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!

Also they could address the pull factors - the generous treatment on arrival, and very high percentage of acceptance rate of asylum claims.

There is this misconception that the benefit class live in the poorer areas.
The benefit brigade is everywhere and financially are doing pretty well, compared to the grafters on or near the minimum wage.

That legal route exists. It's called the skilled worker visa. You need to be going into a job that pays a minimum of £41,700 (higher in some occupations, lower in healthcare).

If we actively encouraged young people to go into these jobs by paying decent wages, offered training, promotion, careers etc then we would not have to import. In the NHS British medical staff cannot get jobs. So why are we importing unskilled workers?

Don't bring up delivering takeaways. It's a sore point re illegal working. Although the assumption any brown person spotted doing deliveroo must be an asylum seeker living in a hotel is an interesting one.

How are all these young men going to take care of their sexual needs? I think that's about the biggest question going.

Yes.
No.
No.

Ah I read the original question as in middle class to take their fair share of any benefits etc. Now that would be good, seeing as though I’ve worked 36 years, reasonably well paid job and not much to show for it and never received a penny.
As for ruining what little is left of ‘nice’ Britain, now that would be a very bad idea! Keep them all in inner cities etc which have been on the decline for years. Not ruining much there!

My neighbours work one of them works in a mental health hospital and the other in hospitality. You can't survive on benefits where I live. Claiming they won't work is an assumption. Who is they?

Yes I think we know the answer to that

Which is unfortunately a higher salary than a lot of very important "skilled" jobs. Not least prison officers a surprising number of whom come from Nigeria. Now, maybe in the long term we should be making working in the prison service more attractive to UK citizens and advertising and providing training. In the short term a large part of the "prison spaces crisis" is driven by a shortage of workers not just buildings and you can't just let someone sentenced to murder hang around for a few years while they recruit and train new employees.
When the government last raised the threshold for skilled worker visas they accidentally priced out all the prison officers from Nigeria who were already supposed to be coming to work in the UK, this making the whole situation with prison places worse

Not all important jobs are highly paid.

Yes of course it's fair that low paid tax payers should pay more tax to house asylum seekers in more expensive areas

If you moved to Abuja or Kinshasa, would you find it "fucking weird" that they would be so black that anyone with white skin would stick out like a sore thumb?

They are capitals so, more so, if you moved to a rural African town.

No you wouldn't, would you.

In fact, you would come back praising the food, the culture, the dress-anything you set you your eyes on.

And yet, in England we are supposed to find it "fucking weird" if a town is still-for the moment at least-mostly white.

Make it make sense!

This isn't reflected in the statistics. Where, I live in Surrey/W Sussex borders 7.1% are on UC. Picking a 'poor' area at random - Clacton - and we find that 21.2% are on UC. There appears to be a direct and strong correlation between the wealth of an area and the amount of benefit claimants. You can explore for yourself: commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10513/

You clearly don’t understand the ramifications of Brexit on immigrants/asylum seekers.

if Burnham pulls this off then he can kiss goodbye to labour winning the GE in 2029

i think a lot of labour voters will switch to conservative or reform

The trouble is that politicians and those welcoming immigrants rarely get to actually feel any pain or problems with what they plan or vote for

it won’t affect them.

Well all the illegal unvetted men arriving think of women and girls as pieces of meat, many incidents of them targeting young vulnerable women coming out of nightclubs on their own and harassing school girls as they walk to school etc.

The UK is no longer a safe country to bring up children, we now have to be permanent bodyguards to our children due to the risks that successive governments have put on us, unforgivable.

I have 2 friends who work in care homes; one is in the SE and one in East Anglia.

They've both told me that the homes have so much difficulty recruiting staff that they are heavily reliant on agency staff, and that the majority of those agency staff are from South Asia.

Anecdata, I know, but if that picture is a general one in the care sector, our old and infirm would be fucked. Or the NHS would, because hospitals would be full of old people whose care needs couldn't be met because of care staff shortages.

Drill down to the neighbourhoods (as most town and cities have their wealthy and poorer parts) and you will see UC claimants in most areas.

Yeah, those boats are awash with care workers. Can’t wait until one is wiping my bottom for me. Pull the other one!

He’s going to do fuck all about the boats then, just expects other areas of the country to be more accommodating to them

That has got to be a wind up post. Talk about flattering yourselves. The level of self importance is astonishing.

‘Conservative areas shouldn’t simply be expected to absorb the consequences of policies they didn’t support, IMO.’

Sadly, my part of the very poor, post-industrial north-east is still suffering the consequences of Conservative policies from the 1980s that they didn’t support. My area will never fully recover.

Then my area got no say in being flooded with illegal economic migrants; men who subscribe to an ideology that treats women as only good for producing baby after baby after baby and all at the expense of the tax & council-tax payers.

As a nation, with an economy that has been flatlining since 2009 and, from my point of view, has no upturn in sight, we can’t afford these people. They will never be full contributors. They are a drain on our resources, on our public services. Look at the study results I posted (on page 6 of this thread) if you still think these people will make a full & fair contribution to our nation’s finances.

If a spread of these migrants to the leafy areas of the midlands and south is what it takes to make more people sit up and take notice of what is happening, then I’m sorry to say it, but good. In some ways I feel awful saying that, but hear me out.

The north-east has never mattered to successive governments, but pressure from the wealthier areas and voters might make a difference. I bloody well hope so.

I know where you are and I find this situation terrifying. It is not appropriate at all. What are these people going to spend their time doing. I truly believe they should not be allowed out of the grounds.

We can clearly see that all efforts to control our borders have come to nothing, brexit, at least the one the people voted for, has not delivered on this promise yet. Mainly because there were too many obstacles - Whitehall, CS, the courts and plenty of well heeled remainers insisting we can't change any laws.

I would say what is happening to the country right now (and in the future) highlights the reason why the vote went the way it did.

The idea that we could easily send people back when we were in the EU is a total lie, one of the reasons why there was so much consternation at the time was because it never ever happened.

If we held another referendum tomorrow promising control of our country and its borders it would be achieve a much higher percentage than it did ten years ago.