Soddball

I am already paying the Social Cost. I pay it every day with fat benefit scroungers stuffing their faces at my expense. I pay for it with teenage single mums thumping out children to get a bigger free house because it's easier than working. I pay for it with higher public sector salaries, homes-for-votes (sorry! Key worker housing), an engorged NHS, obsessive regulation, and so on.


:roll: As I said earlier, I don't remember it. From the footage I've seen since, I think I would have done exactly the same as Thatcher, but harder.

I don't think I need to say anything about Scargill beyond his being an apologist for Stalin. Anyone who says that he wasn't all bad isn't worth listening to on any level.

The unions tried to hold the country static in a time of change because it suited their short-term interest. They always do this. They did it with Rover recently and they cost thousands of people their jobs.

Unionist

Well said. The deficiencies are in the education and welfare systems, not immigration which is currently filling a need in the economy.

The welfare state has failed. As long as we keep paying people to do nothing they will continue to do nothing.

Attacking immigration is only attacking the symptom, not the cause.

mkpdavies

I think the Polish deserve some extra points when they make their application, due to their high quality people who have had close ties with Britain for years.

If Britain was bigger and less packed, then I would be more open to loose restrictions (never toally open like now, we don't want criminals and other countries lazy sods too!). Maybe if we could ship our government non job workers and the scroungers in exchange.

At least that would stop the country becoming a battery farm. The economy is important, but it isn't the be all and end all.

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Moving Target

Oh Dear. You need to get out a bit more mate. Seriously.

Soddball

When unable to find a strong argument in rebuttal, the classic approach is to use abuse. I see that you are fulfilling the stereotype.

brian pearson

In which case so do I. Because all that lot just about sums it up for me ! You won't find any of the big three saying the welfare state has gone mad, but imo these are the big domestic issues.

Robin

Sodball,
Do you think that the Polish are inherently hard workers, and the British lazy likewise. Are there any other virtues or vices that one lot has that the other lacks ?

What about those of us who are badly affected by migrant workers coming in ? Should we react to the dispiriting situation by accepting lower wages or working longer hours ?

What about the government,should it reduce our overheads to match the overheads of the countries that these migrants come from ?Is it good to import younger labour to compete for jobs with the older workforce who are settled in the areas with mortgages ?

Soddball

I think that, as a rule, anyone prepared to travel several hundred miles to a nation where they don't necessarily speak the language, to a place where they might not get a job and might not like the food or accomodation - anyone prepared to take that level of risk, in other words - is going to be keen to work hard. This applies to all migrants.
I also think that there is a subset of British society that expects stuff to be handed on a plate to them.

Are these generalisations? Absolutely. Are they cast in stone? Absolutely not. There will be workers that come here from abroad that don't want to work hard - but by and large they wouldn't apply to come here anyway. Are all British workers lazy? Far from it. Those that I meet day to day when I visit SMEs are rarely lazy - they often have a personal stake in that business and they usually love working for it.

But, on the whole, are Poles prepared to worker harder for less money than equivalent British workers? The business sector thinks so. I don't disagree.

Those are two of your choices. Another is to change the area in which you work. Another is to become an employer, take on those migrant workers and make money from them.
You could upskill, change the location of your employment. Have a complete career change. There's a range of options.

The one thing nobody can afford to do in our world today is stand still. It is hard. I've retrained three times in nine years - archaeology to the motor industry to IT and I've sacrificed one job with excellent prospects in a multinational for three years of poverty whilst my business got going.

The government's primary responsibility, IMO, should be to provide an environment in which businesses can thrive. Our government is singularly failing to do that.

This doesn't mean no employment protection. There is a place for that and it would be barking to suggest otherwise. I disagree with the US system of hire 'n fire. However, businesses now - small businesses in particular (which you never hear about because although they employ the majority of the people in this country they don't have a powerful voice) really are struggling. They struggle under truly bonkers amounts of paperwork - Inland Revenue, Companies House, HSE, unions, government. If you don't deal with it every day, you can't understand just how mad it is.

What I mean by that paragraph is that workers should be skilled by an excellent education. That education shouldn't just be about getting a job, it should include music, arts, sports and cookery.

Government should provide a minimal-regulation environment for SMEs. That is where the wealth of the country is generated and where the power of Britain's economy lies. Napoleon sneered at our 'nation of shopkeepers' but the small business really is the bedrock of UK Plc. A simple tax system and a light regulatory touch are all that are required.

The younger generation can't even get a mortgage. In my area something like 85% of first-time properties are going to buy-to-letters. That younger generation have far more problems coming to them but that is really for another thread.

Britannist

Your reply is so absurd it barely merits a serious response.

I can see from your last two postings to this thread that charm oozes out of every pour of your body.

You say Poles are excellent people - met all 40 million of them have you?

Ask MigrationWatch what the long-term economic benefits to this country are from eastern european immigration. It's negative. Ask the Centre For Policy Studies. They will tell you the same.

As for your reference Cuba - I am an anti-communist and fully supported Margaret Thatcher giving Scargill a good thrashing.

By the way, you say that you couldn't care less that I don't like your tone. You know something? I couldn't care less that you couldn't less that I don't like your tone. Deal with that. And deal with the fact that you and your anti-British worker views are in a minority - most British people don't want this massive eastern european influx.

Robin

Sodball,

I too ran a small business (international haulage) which was taxed out of existence. (British hauliers pay when in other countries, foreign trucks use our roads for free ). Now I freelance, no work no pay.
Lets leave out the macro economics and go to the other aspects.
The Poles work for less because £1 here is worth £5 in Poland. Thats gives them a great advantage, but when I did Poland in commie times they weren`t hard workers then. (the saying then was "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work). To me this shows its incentives that do the trick-incentives the British workforce doesn`t have.

For it to be fair the British worker should have his costs reduced- all taxes, and no money going to Poland via the EU.

The two choices of lowering wages and extending hours to accomodate outsiders coming in hardly seems fair. The others are not always feasable.Some people are too old to retrain, others have commitments and even if everyone was retrained (to what) those trades could be affected by migrant labour later.

The migrant workers dont affect the workshy, the dross you mentioned earlier, but they affect the innocent worker who doesn`t always have control over events.

The other costs to mass immigration also hit the workers hardest, the overcrowding, increase in house prices.

Best for the competition here to be between British workers for the jobs, and then competition woeldwide between Britain PLC versus the rest, with the government also doing the competing by lowering our costs.