@thevfmaddict
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I envy you, Bob. As I said it was my Great Grandmother who was Romany and I can only vaguely recall her face let alone her voice as I was about four when she passed on. I’m told her eldest girl, my Grans oldest sister was just like her. If she was then she must have been one hell of a woman because my Gran’s eldest sister was the equal of any man when it came to starting up and running businesses. She had close on an empire of shops and B&B’s in West London all from her own enterprise. But although tough in business she was equally down to earth and rather homely so you’d have had no idea until you saw the cars she drove; her one luxury weakness. I was well in my teens when she departed so have far more memories of her.
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I have to say, Ed, your comment re ‘clever’ also occurred to me. However, it seems that the plan that Gabriel Felbermayr thought would be clever or as he actually put it “hard but smart” is exactly the plan The government has if it becomes a No Deal Brexit. Wonders will never cease.
I note Carney also is today beginning to change his tune on No Deal Brexit saying we are now far better prepared for it than is the EU.
I think Cox is being given some teeth to bite with in the Backstop negotiations. And he has the incentive to fight very hard because pull it off and Leavers and Remainers alike will see him as the next PM.
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More data re the above can be seen here.
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So now the truth is starting to come out.
Germany’s prestigious IFO Institut, one of the most respected Economic Think Tanks in Germany and the EU has crunched the numbers and is now of the conclusion that a No Deal Brexit, if played cleverly by the UK hits the EU harder than the UK; and crucially Eire three times as hard as the UK.
In this scenario, the UK actually faces a smaller impact than the EU – they forecast a -0.5% impact on the UK compared to -0.4% for France and -0.48% for Germany, and -0.6% for the EU as a whole.
Gabriel Felbermayr, the author of the report and also President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, said that the EU needed to “urgently ponder whether the danger of a hard Brexit isn’t bigger than initially assumed” and called on the EU to offer to remove the backstop “as a quick fix at least”.
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@ Ed,
My paternal Great Grandmother was Romany so I do understand that, Ed. Today in the UK you’ll typically find more prejudice towards the Irish Traveller community than towards true Romanies. Indeed, if you look at top table in the YouGov poll, the UK was fine with Romania’s membership. And we were by far the most tolerant re all current memberships and potential memberships; and on balance the only state accepting of Romania’s membership. Personally, I have always believed that, despite what is often said re the Brexit vote, we remain by far the least racist country in the EU. Brexit or No Brexit the extreme right has a far more fertile breeding ground in mainland Europe than in the British Isles; note I am using the geographical term that encompasses the whole Island of Ireland and which, as with the UK, I do not believe has a significant problem with race.
The bottom table were also fascinating because the public resistance to new Eastward states joining the EU was consistent and very substantial in France and almost as high in Germany. To me this suggests that if the EU political project continues to pursue such memberships it is increasingly certain to rub those electorates up the wrong way and thereby fuel still further the rise of the extreme right.
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I’m not sure, Ed. The anti-Roma sentiment might make sense in Germany but would that be so in France, Sweden, Denmark and Finland?
Someone I was talking to earlier (in person after I had posted) suggested that it might be due to memories of the appalling pictures and stories of the conditions in the country’s orphanages during the Ceausescu regime. Perhaps that tainted not just his regime but the entire country in many European’s eyes. As my friend put it, those orphanages were well on the way to being, I quote him, “Concentration Camps for Kiddies”. Something of an exaggeration but not by much. I must admit I’d totally forgotten about all that until he reminded me.
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God, that reawakens a nightmare. I was once on a large committee the basis of appointment to such seeming to have been that either you had valuable and relevant experience – or – that you had nothing whatsoever worthwhile to bring to the table but were both absently minded deaf and an extreme pedant. Getting Minutes approved by all after each meeting was even harder than trying to get agreement on May’s deal through Parliament.
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Was up most of last night and been groggy all day. Nearly missed this one. Hope you’ve had a good one, Bob, and that what’s left of it is even better.
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I’m sure you are right, Ed, about literacy. It is only in the last decade or so that the 10% of children that have some degree of dyslexia have begun to be recognised early with the worst affected being given support. The knock on effect of illiteracy during school years is of course that all educational subjects suffer. When one considers that most dyslexics were given pretty much zero educational support before 2000 it is hardly surprising that so many adults have at best the reading ability of a (non-dyslexic) 5 year old. Obviously these unfortunates will rarely fare well in the employment market leading to either unemployment or low paid jobs. I obviously can’t know the true numbers but it would not surprise me for one second if well over 50% of the long term unemployed and a high percentage of those in extremely low paid jobs genuinely do have significant literacy problems.
The Catch 22 for these unfortunates is indeed exactly that which you highlighted, Ed. To claim any significant benefits you usually need top notch literacy skills to read, interpret and complete all the forms. I haven’t seen the forms for claiming UC but I saw earlier benefits forms having helped a young couple complete some about 4 years ago. They were bad enough and of course I see my partners Disability Living Allowance forms which also are voluminous. Someone with even mild literacy problems, let alone severe problems, would find them more intimidating than the rest of us might find getting our heads around quantum physics. To a severe dyslexic normal handwriting can look as the complex as do the equations and symbols on a particle physicists white-board to the rest of us. Sure, we recognise each letter used but are totally unable to interpret meaning of the full equation.
It occurs to me as I type that the civil servants working with completed benefits forms may quite often find the handwriting, spelling and grammar on returned forms almost impossible to decipher. Can you just imagine having to wade through hundreds of forms where not only is the handwriting close to illegible but faulty spelling and faulty grammar also means that the normal clues we all use to decipher poor handwriting are not even present. So perhaps some of the ludicrous benefits decisions we hear of result in part from misinterpretation rather than merely bloody-mindedness on the part of civil servants. We hear people being interviewed on radio and TV saying I have this problem and that problem and still didn’t get benefits. But it may well be that the individual can relate such verbally but the forms they completed were close to impossible to read due to their illiteracy.
Don’t forget that due to the stigma still attached to illiteracy many sufferers go to huge extremes to conceal such. It is from what I’m told quite common for those with severe literacy difficulties to carry a newspaper with them in full view as, effectively, a disguise. My first wife’s father ran a small building company and said he had two (illiterate) labourers that did that. That was in the days before the escalator style brick lifts one now sees on building sites. I remember my FIL adding that one of those two labourers was the fastest and most hard working hod carrier he’s ever had work for him. Which I guess goes to show that there is no link between illiteracy and laziness. For the record, my father in law added that that lad was even faster than the boxer Chris Finnegan who carried the hod for my FIL’s bricklayers to maintain his fitness in the run up to winning his Olympic Gold.
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Come on folks its obvious why she keeps him. His performance is so very bad that it makes her own look better by comparison. Joking aside in reality it does in part shift direct focus away from her which i doubt she would complain about. Yes there’s some reflected discredit on her for keeping him but reflected discredit is nowhere near as bad as direct discredit. One might call it the Amber Rudd Principle yet again.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Linux pointless!!! How dare you………………LOL
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Deja vu – Still not sure, Ed, what “unfortunate side remark” I am supposed to have made. I thought that there had been conflation on your part and that I had made none was already established. But lets leave it there. It is all too easy for all of us to talk at cross purposes given multiple inputs so let’s just leave that there.
Moving instead to Richard’s expansion(s) of Bob’s theme(s) I think what I had said earlier of the flaw in Communism, that being that cleverer immoral individuals will always find a way to work the system, is equally true to some degree in respect of all Benefits systems such as ours. I happen to know very well indeed one of the UK’s top experts in Benefit Fraud. Benefit fraud covers a staggeringly wide spectrum from ‘work shy fraud’ at one extreme to illegality bordering on that which might be considered ‘organised benefit crime’ at the other. Housing benefit fraud is a huge ‘organised’ problem. Landlords, often of multi-properties, work the Housing Benefit System in many different ways even to the point of constructing non-existent claimants for which they receive high sums of housing benefit direct.
One of the key advantages of Universal Credit is that Housing Benefit is no longer paid direct to landlords but is paid to claimants. This principle has been maligned by the media and lobby groups because genuine claimants not skilled at budgeting may unintentionally spend the housing component of the UC paid to them instead on other things; i.e. not pay their rent and accrue rent arrears. However, paying HB to claimants rather than direct to landlords at a stroke removes the potential for some of the biggest benefits frauds occurring today – i.e. that by Landlords. The media has not covered this but the savings for the public purse are potentially so large that they cannot be ignored. Put differently it would take whole armies of work shy individuals (which I personally do not believe exist) to damage the public purse in anywhere near the way that a smaller number of criminally clever landlords have been doing for years. The problem is particularly bad in London.
Its about time there was a decent TV documentary covering the above explaining where the bulk of Benefit Fraud loses on the public purse originate. It may well open the eyes of many who still automatically and exclusively think of ‘the work shy’ whenever the term Benefit Fraud is mentioned. That myth so often perpetuated by the whole of the media, including the Beeb, masks much of the reality. A not insignificant percentage of ‘the work shy’ in reality do not even exist and are simply the constructions of criminal minds who then pocket that free (benefit) money.
I will not labour the point too far but I am reliably informed that the increase in migration the last decade has increased no end the number of benefit fraud opportunities for criminals. Did Irvana, Dragan or Petre, truly move here in 2011? Did s/he remain here or in reality actually return home quite soon after? Is s/he realy still here and hence entitled to benefits? And indeed did s/he even exist in the first place? Such adds hugely to the workload of Benefit Fraud Teams raising a whole bevy of new questions that previously were not even a dynamic of their workloads. Tracking non-EU migration is nowhere near the problem that tracking free movement migration is as it pertains to benefits. I stress firmly and completely that I am not slagging off genuine Irvana’s, Dragan’s or Petre’s who came here to work, are working and are contributing to the economy. They are fully entitled to any benefits they qualify for. All I am stressing is that free movement has sadly provided a very fertile ground indeed for our home grown UK criminals to commit benefit fraud on an even larger scale than previously.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
@Ed
“I simply cannot agree, Ed, that folks from Ealing are violent”. See what I did there? I implied that you had said something that you never had.
Can I just ask you to take a little care not to do similar to me, even by accident. You wrote,
“Where I had difficulties with VFM’s post is that a lot of people at the Food Bank are not lazy, but are in the main victims of circumstance or ignorance.”
There is no question that those words imply I had held food bank users to be lazy. I never even mentioned what type of people go to food banks, let alone state or imply that they were lazy. I agree 100% that users are in the main victims of circumstance. I’m unsure if you know how food banks work. They are not open to all. The purely lazy would have great difficulty accessing such banks because typically banks require a referral from a government agency or as reputable NGO. Truly, only the genuinely needy get referrals. As I stated either in this thread or one of the similar threads; members of my extended family have used a food bank hence I know close to first hand how they work.
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Dave, if you cannot see that calling folks delusional is nasty all hope is lost for you. How can you truly say calling people delusional is not an insult.
I stress again all insults have tended to be from Remainers towards Leavers. Tell me, apart from suggesting that you may be better off than some (which is hardly an insult) can you direct me to a single insult I have directed at any Remainer in person or even generically re Remainers. You will find none. I do not descend to such levels. Resorting to such is evidence of a bankrupt mind. Yet Leavers have been subjected to all manner of attacks your last post simply adding to such. Or would you try to suggest your last post was not nasty or insulting either. Calm down, lad, calm down.
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Ehem – check the latest migration figures. EU migration down but non-EU migration at an all-time record high EU down 61000 (mainly eastern bloc), non-EU UP 130000. Not quite in line with your assertions.
I am entirely unsure what “assertions” I was supposed to have made and which are contradicted by the data you highlight. Can you explain and point me to it. You seem to suggest that I had commented about numbers, trends and where they were coming from. I don’t recall doing so. Truly please explain which comments of mine (i.e. my “assertions”) you are referring to. I am quite genuinely baffled. Could it be that you automatically assume Leavers will have view X and attribute such to me.
All that said I will take your words at the very least to be inviting comments on the subject from me. So here goes.
Ed, the headline migration figures are misleading for a myriad of reasons.
A very high percentage indeed of the non-EU migrants are either highly skilled individuals that we need or are fee paying students. It may surprise you but at Cambridge there are now more post-grad foreign students than UK students. What may surprise you even more is that of the top ranked 30 universities in the world the UK has 6 or 8 depending on which ranking list one chooses. The rest of the EU put together has not one in the top 30 on any ranking list. Indeed in some rankings it has not one in the top 50. Students from all over the world therefore want to come to the UK to study and Uni’s want their fees. That they study here is not a bad thing as it creates an affinity with the UK that can be advantageous in future years politically and commercially.
What can be missed by the ill-informed is that financial dynamics incentivise Uni’s to favour non-EU students. By EU law UK Uni’s must charge EU students no more than they charge UK students. However, this cap does not exist in respect of non-EU students. They can charge far more. Universities have been accused of therefore of favouring non-EU students such that UK students are now being squeezed out. The empirical data supports this accusation with the number of UK students at Oxbridge for example falling dramatically and non-EU students rising very sharply over the last decade. All this said, due to the huge fees income from non-EU students their temporary admission could be considered a valuable ‘services export’.
The over all profile of EU immigrants is very different from non-EU migrants. Yes, there are quite a few skilled workers and some students coming from the EU to the UK but the overwhelming majority of EU migrants are low paid manual workers.
I have said often regarding immigration that my view is that the playing field should be level. We should be able to source the skills we need from anywhere they are available without prejudice. It simply cannot be right that low paid unskilled migrant workers from the EU can walk in at will but if we need a highly skilled doctor, scientist, technician, etc., from a non-EU country both that individual and his UK employer face a huge and protracted battle to get that person in. Is that what you want? In purely practical terms also, skilled workers irrespective of colour or race whose native tongue is English (i.e. Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.) can on average, and I stress on average, be more productive more quickly than those for whom English is not their first tongue. Yet an Eastern European hardly able to converse in English walk straight in but we must battle to get a Canadian Cardiologist in that we desperately need. That cannot be right can it?
I am not a “cut the numbers no matter what Leaver”. I believe we should be able to admit any and all that we truly need from wherever and not be, as we are at present, obliged to enforce an irrational bias which is often directly contrary to our needs.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
Can’t disagree with a lot of what you say, Duke, although I do not think the concept of Nationhood is simply a device to assist those who want control. I think it goes far, far deeper in human nature deriving of pre-historic times and the importance of tribalism to one’s survival and is equally an extension of family instincts.
The concept of evenly distributing wealth I believe should be worked towards at the very least to the point where all humans’ basic needs are entirely fulfilled. It gets far trickier to do beyond that once there is what could be termed a ‘surplice’ or ‘disposable income’. Do you control how people use that or do you give them a free choice? That’s the conundrum. Take away free choice and you’ll have a huge backlash from them. Provide free choice and clever folks will find ways to manipulate those less gifted and get very, very rich. As someone once said to me, what feels like a hundred years ago now – Communism would work perfectly provided we found a way to equally distribute both intelligence and morals. I got the point. Cleverer and immoral folks will always find a way to manipulate others and accrue indecent levels of wealth and power. But if no-one is cleverer than anyone else then that can’t happen.
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The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that politics is broken in the UK so we can probably take that as a given. I suspect also, but am not certain, that most of us around here would agree that the FPTP system needs replacing with PR which is more conducive to consensual decisions and hence is less divisive.
The Catch 22 or more precisely the 2 x Catch 22 are that PR will only be introduced if – (1) those who currently benefit from FPTP are open to consenting to it (fat chance) – and – (2) they put the decision re PR out to a referendum (just can ‘t see Parliament or the public in the short term wanting one of those on yet another subject).
Conclusion – Politics in the UK sadly is likely to remain broken for some considerable time yet.
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It most certainly was not said as a joke.
I do agree that Tory policies re austerity have contributed to such. As I have said over and over on this website I am not a Tory. Go look at the posts above. I am left of centre. My anti-EU beliefs mimic Tony Benn’s.
The reality is that most EU immigration is low skilled low paid workers. The very economic migrants that Bob was talking about; which on top of the Tory failings has not helped. Now that that flood of migration has begun to slow wages are rising.
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[…] So there is no separate human species. It’s a melting pot. Today’s problems of mass immigration have only one causal beginning: over 7 billion people, war, and dwindling resources. The Have-Nots will continue to press the Haves and it will get worse. I predict a future which will result in the Haves taking decisions to reduce the number of Have Nots by any means necessary. To survive, it may be necessary for the Have nations to adopt Hitlerian measures.
Can’t we just start by having National borders instead of letting more Have-Nots move in? Christ we’ve enough of our own Have-Nots visiting food banks.
Not to worry though, won’t be long before the Super Haves of the Big Corporates, the beloveds of the Super Beaurocrats of the Super National Blocs, will find a way to ensure those of us who are only marginally above being Have-Nots are kept happy. Fancy a nice game of Rollerball, anyone? Heck why do all the the Super Haves in that movie look so like so many EU Presidents and drink at precisely the rate championed by Junker………..LOL
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Actually if you look at the less easily fiddled Long Term Unemployment figures the trend is now on the upslope. link
Such is untrue as I assume you would/should know. Trends are based in essence on a line of best fit and require established data to extend from. They are not merely forecasts for which no evidence as yet exists. There is as yet no upslope whatsoever. Indeed even the forecasts are for unemployment to fall still further below today’s record low. It is though, I accept, forecast that they will then return from that ‘extra low’ to a level the same as today’s record low. To hold such to be an upslope is, I am sure unintentionally on your part, deceptively misleading.
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During the Covid-19 Epidemic I will be wearing a mask and goggles while posting so that if I become infected I won't spread it to you.
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