Shocking Britain

[ShockingBritain]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxplq92rx1o

The crime wave from overseas gang led, drug dealing, money laundering, fake cigarettes, etc dominating our High Streets.

Would be an interesting AMA thread.

Ive written to my MP asking how easy it us to get a licence to open up a vape shop. There are so many of them in my small town. They can't all make money. Along with the huge number of barbers. Most have several 'staff' hanging around and no customers.

Care worker visas that allow families to be brought over and are a pathway to Leave to Remain are a disaster. People get their ILR and leave the sector, and that's potentially then another low income family that cost the state.

I'd support a scheme of temporary visas for single people who wish to work abroad for a few years and save money, and then leave. Although as things stand, they'd probably just claim asylum at that point.

you will see em on May 7th I suppose!

its interesting- Shirley high street in Solihull West Midlands used to be nice it’s changed beyond recognition and is full of “Turkish barbers” (none of whom seem to be able to cut hair) and these mini marts. One was recently closed down shortly after a machete attack took place by teenagers outside it
https://www.westmidlands.police.uk/news/west-midlands/news/news/2026/march/shirley-business-closed-down-following-licensing-investigation/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9qypgr229o

You think Care workers shouldn't have to hold a DBS? We've had the situation of African men raping women in their care and just going back home. Some people's lives are being affected by immigration. Someone who can't speak English shouldn't be able to come over on a work visa, unless highly specialised and a interpretator be justified. The solution is care homes out of the profit sector and fix what is going wrong. We don't need the care homes to mirror 12 hour shifts, which is part of the recruitment problem.

Yeh it’s not the best line.

You certainly will be seeing us. Roll on next Thursday.

It's very telling that this thread is purely about 'the crime wave from overseas gang led, drug dealing, money laundering, fake cigarettes, etc dominating our High Streets' and we are venting our frustration that it's taken this long to expose and acknowledge something the average person on the street has been shouting from the rooftops about for years. Yet all people like you can do is find weird reasons to excuse or defend it, and constantly push the narrative that anyone angry that it's happening is simply a gammony little bigot dressing up their racism as faux concern.

Just one more useful idiot happy to clap and cheer on the sidelines as our leaders sit back and let the country slide into ever deeper decline. Because no-one has the balls to tackle the most obvious problems by implementing the most obvious solutions.

Yes, there's so much wrong with our visa and immigration system and our law enforcement which is afraid to tackle crime. I hope we see this start to change.

It's crazy that we have so many people not working, especially almost a million NEETs. Top priority for the govt should be to get the NEETs working, even if that means improving wages and conditions in low paid sectors (which would probably cost less than paying out benefits and funding all the people coming in on visas who then claim ILR).

I imagine he's learning english and will soon be bilingual which is a great skill

Ah i thought someone was saying deport all turks

But also- why assume they’re not paying tax? The cleverest way to launder money is to comply with local tax laws etc- not paying tax is the easiest way to get caught

That is true but I think the point of them being cash businesses is so that they don’t pay the correct amount of tax

It’s not, it’s to clean drug money by injecting it into legitimate circulation- pretending you did haircuts and paying the tax on that is the easiest way to do it. Yes you lose a % of the cash but as dirty money it was worthless anyway

legitimising it is the whole point

Totally missing the point.

a) Don't we need people to be bilingual before we give them jobs in customer facing roles?

b) As it's a low skill, low wage job, can't one of the already unemployed do it?

What could possibly be so special about wandering around a shopping centre in a uniform while doing very little and having no real powers, that requires people to be brought from the Indian subcontinent especially to do it, and take up a space in a drastic housing shortage while they are at it?

Well there are two benefits. One is to not pay the correct amount of tax by understating your true takings, (window cleaners, cash only fish and chip shops, not money laundering but being a bit naughty nonetheless) while the other is to overstate your true legal takings, and pay tax on it, as a way of washing your dirty drug money and making it seem legit. (Nail bars, car washes, vape shops, barbers.) Most of the money wasn't earnt through the legitimate business but it's made to appear as if it was.

At least I think that's how it works.

Partly, but they will pay tax, the main reason is that as a cash business there’s no traceability as to the origin of the money. So use untraceable money to buy things, pay “staff” and owners, push that money through banks, into other businesses owned by the same gangs etc.

The point many PPs have made is that these shops are not busy enough to be sustainable - paying rent, rates, fuel, water, salaries, tax and NIC. If they are paying tax on payments from customers that don’t exist and HMRC have observed too few customers then that would be false reporting and would give the police a legitimate reason to investigate and then search the premises. If a coordinated approach was taken Trading Standards Officers may well be more useful recording customer numbers than challenging potentially dangerous criminals. But it would need efficient coordination and funding which this country seems incapable of

He still shouldn't be here as an unskilled worker though.

The other thing that happens in a lot of these businesses is that instead of employing people who already live here and have a right to work here, they bring yet more people from their home country. Part of the deal is that these people will rent a space in a shared staff house from their employer. So while some of them may, on paper at least, appear legitimate and be paid mimimum wage for HMRC purposes, the employer will then claw back a big chunk of what they pay them by charging an unreasonable amount for accommodation, and probably some sort of arrangement fee for bringing them over in the first place.

So in effect, the employee who has been brought over from Vietnam or Bangladesh or wherever, thinks ending up with £5 an hour and sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a shared room is perfectly fine, because all their basic needs are taken care of, and at home they'd only be earning £2 an hour before bills and sleeping on a mattress on the floor anyway. So that extra £3 per hour goes quite a long way once it's remitted back home every month.

If these people had to employ from the general populace and couldn't pull all these stunts to save money, the 'legitimate' side of their business model wouldn't work at all.

It's the same reason so many curry houses will bring chefs from Bangladesh and put them up in a box room over the top of the shop. instead of training and employing one of the many, many young men of Bangladeshi heritage who were born here.