Friday OT: The Reckless rise of UKIP!

pblakeney

Whoa!

Why are people so interested in a party that may win a few seats but that is it?

No other party will go into a coalition with them so they are negligible. Stop feeding the trolls.

Sewinman

vermin wrote:

DDD has, unfortunately, identified a group by skin colour (or a race) and applied a generalisation to that group. The generalisation is that the people in that group would share a characteristic that I believe is abhorent. Were someone to acuse me of sharing that characteristic (supporting the policies of UKIP and the attitudes, beliefs and actions of its members), I would be offended and I would take it as defamatory to my character. I am a member of that group. Because the generalisation is insulting and defamatory and has been applied to a group identified by skin colour, that is racist.

Jesus....get a grip! :roll:

ydrol

My tuppence on the matter - http://youtu.be/n-_ncIsthLU When questioned about effects of EU immigration on society Farage's answer is that it has left the white working class as an underclass. Last time I looked , EU immigrants were white and mostly working class. The answer reveals the true heart of UKIP as far as I'm concerned.

rick_chasey

Rick Chasey wrote:

To my half foreign mind it's bloody crazy.

Try explaining it to any foreign friends you have in other countries. It's not easy!

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... cial-class

How the media huffed in disapproval at David Mellor’s repulsively snobby rant at a London taxi driver, and quite right too. But their indignation was somewhat undermined by their insistence on recording what school and university Mellor attended half a century ago.

Ask yourself, Britain, if there is another country on this earth that insists on noting what school a 65-year-old man attended in any news story about him; and then tell yourself, there is none. All countries are interested in status – in the US this is usually expressed by a fascination with money and, increasingly, fame. But only in Britain is there this kind of paralysing myopia where a person is defined eternally by where their parents sent them to school, where snobbery and inverse snobbery clash with equal force and explode into a fiery ball of angry arguments involving such seemingly random – but actually deeply significant – things like grammar schools and John Lewis.

This kind of double-edged class-obsessed snobbery underpinned the – to an outsider – bewildering furore last week about Labour MP Emily Thornberry’s now infamous photograph of a house in Rochester. Twenty-five years I’ve lived in this country and yet I am still at a loss to explain how a text-less photo of a house led to an MP being sacked. But I am alone in the corner, eating my pear with the wrong knife: the rest of the country spotted the invisible code embedded in that photo and reeled in horror.

bompington

It was hardly an invisible code though, was it? While you can't really expect foreigners to know about all these things (and for sure just about all Brits would fail to spot similar subtleties in other countries) you don't have to be a razor sharp social commentator to know the cultural significance of white vans and flying the English flag. You then only need to add a modicum of political knowledge about the increasing distance of Labour from "the working class" - of course that applies to the cosmopolitan elite in general, but it's most significant for Labour 'cos they're supposed to be the ones standing up for the WVM.

But what really confirms it is Milliband's reaction - if they could have come up with any other way of making it look, don't you think they would have done?

rick_chasey

bompington wrote:

But what really confirms it is Milliband's reaction - if they could have come up with any other way of making it look, don't you think they would have done?

Should have totally ignored it.

bompington

Probably, yes. But it's hard to ignore a raw nerve, isn't it?

il_principe

Was chatting to a Greek colleague on the way to a meeting this morning. She said that 'you' (meaning the British) 'allow far too many people to come over here and claim benefits.'

I argued that migrants contribute more than they take out, but she was unmoved. Claims to know several Greek families who have moved to London en-masse and are claiming benefits.

She's working in the UK as the situation over there is still absolutely dire. But interesting to hear a migrant voice these views. My wife (also a non-Brit) has voiced similar sentiments to me in the past, namely that we are too soft on immigrants and Brits who take advantage of the system.

Neither can come up with a solution though!

vermin

Il Principe wrote:

Neither can come up with a solution though!

History instructs us that 'solutions' to just this sort of perceived problem can troublesome.

rick_chasey

Il Principe wrote:

But interesting to hear a migrant voice these views.

Welcome .

Sewinman

Well one solution is to withdraw from allowing freedom of movement within the EU. Or you can only move if you have a job at the end. Work permits etc. My father worked in Barbados for a while and his wife could not work there as they had a rule that you can only work in positions where there are insufficient home-grown Bajan skills. You had to be sponsered etc. She got a great tan.

On the converse side I have a great team of people from various parts of the EU, highly skilled and well educated. It would be a total pain if I had to justify their appointment to the position in order for them to get a work permit. They are here as there is nothing for them in Southern Europe. We also have a lot of South African's in the same boat due to the positive discrimination rules in SA. The Uk is very attractive to those sorts of migrants and they are an amazing asset, particularly as their education has been paid for elsewhere.

il_principe

Sewinman wrote:

Well one solution is to withdraw from allowing freedom of movement within the EU. Or you can only move if you have a job at the end. Work permits etc. My father worked in Barbados for a while and his wife could not work there as they had a rule that you can only work in positions where there are insufficient home-grown Bajan skills. You had to be sponsered etc. She got a great tan.

I don't see that as a solution. Although TBH I really don't see immigration as a problem at all. It's just perceived as one as UKIP are spreading lies & the Tories, Labour have jumped on the bandwagon rather than attempting to tell the truth/educate. It's pathetic.

rick_chasey

Broadly speaking immigration tends to benefit those with higher incomes and tends to hurt those on lower.

One thing I would say is the general age of immigrants is young.

If the UK is to support its own ageing population, it would do well to bring in some fresh, already educated blood to keep productivity up.