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Posted by: sutton mariner, January 6, 2015, 11:19am
Good morning all,

Ive made a short documentary about migration. If you could give it a watch and give an opinion on the matter that would be great. Im looking for people to interview in a similar way in Grimsby. From past experience peoples views on migration massively differer depending on where you are brought up/live. Would be interesting to compare views from a few Grimsby folk compared to London folk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW0gaQ2KVdI&feature=youtu.be

Ta!
Posted by: KingstonMariner, January 6, 2015, 6:22pm; Reply: 1
Good little film. He makes some good points. Obviously that's just one perspective on the issue.

One minor quibble is the volume - turned my sound up to the max and it was still fairly quiet.
Posted by: Marinerz93, January 9, 2015, 3:46pm; Reply: 2
Apart from the volume it is a good piece of work however, upper class and middle class do not experience immigrants like the working class.  He makes some good points about people twisting data but the point about someone not speaking the language, and with little experience coming and taking someone's job then that person isn't very good at their job.  You only have to watch UK Border Force or what ever it is called to see how many illegal immigrants are working, if those workers are needed why are so many unemployed and genuinely struggling for work.  It's easy to say what he did when you are in work and middle class.

He states that 4 out of 5 nurses are immigrants and that certain papers try and paint it in a bad light.  He needs to read up on how many nurse training places have been lost and why such an essential part of our services have nurses who often do not understand English or do not have the same social caring skills our nurses have.  I know of female relatives and friends daughters who haven't been able to get a nursing degree because there isn't the places.

Immigration is great when it suits the needs of Britain, but it should be skilled immigration and it should be on a points system like Australia.

There was a program about the super rich and how trickle down was meant to bring up the living standards of the poor.  It has however gone the other way, people are seeing less of their wages and the super rich are getting richer.  It's about time a tax on whole wealth was brought in but the ones at the top will never do it.  The trickle down system that Thatcher brought in and Brown vowed to destroy is as strong as ever and it is predicted it will lead to civil unrest in the future.
Posted by: KingstonMariner, January 9, 2015, 11:14pm; Reply: 3
The middle/upper class thing is kind of the point I was making M93. And it's not unrelated to the rich getting richer. Lack of places on nursing courses is also linked - it's cheaper to import ready trained nurses (like lots of trades/professions)*.

But there are plenty of jobs that native Brits won't take for the money on offer - maybe if the minimum wage was a living wage this might change. And you can't blame immigrants for being willing to do it either, especially if it's good money compared to what they can get at home and are just as good, if not better, than Brits.

* But then we wouldn't need to train so many/import so many if return to practice was not so stupidly difficult. My other half** has tried but there are too many hurdles if you have children. That's the real shame because there are 100,000s of ex-nurses who could return if things were organised better. ** It's much easier in her home country (a stable EU country as rich as UK and with standards as high if not higher, so we're not talking about some tin-pot basket case either). So she's working in a lower skilled job, on a zero hours contract with travel time not paid for - I don't see many Brits in her job despite plenty of positions being vacant.
Posted by: Marinerz93, January 10, 2015, 10:47am; Reply: 4
Good points KingstonMariner, especially about bringing in already qualified nurses and other trades being a finance issue.  The problem is there will never be a shortfall of British people wanting to be Nurses or having trade skills and this has the knock on effect of wages and long term career prospects.  It is well known in various industries that immigrant workers are taking lower wages because that wage is probably 5 - 10 times more than what they earn in other countries.  This is under cutting trades persons and I have spoken to a lot of tradesman who have been affected by this, some have had their businesses suffer and had to make redundancies. I also know that some of the immigrant work isn't up to UK standards and work has had to be redone by UK workers.  A prime example is the Italian work done on one of the Oil refineries.

I fully agree with you on the minimum wage being a living wage.  People wouldn't be weighting up if taking a job would make them worse off, that's why like in your wife's case there are vacancies.  You also have to bear in mind that should someone take a zero hours contract they will not qualify for benefits for, I have been told, for a year.  Is a zero hours contract worth a gamble if you have no other income.  Zero hour contracts should be made illegal, along with giving a company your own time before and after work.  I do know of 3 people who worked for less than what they were getting on benefits and they were then promoted / given better jobs after a few months to a year, some people can't afford wait that long, debt can quickly spiral out of control.

I agree again that some Brits will not do certain types of work but there are plenty who would if it was as we both agreed minimum wage being a living wage.

I am not against controlled immigration (like Australia) or genuine asylum seekers, but we need to give our own people genuine opportunities to learn a trade and find work.
Posted by: mariner91, January 11, 2015, 10:36am; Reply: 5
Quoted from Marinerz93

I am not against controlled immigration (like Australia) or genuine asylum seekers, but we need to give our own people genuine opportunities to learn a trade and find work.


This is the most important part in my eyes. I'm at university studying dentistry but it has taken me a long time to get on to the course, it has been incredibly difficult involving lots of work and repeated rejections. If I wasn't so pig-headed I'd have given up a long time ago and done something different. It even got to the stage where I was on the brink of moving abroad to study at considerable expense before getting my offer in this country. Each year there are roughly 15 applicants for each spot on a dentistry course in this country and whilst I realise not all of these applicants will be the required standard academically, there are many who miss out who would have made great dentists. Yet we are constantly told that we have a shortage of dentists and in the practice I attend back home, 5 of the 6 who work there are european and were educated abroad. If the government funded more places there would be more home grown dentists doing a skilled profession that the country needs, instead of importing them from overseas because frankly, some of them aren't as good.
Posted by: barralad, January 11, 2015, 6:33pm; Reply: 6
I'm no expert on dentistry but there appears to have been a shortage of home grown NHS dentists since the mass exodus in the early noughties when they all went private in response to the Government's decision to alter the contracts. As many of these dentists were trained by our universities under the auspices of the NHS pre-fees they could be considered to have a lot of responsibility for the situation. For a time after the exodus it was virtually impossible to find an NHS dentist willing to take patients on. Such a problem was always going to require time to sort. Although the situation has unquestionably improved over the past few years any credit due to the current Government is eroded by their insistence in making our higher education system subject to the effects of the market place and the apparent refusal to channel funding of sufficient quantities into that area.
We appear to therefore be reliant on foreign dentists for the foreseeable future-my own practice has excellent dentists from South Africa and Poland but no British....
Posted by: Marinerz93, January 11, 2015, 10:12pm; Reply: 7
Quoted from mariner91


This is the most important part in my eyes. I'm at university studying dentistry but it has taken me a long time to get on to the course, it has been incredibly difficult involving lots of work and repeated rejections. If I wasn't so pig-headed I'd have given up a long time ago and done something different. It even got to the stage where I was on the brink of moving abroad to study at considerable expense before getting my offer in this country. Each year there are roughly 15 applicants for each spot on a dentistry course in this country and whilst I realise not all of these applicants will be the required standard academically, there are many who miss out who would have made great dentists. Yet we are constantly told that we have a shortage of dentists and in the practice I attend back home, 5 of the 6 who work there are european and were educated abroad. If the government funded more places there would be more home grown dentists doing a skilled profession that the country needs, instead of importing them from overseas because frankly, some of them aren't as good.


Firstly I like to congratulate you on sticking to what you wanted to do and secondly I hope you are successful in getting a 1st for your degree.

Best of luck M91.
Posted by: mariner91, January 12, 2015, 11:06am; Reply: 8
Quoted from barralad
I'm no expert on dentistry but there appears to have been a shortage of home grown NHS dentists since the mass exodus in the early noughties when they all went private in response to the Government's decision to alter the contracts. As many of these dentists were trained by our universities under the auspices of the NHS pre-fees they could be considered to have a lot of responsibility for the situation. For a time after the exodus it was virtually impossible to find an NHS dentist willing to take patients on. Such a problem was always going to require time to sort. Although the situation has unquestionably improved over the past few years any credit due to the current Government is eroded by their insistence in making our higher education system subject to the effects of the market place and the apparent refusal to channel funding of sufficient quantities into that area.
We appear to therefore be reliant on foreign dentists for the foreseeable future-my own practice has excellent dentists from South Africa and Poland but no British....


You're quite right about the exodus but one of the problems there is the way dentists are paid (which I won't get in to as it's complicated) but essentially the current system on the NHS leads to the practitioner working at an almost conveyor belt speed in order to be able to make any money at all and it also encourages bad practice.Thankfully, this is getting reviewed and if it is sorted out fewer dentists will be so keen to move into fully private practice (some will still as some of the figures I've heard bandied about by my clinical tutors are astonishing) and I'd like to think most will operate with an NHS contract and a few private patients to supplement their income.  

I do personally believe that the government could do much, much more to fund the education of future dentists and if the fees weren't so high they'd benefit from fewer dentists moving to private practice so quickly. Most of the foreign dentists are very good but you do get some who I'm certain wouldn't have passed the course in this country which is a shame as there are plenty of people from this country willing to do their job who never get the chance.
Posted by: KingstonMariner, January 21, 2015, 12:50am; Reply: 9
Essentially what's lacking, we all seem to be tacitly concluding, is a healthier dose of socialism.



We carry on treating the market as God and we'll end up training no one in this country, importing more people when skilled workers are needed, with a bigger underclass of people born here, with more bitterness and hatred as a result. Eventually the Poles get replaced by Bulgarians and Romanians, they'll get replaced in turn by Ukrainians, they'll get replaced....in a race to the lowest common denominator financially speaking. And let's not forget it was the state, i.e. us tax payers, who saved the financial system from the mess the market created.

You don't need to stop immigration if you train your own people, set a basic minimum living standard for all people working.
Posted by: psgmariner, January 21, 2015, 4:14pm; Reply: 10
Be careful what you read when it comes to the NHS and stats. I work for this lot and we are still waiting for a correction:

http://www.hscic.gov.uk/article/5298
Posted by: barralad, January 21, 2015, 8:35pm; Reply: 11
Quoted from KingstonMariner
Essentially what's lacking, we all seem to be tacitly concluding, is a healthier dose of socialism.

  • Statutory living wage as the market doesn't provide it for many (and we saw how the arguments against the Minimum Wage disappeared when we saw what happened in practice).
    More university places for professions in short supply
    Better NHS financial support for dentists to discourage them from going private (maybe make them pay more for their training and education, but suspend it unless they leave the country to work abroad)
    More support for nurses wanting to return to practice


We carry on treating the market as God and we'll end up training no one in this country, importing more people when skilled workers are needed, with a bigger underclass of people born here, with more bitterness and hatred as a result. Eventually the Poles get replaced by Bulgarians and Romanians, they'll get replaced in turn by Ukrainians, they'll get replaced....in a race to the lowest common denominator financially speaking. And let's not forget it was the state, i.e. us tax payers, who saved the financial system from the mess the market created.

You don't need to stop immigration if you train your own people, set a basic minimum living standard for all people working.


Really good post...Sums up my feelings exactly.
Posted by: fishheadphil, January 22, 2015, 9:51am; Reply: 12
Some people who come here fit in well and do a great service to the country and I applaud them,but far too many don't.
I have long held the belief that the ruling elite no matter which party they are in have an agenda to keep unemployment at a high enough level so there is always a pool of people looking for a job?
It helps the ruling elite keep us the workers at heel and subservient to their rule over us.
I think the governments of the day want mass immigration so there is a constant topping up of the pool of the unemployed heaven forbid we have a situation where we the workers have the whip hand.
Posted by: mariner91, January 22, 2015, 6:42pm; Reply: 13
Agree with KM, good post. Personally I think something along these lines would be great http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/08/citizens-income-71-week-person-would-make-britain-fairer but there is no way on earth it would get passed by a Tory government.
Posted by: KingstonMariner, January 25, 2015, 12:00am; Reply: 14
Oddly enough M91, that idea was first proposed as a policy by the LibDems several years ago. And the idea of a single universal benefit is what IDS has been trying to work on for years. The efficiency arguments would help cross-party support.
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