, after being held in prison and tortured for 2 weeks.

She did not come to the UK because it is "a soft touch", but because she spoke good English, and no other European language, and because there was (and still is) an established community of members of her ethnic group.

As soon as she was granted leave to remain, she got a job and has worked and paid her own way ever since.

The impact on communities who are already struggling with poor or broken infrastructure, lack of dental and health provision, poor schooling, lack of housing and on and on.

Why should stopping the boats be a top 5 priority over those issues?

The money spent on housing people who arrive by boat could be massively reduced by putting an efficient asylum processing system in place. That way, the non-genuine ones could be shipped back quickly, and the genuine ones could move into the normal system and would be free to go into employment and start paying tax, NI etc. Goodness knows we need them, we have hundreds of thousands of vacancies in the NHS, care system, and the hospitality and construction industries.

As for the humanitarian aspect, the government could sort that out very easily by offering safe passage.

The problems within the NHS, housing and education have much more to do with mismanagement by a government that has chose to throw away billions on placing contracts with its mates and the sheer folly of Brexit. If anything, bringing in more people able to fill in some of the gaps in health, education and construction could only be helpful to the poorer communities.

My point was in response to someone saying that no one had a problem with the EU until the Tories started banging on about how bad it was. I was reminding them that it was a Tory who was a staunch EU supporter, and called a referendum to prove that the public agreed with him, and to shut down the dissenting Brexiteers. If Cameron - a Remainer and the Tory PM - hadn't called a referendum, we'd probably still be in the EU.

Very true.

YANBU