To think Count Binface is doing a great job in the Clacton by-election?

[Darker]

Count down to Bin Day!

Count Binface has been out bigging-up Clacton and drawing attention to its potential.

It’s a really positive campaign.

I don’t think he’ll win but I’d love it if he did. I think he’d be brilliant.

And if he doesn’t, I think other candidates could learn a lot from his approach.

I obviously have no idea what you do in the NHS and am not asking, but the Reform proposals would affect many, many NHS service users. You will have come across them in your working life. Some of them may be your friends and family, or in fact, you, if you're unlucky in the future.

I was in reasonable health in my early 60s until last year when I contracted sepsis. I was fortunate to live, but it has left me with serious health issues. I'm not claiming PIP or anything else apart from Carers Allowance yet as hoping for improvements but can't rule it out as my mobility is compromised. I'm also full time carer for my bed bound husband and although we're financially OK if far from rich, I hate the thought of people in my circumstances struggling with the benefits system and endless financial scrutiny and worry.

Helping people who can work back into work with proper support is one thing, these proposals are not that.

It was always going to be like that though. A lot of the rhetoric served two purposes. Eg the idea that "some immigrants are contributing but most aren't. They are not "net tax contributors" and therefore a drain. Its attacking immigrants but sets up the idea that anyone who isn't a "net tax contributor" is a drain. So, that's lots of working people and families doing important jobs like care worker, nurse, teaching assistants, lots of blue collar jobs who are a drain because they aren't paying enough tax.
Also the rhetoric against "HMOs" in Maker field which could be about immigrants in HMOs but is vague enough to also appeal to people who don't like other HMO occupants (usually low earners/young people/students who can't afford to buy a whole house).

But you just tell people that everyone is sponging and cheating the system except them and it works.

Very much agree @Persephonia1966 . I just hope that eventually there will be something that makes people leaning to Reform realise that yes, they do mean them as well as brown people on small boats, because at the moment it is the equivalent of turkeys embracing the idea of Christmas.

On a lighter note, the Count obviously knows about Mumsnet (he referenced the favourite biscuit thing)

Anyone think it would be an idea to approach MNHQ to ask if he'll do a Q and A?

Most very ordinary people, like me and DH, just shut up, and pay our tax bills every year. I'm no keener to pay for economic migrants to be processed here than anyone else. But they keep coming, uninvited, and clearly think there's a wonderful world awaiting them. I do believe that we need a repellant option. DH is suggesting Rockall Island as a detention centre. I know he's joking but if the default setting while migrants wait for process is a Hebridean island in a tent or Portakabin without a ferry service, it might be a deterrent.

Who will staff the detention centre, your DH?

Do you mean asylum seekers with economic migrants?

I don't think there would be a staff presence @Hedgeknight. Just the migrants, under canvas. Obviously, we're only considering completed uninhabited islands.

Axis POWs who had been actively fighting us before capture were treated better than that.

Did you see the little baby on one of the boats the other day? What do you propose doing with them?

Hilarious

Hope you and DH will providing the electric fences.

Anyway, as there are plenty of threads other than this nice one for people to share ill thought out Final Solutions to the migration issue, I'm going to email @MNHQ and ask for a Q and A with Count Binface. They've had loads of other politicians on so don't see a problem if he were up for it.

The problem is general migration and asylum seekers are talked about as if they are the same thing. Most migrants are primarily "economic migrants" or people who move for love or family and apply for work, family visas etc ahead of time and outside of the UK. Maybe there are too many economic migrants, maybe there are too few. But if we drastically reduced it our prisons would face staffing issues and we might have to release murderers etc (oh wait!) and people would be sad their American husband couldn't come and live with them.

Asylum seekers (people who are in the process of applying for refuge) and refugees (approved including people who got here 50 years ago) are a much much smaller group. In total they are 0.7% of the population. Asylum seekers whose claims are being processed are a fraction of that 0.7% and the ones with no legitimate claim are a fraction of that. Which is still a lot if you are trying to find accomodation for people while their claims are being processed. But they are not the reason for any demographic changes people might see and like/dislike. Neither is it an invasion. We already have quite robust standards for rejecting people falsely claiming asylum. (I guess that's what you mean when you say economic migrants being processed). However, for a long time no-one was actually sent back because the last government (Tories) had a stated plan to "deter" people by not processing their claims. This just meant the numbers of people waiting built up and up. It did not deter anyone. Even though Jenrick painted over that children's mural.

I agree we need to process claims and send back people with no right to stay. The problem is a large proportion of people applying have legitimate claims, they aren't tempted here by the luxurious conditions in migrant housing and aren't economic migrants. The conditions in the hotels are probably a bit worse than the average homeless hostel which are also bleak. They are living where they have been told to live by the government. You can't apply for asylum outside of the UK so everyone that does it has to get to the UK first and then apply. This isn't the same thing as being "illegal" or cheating the system. They are following the rules of the system as it exists.

I don't know what housing people on remote islands would do for "deterrence". For one thing, there are already people living in Scottish islands and if a hotel of migrants in a city is such a disaster** I don't think housing all the asylum seekers in tents on winter in an area with 100 local people is better? If nothing else, it's going to be annoying for the Scottish crofter to keep tripping over the frozen bodies of children and adults on a winter morning. The current plans to house migrants away from urban areas on former army bases is giving the far right reasons to demonstrate so why would they be OK with Scottish rural areas? Unless it's just a fuck the Scots thing.

Also how bad do you want it to be for the deterrence to work? I guess your description of tents/portacabins on northern Scottish island = bad but I don't want to put words in your mouth by calling it a concentration camp. But... it sounds like a concentration camp. The worst case scenario for these kinds of plans is you have people forced into very poor living conditions. And then we can point to the consequences of these poor conditions (cramp anyone into a very small space and restrict food and you will see worsening mental health, suicides, an inability to keep the area clean because the infrastructure isn't there to remove waste, criminality because ummm they are freezing to death) and say "see these people are bad". And it is also counterproductive as presumably when someone is granted asylum they will struggle more having lived in a concentration death camp for five years.

I completely get the frustration when people with legitimate concerns about migration are labelled racist. But can't you see how "put them all in tents in freezing Scottish islands, that'll learn em for fleeing war" opens one to legitimate criticism?

**I lived near one with no problems and without realising it existed. I appreciate other people have had other experiences.

Have sent email. We can only ask!

I’m not as bothered about migration as I am about very rich people and corporations not paying uk taxes.

Farage supports tax avoidance.

Reminds me of Trump saying it was ‘smart’ to not pay taxes.

Sorry I wrote my very long post before reading than that last comment about putting people under canvas in freezing conditions.
What every gets you and your DH going I suppose.

Maybe one day climate change will radically affect how we live in the UK. If your area became uninhabitable and there was nowhere for you to go in the UK, you might have to become an "economic migrant" to survive. Would you like to be trapped on a deserted island, in the cold, in a tent? If not, why is it ok for others?

You say you and your husband are very ordinary people. I fervently hope that's not true. I don't want it to be commonplace for people to have no empathy, no imagination, to be cruel and treat others as a subspecies because of pure accident of birth.

Sadly, we know @ClarkeandNewman it has happened before. Study of the Holocaust was a major part of my degree and I ended up with no doubt that given the right encouragement and environment, some Brits would have happily run concentration camps. It starts with the othering and the permission to see certain groups of human beings as less.

I agree, and if it wasn't so serious, it would be interesting to see how the same tactics are being used by Reform et al as were used in Nazi Germany (or the Rwanda genocide or any other comparable instance really). You only have to look at Farage's rip off Nazi poster to see that it's being done overtly, presumably on the basis that you'll always get people who will cheerlead for atrocity.

It starts with the othering and the permission to see certain groups of human beings as less

As nobodies.

I feel like there's been an upsurge in Nazi type stuff. The announcement of the attack on disabled people - calling benefits to disabled people ' suicidal.empathy' - there's some pretty deranged stuff around at the moment. Whose survival.are we talking about? Seems it's largely the leaders of reform.

Yes and in Nazi Germany and similar states there was a warped ideology behind it all, hideous and terrifying but a kind of systematic 'reasoning'.

What is happening here is all about the coin at the heart of it and like Al Capone's tax bill, I hope that will be their undoing.

And their paymasters

Suicidal empathy is heaviy promoted by Musk and the US Christian right wing.

Oh no I think they also believe it will stop the other people they don’t like claiming pip-the mentally ill. They don’t believe in mental illness -everyone with a MH issue is either a snowflake or a criminal in the view of reform.

Ifs actually quite hard to get PIP as it is-the assessment process can be quite brutal and is rigorous. But Reform don’t let that get in the way of their rhetoric do they?

oh dear this has got very dark.

I do agree about the threats. I have several vulnerable people in my life who are terrified of what is happening even under a so-called left of centre party.

As a democracy we need to retain our right to satirise and protest.

Yep, it's been on the rise since the coalition government of 2010, just quietly working away in the background until we get to the point where right wing populists can brazenly make comments about "suicidal empathy".

I saw an exhibit at a museum in Berlin. It consisted of many floor to ceiling length sheets each with lists of legislation brought in from the first Nazi coalition government in 1933 onwards. There must have been thousands of these laws, starting from relatively minor restrictions and ending - well, we all know where. It was a visual representation of the slow creep of oppression.

I think this is where Binny has been a public good. He's a reminder that there is another way, one that is humourous, not filled with hate speech and self interest and I still think...I hope..that has huge appeal to what is best about the British national character, the "mild knobbly faces" of Orwell who support the underdog and value tolerance.