The Silence is Deafening

[Crankley]

For the last however long, I have read threads and posts by Remainers stating confidently that the Prime Minister wanted a No Deal, would get a No Deal. Here are just a few quotes. Some Remainers may recognise their own predictions:

'He is going to give us No Deal and then fuck off into the sunset with millons in bungs from his crooked mates,'

'I'm pretty certain on no deal...'

'I fully expect a No Deal Brexit.'

'Bojo will 'deliver' no deal and then F off into the sunset'

'Boris Johnson and your disingenuous divs - How dare you try and spin a NoDeal'

'He was elected to not get a deal and to make his supporters feel good about the fact the had stuck it to the man (or something).'

There are lots more if you want them.

Now he has obtained a deal, where are all the threads by remainers? Do any have the the guts to hold up their hand up and say 'I was wrong'?

Sabrina, ditto, we always buy good travel insurance, we've never relied on EHIC.

I have always bought travel insurance, but it was very much cheaper just to buy cover for Europe only.

As it happened, I changed the firm I went with last year, the other firm kept bumping the prices up.

@ICouldHaveCheckedFirst

Sabrina, ditto, we always buy good travel insurance, we've never relied on EHIC.

As do I.

But if you have a pre-existing condition, insurance companies will charge you more to cover you, or refuse to cover any costs arising from the condition at all.

Can I say yet again I have absolutely nothing against anyone who is already here I don't want them all to go home, I'm very keen on cultural diversity it's part of what makes Britain Great. I just used the example of my relatives to show that we are a diverse and inclusive family not to be derided. I have absolutely nothing against anyone who wants to immigrate here I just don't think the system of FOM worked very well and skewed employment and housing to suit certain businesses but not the population as a whole. For the UK to flourish we need immigration. Along side a 'points system' we also need an agriculture system for migrant workers as we had in the past. Pre war my family employed and housed Irish workers for potato picking and harvesting. During the war they had Italian prisoners of war, post war fewer labourers were needed on their farms as more mechanism came in but there are still some types for arable farming that is labour intensive so we need a system as we did prior to FOM. I'd like to see us being able to look at other parts of the world where being able to come over here for short term work would make a massive difference to their's and their families lives.

TitaniaBis - Consistent Bollocks!! great! I feel that FOM has been sold as this wonderful thing but by it's very nature in concentrating on Europe it really does exclude so much diversity in creed, culture and race which in my opinion is wrong.

Could I say yet again then, that most if not all of your arguments are to do with Westminster policies and how they were applied.

FoM was in fact Freedom of Labour - we could have chucked people out who didn't find a job after three months, we didn't bother.

Please don't think that the people who currently exploit Bulgarians and Romanians will have the kindness of their hearts not to exploit Indians, Bangladeshis, sub Saharan Africans. For them it will be worse. There are cheap flights to most parts of Europe, they aren't as cheap to the rest of the world.

For your desire to make things better for some people which we could have done before had the political will been there, you have now gone along with the side that has chosen to make our lives worse.

Maybe you could have looked at the other 17 million people who were voting to end FOM because they wanted fewer black and brown faces here, and thought "Ooh, maybe I'm on the wrong side here"?

I am pretty sure that not all of the 17 million were voting to see fewer black and brown faces but I would be happy to bet on it being about 2 million. Which had they not voted would have swung the result the other way.

I wish it were only that few. The racism that has been released by the Brexit vote leads me to suspect it's considerably higher.

Well well, here we go again, All these idiots that voted leave because it would mean no more black or brown immigrants or Muslims even! There was bound to be loads of them! how do you know? How can there possibly be that many idiots? How many did you see interviewed? Hundreds? Thousands? Or did they just roll out the same old piece of tape again and again, me thinks so.

How do we know? We can look at the last Euro elections and see how much support Farage got for his Brexit party, which was just a revamped UKIP however much they tried to re-package it as a new party.

Many people felt that businesses were getting ready trained trades people from Europe rather than bothering to train up and offer apprenticeships for local school leavers

When in fact the case is that young people have (until recently, when the situation has improved somewhat) been actively dissuaded from entering a trade by a secondary education system designed to send as many people as possible to university, whether that’s the best place for them or not, and that has always seen vocational education as second best.
FE has been denuded of proper investment, apprenticeships are still hard to find, funding is Byzantine, and the whole process is fearsomely bureaucratic and rule bound. No wonder some (particularly smaller) employers give up and wash their hands of it. On the positive side, I have seen some employers, College lecturers, assessors and training coordinators really go the extra mile to ensure their apprentices are successful.

Why should people shut up about those vile (yes) racist Vote Leave campaign posters about Turks and foreigners? The right wing extremist murder of an MP? The four years of xenophobic hate that has even continued last week (in some of the coverage of Macron and France)? This is a nasty chapter in the history of the UK and nobody should be coerced into not calling it out.

I would say that it's as high as somewhere between 30% of the electorate that would be classified as a racist, misogynist, etc. Have a read through this thread on Twitter, I think it is fairly close to where we are:

twitter.com/cakeylaura/status/1341412374792835073

It doesn't give me much hope for the future and why I feel we'll be lumbered with a very right wing anti-Europe government until the 2040's. I saw in the news today that Priti Patel is looking into bringing back the death penalty which shows where we are. Fortunately the EU have had the sense to put a clause into the deal which prevents us going back on human rights and capital punishment so will block the ports again if we try and do something like that but it's depressing they felt the need to even do that.

@Corcory

Well well, here we go again, All these idiots that voted leave because it would mean no more black or brown immigrants or Muslims even! There was bound to be loads of them! how do you know? How can there possibly be that many idiots? How many did you see interviewed? Hundreds? Thousands? Or did they just roll out the same old piece of tape again and again, me thinks so.

Did you ever see the very successful advertisements the leave campaign did on Turkey joining the EU, the maps showing where turkey is and the countries to east of turkey? (they'll be joining next)

Politicians like Patel, Gove and Johnson telling us all Turkey would be joining the EU and they'd all be coming here!

Farages Breaking Point poster, no white faces there.

Clever people who used the fear of black and brown faces to win power and it worked.

Immigration was a significant driver for Brexit, if Leave had failed to get just 650k votes, we'd not be exiting the EU.

The economy of many Eastern European countries has changed substantially since they joined the EU so don't have the same 'need' to come here to work but we could be helping other communities throughout the world

How does taking skilled people from these countries help them? Eastern europe was helped by pouring billions into their economies, which has helped the UK enormously as we can then export to them.

We need to change this and ensure that everybody is given a far whack at finding a trade, finding a reasonably priced home and that companies do not exploit workers from where ever they are from

Proper time served apprenticeships have long been in decline, we don't value practical skills in this country, nothing to do with EU membership.
You want a collapse in house prices? really? that will lead to a deep and long recession, as it always has.
We could return to social housing but the tories will never do that.

Exploitation of workers takes place where there is little union membership, anti union laws and poor employment law/enforcement, a process that began under Thatcher.

Once again the EU gets blamed for UK failings.

FoM was in fact Freedom of Labour - we could have chucked people out who didn't find a job after three months, we didn't bother.

It seems a lot more complicated than 'chucking people out after three months'. This European Parliament Fact Sheet suggests that 'job seekers' can stay for six months plus;

Case law on free movement of workers

Since the introduction of EU citizenship, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CoJ) has refined the interpretation of the directive in a range of case law on the free movement of workers. A dedicated Commission online database presents case law in this area.

As regards residence, job seekers have the right to reside for a period exceeding six months (CoJ, Case C-292/89 Antonissen) without having to meet any conditions if they continue to seek employment in the host Member State and have a ‘genuine chance’ of finding work.

Other cases relate to access to social benefits...

"The status of first-time job seekers has been the subject of intense discussion, as they do not have a worker status to retain. In Cases C-138/02 Collins and C-22/08 Vatsouras, the CoJ found that such EU citizens had a right of equal access to a financial benefit intended to facilitate access to the labour market for job seekers; such a benefit consequently cannot be considered to be ‘social assistance’, to which Directive 2004/38/EC excludes access. However, Member States may require a real link between the job seeker and the labour market of the Member State in question."

www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/41/free-movement-of-workers

@Corcory

TitaniaBis - Consistent Bollocks!! great! I feel that FOM has been sold as this wonderful thing but by it's very nature in concentrating on Europe it really does exclude so much diversity in creed, culture and race which in my opinion is wrong.

If you think that diversity of immigration has been in any way impeded by EU FOM then you need to get out of your very small backwater and visit cities such London, Birmingham, Bradford etc with areas of majority immigrant communities that have nothing to do with the EU.

The diversity you say you want has already happened.

Edinburgh, for example, has Polish, Chinese, Indian, Australian, Irish, American immigrants. Chinese are actually the largest of the Asian communities - 1.7% of the population. Communities of French, Spanish, Italians are smaller than all these.

In Scotland as a whole - Poles are the largest immigrant group - which is presumably the source of your desire to shut them out, but the next biggest are Indians then Irish. Following that - Pakistan, China, Germany, America - of which only one is EU.

If you want to live a more culturally diverse life, then move somewhere where diversity is the norm, rather than expecting national policy to compensate for your inertia.

if they continue to seek employment in the host Member State and have a ‘genuine chance’ of finding work.

However, Member States may require a real link between the job seeker and the labour market of the Member State in question."

None of which invalidates my basic point that we could have asked people who came and made no effort or were completely unable to find work to leave, and chose not to.

The Poles are an interesting group because there were two waves of them - the Polish communities who came immediately after WW2 and those who came in the first decade of this century.

The first now are not so obvious - with women especially marrying and losing a surname like Gondinska for something boring like Smith.

Cory -

Overall non-EU immigration to the UK is far higher than EU immigration. And non-EU migrants outnumber EU migrants in most regions.

About 6% of the UK population was EU immigrants in 2018. However India is the most common birth country for migrants to the UK.

To take London as an example of cultural diversity - roughly 20% identify as Asian, 13% as black.

In the borough of Southwark, which has a large immigrant population - 120 languages spoken -

54% Southwark’s population is of white, 25% black and 11% Asian, 'other' ethnicity being 10%. There's also a high proportion of Latin Americans,

Are these figures indicative of EU immigration run riot at the expense of other nationalities and ethnicities?

None of which invalidates my basic point that we could have asked people who came and made no effort or were completely unable to find work to leave, and chose not to.

It's probably quite difficult to prove that someone has no chance of finding work in a minimum wage job within the next six/twelve months, or even in the construction industry etc. My link suggests they would be entitled to jobseekers' allowance whilst looking - your point was that we could 'chuck people out' if they didn't find a job within three months.

No Clavinova, my real point is that Eurosceptics have bellyached about the EU, while using it as a good excuse to cover up their own failings.

I live 20 miles from Edinburgh, was born there and lived there for many years so I'm well aware of it's cultural diversity TitaniaBis. I've also lived in London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Peterborough so am well aware of the cultural diversity of these places too. May of the communities you speak of came here well before FOM and we have never stopped immigration from other countries. The village I live in has French, Swedes, Finnish, Danish, Canadian, American, Irish, Turkish, Chinese and Poles, many of whom are artists, living in it so hardly a back water, I love it because it attracts so much diversity. The Poles that came to our area Peregrina in the 40s tended to be service men who had served in the British army and had decided not to return to Poland after the war so very few women and lots of Polish names, even a Polish club which was very well frequented by many locals and Poles included.

Having come from an area which had a large post war Polish community, a lot of men will have married local women, who took their names, but since that's now 75 years ago, generations are growing up where the Polish surnames are being lost.

@Corcory

I live 20 miles from Edinburgh, was born there and lived there for many years so I'm well aware of it's cultural diversity TitaniaBis. I've also lived in London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Peterborough so am well aware of the cultural diversity of these places too. May of the communities you speak of came here well before FOM and we have never stopped immigration from other countries. The village I live in has French, Swedes, Finnish, Danish, Canadian, American, Irish, Turkish, Chinese and Poles, many of whom are artists, living in it so hardly a back water, I love it because it attracts so much diversity. The Poles that came to our area Peregrina in the 40s tended to be service men who had served in the British army and had decided not to return to Poland after the war so very few women and lots of Polish names, even a Polish club which was very well frequented by many locals and Poles included.

Explain then why you have consistently claimed something that is demonstrably untrue: EU immigration is not at the expense of non-EU immigration and that there are more non-EU immigrants than EU immigrants across the country.

I suspect the answer lies in the fact that overall net migration is very low in Scotland compared to say London and the SE.

That you fall into the trap of other Brexiters - your fear of inundation by Johnny Foreigner, in your case Johnny E. Europeans, far outweighs that number of actual migrants in your community.

Claiming to love your 'village' (of course you live in a village) for its diversity is directly contradicted by your desperation to shut out EU migrants.

Everything you say is bogus.