To agree with Andy Burnham that it’s about time the middle classes took their fair share

[Morningteacup2]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/08/11/burnham-middle-class-areas-must-take-more-hotel-migrants/

Not a huge fan of Labour I must say, but this is well overdue!

We are taking in large swathes of unvetted young male migrants, what is this doing to our population gender balance! Afghanistan is home to the Taliban…which is why Saudi Arabia will not take migrants from there. Why were we on the one hand trying to eradicate them in Iraq and Afghanistan and then the other, now, opening the doors to them.

How could they stop them? That's a genuine question because nobody seems to know how.

I live in a "leafy enclave" now, but for several decades I lived in a very racially mixed part of Croydon: not the tree-lined 'burbs of South Croydon, but the West Croydon/Thornton Heath borders. The local primary had the largest proportion of non-white children of any school in the borough and a very high proportion of children entitled to free school meals.

It was a lovely mixed community. My next door neighbours were of traveller heritage, there were several south Asian and Afro-Caribbean families, at least one Irish family, and 2 Vietnamese families in my stretch of approx 25 houses. When the kids were playing football on the green, it looked like an advert promoting racial harmony.

I found it fucking weird when I moved away from London. The town I live in now was so white back then that anyone with brown skin stuck out like a sore thumb.

We had a hostel housing these men down the road from us (central London) and they were a nightmare, thankfully they were moved. Possibly due to several sexual assaults and robberies nearby.

Good to hear

Moved to do the same to women in a different part of the UK.

This is why people claiming this is some unsolvable problem which the government would love to solve but just can’t are so misguided.

People are being incentivised to come here by the government, and were by the previous Tory government. It’s not some unstoppable force of nature.

They could pull the country out of the ECHR and change the law.
They could suspend all visas from any country unwilling to take back their own citizens, and set up a third party country for those unwilling to share their birth country. There are so many options, Andy will choose none of them.

Make a deal with the French that anyone making an irregular crossing of the Channel is immediately returned to France and processed there. Widely publicise the scheme and its start date on the social media channels that migrants actually use, not just in the British/French mainstream media. Offer a bonus (effectively a bribe) if migrants accept immediate repatriation to their country of origin. No-one is going to pay a smuggler thousands if they know that when they are picked up by the coastguard/RNLI they will be returned to France, regardless of which side of the channel they had made it to. This is the scheme proposed by Gerald Knaus who is widely respected as an expert on migration.

The current "one in one out" is completely half-arsed, and worst of all it was never publicised so the migrants don't even know about it.

But why is our government allowing this? I really don’t understand how this can be good for a society.

housing then in middle class areas will just add to the country’s debt problem. Local authorities will be responsible to house them and rents in Westminster are far higher than Liverpool. So as usual it will be the council tax payers funding the huge homelessness bill.

So why did you move from this Utopia?

The middle classes are already paying for this fiasco through the ever-increasing tax burden.

If the poorer communities are actually taking more asylum seekers, isn't this the least they can do to contribute to a society they add little value to

I think he will have no choice. And when respected experts like Gerald Knaus argue for immediate returns, third country processing, and dispersal, I think he will listen. All this can be done without pulling out of the ECHR of course - as Denmark, Sweden, Greece, and Turkey have done.

If this happened the middle classes would suddenly find they are not as cool with boatloads of young men arriving in their neighbourhood after all. Their inclusivity was always a luxury belief based on never having to live out the consequences of their principles.

It won’t happen though as there isn’t the spare housing or affordable housing to enact this policy.

First thing I'd be doing is getting a big protection dog.

If we opened up a legal route whereby we get skilled, experienced labour with similar values to our own (ethnicity and religion irrelevant), we might get the right people in. We also need to sort out our own populace and help the NEETS, and others, that could be adding to the economy rather than draining from it.

The statistics on net benefits of asylum seekers are pretty poor - most of the unskilled end up costing the existing populace a lot of money in healthcare, benefits and other costs as they don’t pay enough in.

Burnham needs to put them in his constituency
then maybe the people there will realise what a wanker they voted in and how stupid they were to believe him

Listening is not enough.

We want to see immediate action.

Millions of illegal economic migrants being deported safely and securely to their country of origin, not dispersal around the country.

At what point do you think anyone in Labour will actually listen? They have done absolutely nothing to address the most pressing issue of our time.

Andy is talking about buses for fucks sake.

Where do you think the people who deliver your weekly shop/ takeaways/ stack your supermarket shelves/ clean everywhere you go/ empty your bins/ sort your recycling/ clean your hospitals and will work in your care home live?

Didn’t covid help you to understand what the essential jobs in society are?

Oh give over.

It’s not just ‘poor areas’ getting asylum seekers, the lower middle class and middle-middle class towns have been getting them for a while.

And lots of people working and paying tax have to live in ‘poorer’ areas due to the housing crisis and it’s the only place they can afford to buy a house.

But that aside, why should the services and resources in poorer areas be stretched with more people, but not those in wealthier areas. People in poorer areas are already statistically less healthy and have a lower life expectancy. Stretching their resources in this way would just make the gap even wider.

The trouble is the middle class, the bulk, was largely in support of illegal migration, at the expense of the poorer areas. Why make the deprived areas even worse. Sending them to middle class areas means a better understanding by the general public of why this is such a problem.
Send them to areas that vote Green imho.

If the poorer communities are actually taking more asylum seekers, isn't this the least they can do to contribute to a society they add little value to

Oh my goodness. You didn’t just write this did you? Poorer communities don’t add any value to society? People doing honest jobs, bringing up their families are not contributing to or adding value to society?

Quite. Why move away to live amongst horrible white peolle?

Also this utopia was home to families . Not large numbers of single men of unknown backgrounds congregating in public.

I live in an ordinary area. For the first time I saw a group of “asylum seekers” on a bench where I walk the dog. At a distance they were leering and nudging. As I came closer they saw I was an old boot and went back to their phones. Do “we must welcome them” people think it’s all fine and dandy to have thousands of men at large with no hope of a girlfriend and with poor attitudes towards women in general?

We face the very worrying prospect of society finally snapping and deciding to fix the issue themselves, anyone that has seen events in South Africa in the last few months will fully understand why this outcome would be disastrous for us.

Why wouldn't they address the issue before it get to that point? Why not move heaven and earth to make the changes needed now, whilst we are STILL an open, moderate and tolerant country (stretched to our limit as it might be)

Are they going to wait until ALL goodwill has evaporated and the country becomes a very hostile place, because that is precisely where we are headed.

I think that's pretty much the case over much of the south-east. I never cease to be amazed at the way they shoehorn housing into any spare corner of my small town. Not just new-builds either: one of the hotels here was converted into flats a few years ago, ditto the police station, the former bus station will soon have a 7-storey block of flats on it, and a developer managed to get 4 houses and 4 flats out of what was a pub. And this is in a town that's in a national park and where most of the town centre is a conservation area, so has a very high degree of planning restriction.

There are plenty of people here who offer accommodation to refugees, and there is an active refugee and asylum seeker support group.