Anyone from the Commonwealth who arrived from 1948 to 1973 is now officially a Good Immigrant and is to be given UK citizenship. If you arrived on the 1st of January 1974 you're still a Bad Immigrant and will be treated in the same shitty way as before. Seems fair hey?
So now the government have spectacularly folded on the Windrush fiasco, where should we stop?
If you arrived on the 1st of January 1974 you’re still a Bad Immigrant and will be treated in the same shitty way as before.
Crap, I only came to the UK in 1982...
I was only thinking about the good immigrant thing last night. I think nurses maybe considered good immigrants even post 1974, everyone loves nurses.
It then brought me round to thinking about good aids and bad aids so had to watch some Brass Eye.
It doesn't work like that. If you're white and have English as a first language you're OK too, regardless of when you arrive, and should have some easier visa rules. . At least, that's what all the racists say to my American wife (though not in so many words).
Crap, I only came to the UK in 1982…
OUT!!
Yeah, but I am white, English as only language and my foreign birth certificate is complemented by a British High Commission Certificate of Birth Registration for one of the colonies (dahlings)....
This is a Swedish au pair thread, isnt it?
Yeah, but I am white, English as only language and my foreign birth certificate is complemented by a British High Commission Certificate of Birth Registration for one of the colonies (dahlings)….
Guernsey?
Guernsey?
No, I thinks that’s his normal face in the passport photo.
Genuine 😆 , chapeau.
This is a Swedish au pair thread, isnt it?
I do hope so.
Between brexit & Windrush, this country really is being exposed as a shabby right-wing shithole 😞
Between brexit & Windrush, this country really is being exposed as a shabby right-wing shithole
It took those things to expose it? Tory governments getting in and staying in are all you need as evidence. The majority of people must be voting for them so presumably think the right wing approach is the right one.
Guernsey?
The view is less sea and more:
Luckily I'm a 1969 immigrant with a British High Commissioner birth certificate!
Unfortunately my mum is a 60s immigrant. Had dual passports but was made to chose a nationality and passport.
I think she's a good immigrant. Nurse so must be, oh but retired so a pensioner so living on benefits. Bad immigrant.
I think she’s a good immigrant. Nurse so must be, oh but retired so a pensioner so living on benefits. Bad immigrant.
Could be the perfect candidate to be Schrodinger's Immigrant?!!
Forget about British High Commisioner birth certificates, what if you're actually the child of one...
The majority of people must be voting for them
Or we live in a country where the voting system gives the most successful minority party a massively disproportionate number of seats in parliament.
IIRC no post war government has been elected with a majority of votes cast. I've a niggling doubt on that, perhaps, there was one (1945 Labour victory?) but I can't be bothered to check right now and my point still stands - certainly no recent Conservative government has been elected with a majority of votes cast. (Nor Labour, but your point was that the majority of people voted Conservative, which is simply not the case).
with a British High Commissioner birth certificate!
Same here. In fact, it stops me making a claim to citizenship of the country I was born in… which is a shame…
Anyway, when Nick Clegg started with his "good immigration and bad immigration" angle, I knew this country was ****ed. No parlimentary UK wide party prepared to stand fully behind the idea that country of birth does not make you a lesser person, deserving of fewer rights and a lower status.
I am not up to speed on this, but isn't this just people who entered the UK illegally?
Between brexit & Windrush, this country really is being exposed as a shabby right-wing shithole
I appreciate that this sentiment is oh-so-fashionably-Guardianesque, but all it tells me is that you haven't travelled much.
I've a question over the entry criteria....
We know the UK government has always been more than happy to hand out passports and residency to extremely rich johnny foreigner types, with no questions asked as to where they got their money from.....will this now apply to rich darkies? Dodgy african dictators.... that type of thing?
Yeah, ive never left my birth county sbob 🤗🤗🤗
But please patronise me some more !
I am not up to speed on this, but isn’t this just people who entered the UK illegally?
Nope, it's people who fall foul of new rules meaning that they have to prove, to an impossibly and expensive degree, that they have the right to still be here, or work here, or use the NHS here. Can you show documention proving you've been here every year since you 'arrived' here? And, no, simply referring people to the HMRC because they've been taking your taxes every year of your adult life isn't enough… records the gov should have already don't count… you need to present your own records. Oh, and have a fat wallet for the "admin costs" of those records sitting in a pile somewhere in the Home Office for a year or so, before getting mislaid.
But please patronise me some more!
Sure, would editing out the superfluous space in the above quote suffice?
Here's to any protesters in Tanzania today. Let's hope you won't be "beaten like stray dogs" as promised by the authorities.
#getsome****perspective
Edited due to accidental swear filter avoidance!
Can you show documention proving you’ve been here every year since you ‘arrived’ here?
This and the rest of your post is correct but I don't think people would really understand until they tried to actually prove according to the rules.
Pretty much any British Citizen born here would struggle to prove they have been permanently resident according to the rules.
Try getting the attendance records from 30 years ago from your nursery (now called pre-schools) ... etc. etc.
Simply saying I went to this school... I took these O levels and then these A levels etc. isn't proof... they can turn around and say that doesn't prove you were resident in the country... (other than perhaps the days you actually took exams)
You can supplement this perhaps with those photo's you collected for just this occasion ... like when you went to London and have a photo of the Queen on Jubilee day perhaps...
I was only thinking about the good immigrant thing last night. I think nurses maybe considered good immigrants even post 1974, everyone loves nurses.
Pfft, don't I know, yeah they're great and all that when they're clearing the poo out of your Nans arse for her, but try living with one - talk about Ego!
Yes sbob,I definitely compared UK politics to Tanzania, im glad you are here to tell me what I mean to say !
Yes sbob, I definitely compared UK politics to Tanzania, I'm glad you are here to tell me what I mean to say!
I know what you said, I'm just pointing out by way of example that you are talking out of your Botham.
I am not up to speed on this, but isn’t this just people who entered the UK illegally?
It's a bit more complex than that, and well a bit boring compared to some of the headlines. Well 'boring' in the sense that it's not some great conspiracy by swivel-eyed right wingers trying to make the UK like it was(n't) in the 50s. I'm sure it's not boring if you are threatened with deportation to a country you left decades ago to come to the UK after being invited to do so and stay as long as you want as citizens.
The only requirement the Windrush Generation needed to be UK citizens is that they were Commonwealth citizens and that arrived in the UK at the correct time.
The only official record of their original entry into the UK where paper/card landing cards - a bit like the start of The Godfather, only in the UK. They’d turn up at the Port, an Official fills out a card, bish bash bosch, you're now British - thanks for coming, here's some bricks, or a Nurses uniform, get to work, that sort of thing.
The department in charge for handling and storing these landing cards was the Home Office and in 2010 (when Theresa May was a newly appointed Home Secretary) the newly elected Tories didn't care quite so much about Immigration. It was the economy they cared about. They'd been elected off the back of the credit crunch and back then Tabloid readers were in the business of blaming poor people and not dark-skinned people for their woes. Austerity was the name of the game. As I understand it not long after Theresa May took over a Civil Servant contacted her office. The lease for the storage facility for all these old paper documents from the 40s and 50s was up and obviously they had to do something as it was sensitive data - they could a) continue to store the documents at a cost, b) digitise the information at a greater, but one-off cost c) destroy the documents at a very low one-off cost.
The Home Office chose c) and saved a few quid - brilliant, where's the harm? Most of these people who came here to work were now dead or at least very elderly and their children would have either been born here, or so deeply established in the UK as to never need to prove their entitlement to stay.
Well until the 2015 Election, the economy was now on the mend (for the time being anyway) but UKIP had emerged on a wave of anti-immigration feeling and now Tabloid readers were back blaming dark-skinned people for their woes so they brought in new legislation that says (as I understand it) that you can have all the relevant documents for being a UK citizen you like - NI number, passport, NHS ID, a lifetime of paying tax, even a Scouse accent if you want, but you still have to prove that either you were born here, were born to UK parents or have the correct visa to prove citizenship. The only ‘Visa’ the Windrush generation needed was their Landing Cards, which the Home Office had destroyed 5 years previously – oh dear.
Say what you like about Civil Servants, but they very rarely, if ever, over-step their authority, they impose policy, they don’t write it. A former senior Civil Servant at the Home Office in 2010 was on the radio the other day using a fake name, and basically said that there will be an e-mail paper trail from the junior Civil Servant who was in charge of handling the lease for the storage, through various levels of bureaucracy over to the elected side of the Home Office and through their various ranks to whoever gave the final say on the destruction and all the way back again and it’s a decent bet that the person who had final say was Theresa May.
So I’d bet more by accident, than design the person who gave the order to destroy the only bit of concrete proof that hundreds of thousands of Britons are indeed British is the same person, who 5 years later signed into law the requirement to prove your nationality to that level and maybe, one day soon, someone will leak the smoking gun e-mail / memo.
You miss out the battles in cabinet, and government generally, between May and just about everyone else (both Tory and LibDem). She has a personal vendetta against migrants… being generous, it is because she knows it plays well with certain important people in the press, and also the elderly membership of her party… the alternative is that she really means it… in which case I don't understand what her problem is with us born elsewhere types.
You miss out the battles in cabinet, and government generally, between May and just about everyone else (both Tory and LibDem). She has a personal vendetta against migrants… being generous, it is because she knows it plays well with certain important people in the press, and also the elderly membership of her party… the alternative is that she really means it… in which case I don’t understand what her problem is with us born elsewhere types.
I doubt there is anything personal about anything May does...
Yes it plays well with the elderly membership of her party... but it also resonates with Labour voters who voted for Brexit.
Most of her party are more concerned over issues like sovereignty and getting shut of the workers rights the EU brought than the perception immigrants are taking the lowest paid jobs. (Plenty of the crusty Tories probably think that's what immigrants are for .. along with women belonging in a kitchen). The only "darkies" they come into contact with are what they call "good immigrants" - Be they MP's, newscasters or "the foreign bloke who's nanny drops the kids off at their son's school each term"... that the foreign bloke is a dictator from somewhere hot they couldn't point to on a map is probably not relevant to them if the foreign bloke contributed by buying a new swimming pool at their kids school..
SADLY A LOT (whatever number) of the people that voted Brexit did so first and foremost because they believe immigrants are taking their jobs... or others who don't like seeing people who might look different.
I'll tread close to the "Godwin Line" by saying these are people for whom socialism means national socialism... that because they were born somewhere with a certain skin colour means they should be entitled to a certain standard of life.
(use of language like "darkies" is meant to illustrate how these "crusties" view everyone else... )
Shhh don't tell sbob that Brexit was about some folk disliking immigrants, he'll get upset😀
Weren't all citizens of the empire granted British citizenship too?
I'm sure those deported will be grateful, what with the UK being such a shithole. Probably can't wait to leave!
The UK can turn into more of a shithole but still not be as much of a shithole as other countries. That doesn't make it any better...
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It doesn’t work like that. If you’re white and have English as a first language you’re OK too, regardless of when you arrive, and should have some easier visa rules. . At least, that’s what all the racists say to my American wife (though not in so many words).
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... say to your wife. Not necessarily behind her back though.
Are the Indian doctors NHS trusts were recruiting, but who have been denied visas, an example of people who might be "good immigrants'?
This thread needs more Pie.
* NSFW*
*Greggs content*
Shameful episode.
My mum's a bad immigrant. Born and grew up in India, came to the UK in 1947.
How bad does a non-immigrant have to be before the accident of their birth is overcome and they are sent away from the country, e.g. to Rockall?
Does messing up the country with a pointless and destructive referendum get you into that category?
Are the Indian doctors NHS trusts were recruiting, but who have been denied visas, an example of people who might be “good immigrants’?
Wrong colour, I'm afraid
So the UKBA is being used as a tool to meet net migration targets, though they are far away from meeting the target. They couldn’t pick on European citizens so they went for the soft targets. “Go back home and apply for a visa from there” The folk with money employ a lawyer those without go or are stuck in a detention centre.
So is this how we want society to be? The policy is obviously lacking morals and is not well though out economically. If you apply for a work visa now you need to earn something like £70k to get in. How do we get a curry chef over from India?
We need to keep the spotlight on this to force change.
Where does Schrodinger's Immigrant paradox fall into all of this, and could it help find the true "bad immigrant"?
The concept that immigrants exist in a state of both lazing around on benefits whilst simultaneously being out there stealing British jobs.
Edit, too slow, just seen Pyro mentioned this earlier in the thread.
[i]edlong wrote:[/i]
IIRC no post war government has been elected with a majority of votes cast. I’ve a niggling doubt on that, perhaps, there was one (1945 Labour victory?) but I can’t be bothered to check right now and my point still stands – certainly no recent Conservative government has been elected with a majority of votes cast. (Nor Labour, but your point was that the majority of people voted Conservative, which is simply not the case).
I enjoy election pedantry, but you're right, the closest to a majority of votes post war was in 1955 when the Tories got 49.7% (Labour in 1945 only managed 47.7%) - though that includes National Liberals and UUP who took the Tory whip.
Where does Schrodinger’s Immigrant paradox fall into all of this, and could it help find the true “bad immigrant”?
The concept that immigrants exist in a state of both lazing around on benefits whilst simultaneously being out there stealing British jobs.
and every time you observe on it changes state ...
Edit, too slow, just seen Pyro mentioned this earlier in the thread.
It's worth raising this multiple times!
This is the paradox that wasn't to the Brexit campaign.
There are places with many unemployed immigrants .. and there are places where most immigrants are employed.
The former is largely a failing of how the UK has handled immigration and if not enforced certainly aided the creation of ghetto's.
Meanwhile .. I was born in the UK but I spent half my working life outside the UK... I know lots of immigrants who are more British than I am in all practical terms.
Looking from the outside the UK has a ridiculously non-sustainble system.
We take for granted that we can turn on a light or tap... but we don't think what that costs. Of course I think that this is wonderful.. but we need to understand this doesn't just happen. As a nation we have to PAY.
In the larger context there seem to be plenty of people on NMW who take for granted satellite TV, smartphones and buying a £3 coffee. Take the last one... how much can the person making the coffee be paid if we expect someone on NMW can afford one in a fancy coffee place? Somehow the underclass seems to want a under-underclass to serve their coffee and make their sandwiches etc. then they turn around and say they can't find a job because the (immigrants) serving their coffee took THEIR job.
Another thing this typically contemptuous Tory nastiness has highlighted (as if we didn't know it full-well already) is that when they said there were 'no targets', they didn't actually mean were were no targets, as such. We shouldn't take that literally, obviously. There are targets, but its just that they referred to them as 'internal performance management' instead, so technically they weren't actual targets.
So I think is fair to assume than when they also say there are 'no targets' for sanctioning benefit claimants, or removing peoples disability classification, its equally as believable
They really are a shower of utter ****s!!!
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kelvin wrote,
Are the Indian doctors NHS trusts were recruiting, but who have been denied visas, an example of people who might be “good immigrants’?
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self-evidently not. Neither are the funny-coloured students that we recruit, who then get turned away by the ATAS scheme, not because they've failed their application for clearance but because they just never got a decision in the timescales promised, and so couldn't get a visa in place in time to travel.
The "no targets" thing, it now turns out, goes in the same basket as "no needles" and "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"
By which I mean, a lie. Not a mistake, not a statement made in ignorance of the facts, but a lie, told by someone who knew it was a lie when they said it. AKA "a liar".