On Saturday I asked a friend of mine who lives in Walsall whether he had been vaccinated yet. He replied that he had not, because he is an illegal immigrant, which I had forgotten. He has been here for seven years now, and I know him from before that in Nigeria. After some online research, I called him back and asked him if he knew that the government had announced that illegal immigrants could receive the vaccine through registering with a G.P., with no details asked. He said he did not have a G.P. and certainly would not be providing the state with all the information needed to register.
That chimed with me, because eighteen months ago when we moved to a different part of Edinburgh we had to change G.P., and I was horrified by the process. We had to produce passports and proof of address. Why a G.P. practice needs to see your passport is something I completely fail to understand, unless it is indeed a form of immigration check. The doctor’s job is to make you well, not to check you are using your real name. It is of course also difficult to provide proof of address immediately after moving, for obvious reasons. We had a period where I could prove with a utility bill that I live here, but that was not acceptable as proof that my wife and daughter lived with me.
I cannot tell you how much I detest all this. There has been a fundamentally authoritarian swing in society and I detest the way that so many people simply accept it. The system used to run on trust and honesty. For most of my life, if you walked into a GP’s office to register yourself and your family, you would just fill in the forms and get registered. The assumption was that you were telling the truth, barring any indication otherwise. Society has changed so the default, the presumption, is that you are lying unless you can prove otherwise. This is an appalling and fundamental societal shift that people have simply accepted.
If I tell a doctor that I have moved into a certain house, I expect that doctor to believe me. If I tell them my wife and daughter live with me, I expect them to believe that too. Why on earth should I have to prove it to get medical treatment? If I tell them I am a giraffe, certainly they may doubt.
This presumption you are dishonest is most marked in the field of money. It is almost impossible to make any financial transaction of any size, without proving positively you are not a money launderer or drug trafficker. Again, the presumption is of guilt until you can prove otherwise. If you wish to withdraw any significant sum of your own money in cash, a bank will even require to know what you intend then to do – with your own money. You cannot put money into a business without proving the origins of that money. The degree of intrusiveness is simply enormous, the realms of the state have expanded exponentially, the integrity of the citizen is officially disbelieved at all times. All of which is deployed almost exclusively against the little people.
I believe that a system which assumes that everybody is a rogue and a liar, that nobody’s word is trustworthy, leads to a situation where the important societal norms of trust and honesty are so officially disrespected, that these good behaviours start indeed to disappear through discouragement.
I should make plain I am not against the policing of crime; quite the opposite. Laws should be well enforced against those who are not honest, that is important reinforcement. But that is very different from the assumption that nobody is honest, and regulatory control of simple, everyday social and economic transactions on the basis of zero trust.
All that brings in a truly authoritarian state.
So I am not surprised my friend does not want to register with the G.P. to get vaccinated. It brings a host of intrusive questions, and Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policies, which aim to turn everybody with whom an immigrant has dealings – landlords, employers, banks etc. – into a government informant, has destroyed any feeling of security in dealing with authority in the immigrant population.
Nobody knows how many illegal immigrants there are in the United Kingdom. An estimate of 1.3 million people was used at the time it was announced they could apply for Covid vaccines. I believe that may be a severe underestimate. 22 years ago when working in the FCO I paid an official visit to a Thames Water sewerage works (it’s a glamorous life in the diplomatic service) at a time when Thames Water were looking for a big contract in Accra. We were discussing the fact that nobody truly knows the population of Accra, and I was told the same is true of London. The volume of sewage in some parts of London (Newham, Tower Hamlets) showed that the actual population was approaching twice the official population.
London in particular would simply grind to a halt without the illegal immigrants who keep its services and infrastructure going. Boris Johnson recognised this as Mayor of London, and in a quickly buried moment of sanity called for an amnesty for illegal immigrants.
For what it is worth, I think Johnson is an intelligent man, capable of a wide and sensible understanding of real problems and solutions, but that he has no interest in pursuing these at all. He subordinates any ideas for the public good, to ideas that will bring him personal power and wealth. When you think about it, that is a special, higher grade of calculating evil.
In fact, an amnesty for illegal immigrants is precisely what is needed for the sake of society in general. Society deplores illegal immigrants while being highly dependent on their labour. Their position outside of formal institutions is fertile ground for crime and exploitation. an amnesty will bring millions of people within the formal economy and able to pay tax. The Covid crisis should be used to give the political cover required – the alternative is to have pools of Covid continuing to exist within highly concentrated communities living in dense populations, waiting to mutate and break out again.
Immigration amnesty as a response to the pandemic should be a no-brainer, bringing those living amongst us into a position of human dignity in the state and able to enjoy its protections. It would be great to see some good emerge from this crisis.
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The environment in the UK has become even more hostile to immigrants since Brexit, as you say some of our great institutions wouldn’t function without them such as the NHS. We are living in an increasingly authoritarian union, and I won’t be surprised if the idea of ID cards is refloated again in the not so distant future.
My pet hate is self service checkouts, there’s even an Amazon one in London now where you scan your card on entry, pickup what you need bag it and walk out the door, without saying a word to anyone if you want to. What’s becoming of a quick chat with the check out girl/guy, that in my opinion is part of the overall shopping experience, and is a natural thing to do, I despair.
I despise self-service checkouts too, because
a) why should I do for free what used to be considered as included in the price, without any reduction in the price?
b) checkouts are socially completely unnecessary anyway;
c) I feel solidarity with shop workers whose jobs the self-service checkouts put under threat.
I explained c) to one young worker in a supermarket once – naively expecting a friendly response – and he “explained” back to me, as if I were a moron, that in fact using self-service checkouts meant the company had to employ more workers not fewer. He had no idea that for capitalists the wages paid to workers are a cost. In 1985 I doubt a single worker in say the north of England, other than perhaps a few village idiots who their friends and colleagues looked after, would have had such a lack of understanding of what waged work and capitalism are all about.
You are so right, especially about these absurd identity checks that have proliferated, and also about the ridiculous status of illegal immigrants.
We now see that when the infamous “there is no such thing as society” statement was made all those years ago it wasn’t simply wrong; it was actually stating an aspiration that has been pursued by all governments since. They are nearly there but we must resist it. Once social coherency and cohesion is destroyed then the state truly becomes all that there is outside our individual sphere and wields total power. Authoritarianism reigns supreme.
Not a situation I am prepared to tolerate.
Resistance is fertile.
When the state orders people not to go within 2 metres of their own family members or friends, that’s way beyond the authoritarian. It is totalitarian.
No, it’s called sensible precautions during a pandemic. That’s if you have enough sense to recognise it IS a pandemic – which might not be true in your case, so fill in whatever ludicrous conspiracy you like based on that false premise.
Well said Glenn, the fact that every other country are doing it someway or another seems to have totally passed these conspiracy nuts by.
There was a time in history when almost everyone believed the Earth was flat. That didn’t make it true.
” almost everyone believed the Earth was flat “
Some people still do. Some also believe Covid and vaccines are hoaxes. Doesn’t make that true either.
As usual, you completely miss the point of my comment.
“Health” in general is an area of life in contemporary capitalism that is subject to a truly enormous level of propaganda. The last time I looked, the average adult woman in Britain went to see her GP about once every 6 or 8 weeks. I forget the exact figure but it was something like that. Average frequency of visits is significantly lower for men. Seriously are people (here the female half of the population) really so damned ill all the time? Or is something else going on? There may be a clue in the (undeniable) existence of the marketing category called “health and beauty”.
Lemmings.
Incidentally Christobel Pankhurst wrote a pamphlet called “The Great Scourge – And How to End it”. Needless to say she is not my favourite member of either her family or the suffragist movement, but in that pamphlet she dares to look at reality and she does it in a way that is clearly not under the thumb of the medical fraternity.
Those who believe the medical fraternity has become the opposite of what it was then – that basically they have become the “servants of the people” – are as naive as f***.
Mystic N_eg : I’m amazed by you’re ability to pretend to be so completely unaware of the benefits of medical science.
Back in the good old days, nobody went to see a doctor regularly. Do you know what life expectancy was back then? A lot less than yours is now, that’s for sure.
But you – and your fellow travelers – have somehow turned this on its head, and conclude that the practice of medicine is making people ill and die! It’s just astonishing!
Tom Welsh: “Lemmings”
Such is the hazzard of never bothering to actually research anything, and relying 100% on bogus news sources and repeated falsehoods. Vaccines, viruses, lemmings – the lot, stop being so lazy before spreading your ignorance around even further.
https://blog.nature.org/science/2014/01/23/the-myth-of-suicidal-lemmings/
In my opinion many of the COVID rules are preposterous anti-scientific drivel, and some are positively destructive. When these are backed by state sanctions, that is totalitarian. A less authoritarian government would command more support.
The preposterous thing is the late poorly applied rules that are badly monitored and that do not offer help who need it to survive self isolation and loss of income. Quarantine and isolation are well proven public health measures in the time of pandemics.
@Glenn – Do you think it would be “sensible” for the government to impose special restraints on concentrated pockets of the population known to contain an unusually high proportion of people who refuse offers of vaccination, to
enable the rest of the country to socialise (at least for a few months) in approved ways, such as going down the pub, etc.?
Goodness knows what’s being prepared for smartphone resisters, even those who accept vaccination. The demand is not simply that everyone gets vaccinated; it’s that everyone can prove to companies and officials that they have been vaccinated.
The royal-decorated Simon Stevens, chief executive of the National
HygieneHealth $ervice in England – a Balliol man, friend of Boris Johnson, former president of the Oxford Union, and former recipient of a Harkness Fellowship to spend time in the US – says “digital medicine and digital health is [sic] obviously going to be a bigger part of what healthcare looks like in the future.”Quite interesting that he distinguishes between “digital medicine” and “digital health”.
Digital medicine – that’s to do with when people interact with medics and “health professionals”.
Digital health – think about it … digital…not necessarily in interaction with medics or “health professionals”… Human bodies are not digital…but certain equipment is…
I see you’re going to enjoy setting yourself up as a anti-vaxxer martyr. Make yourself vulnerable to Covid-19 and its variants, help to spread it around (and promote others to do so), then revel in the even more virulent variants thus produced. But if you’re not permitted to do so, oh! How your liberties are being curtailed! The humanity!
You must like death a lot.
Your other points are rather disjointed. Yes, digital – fascinating stuff, eh? That’s how you’re able to promote all this disinformation here – all digitally based. Avoid it, Mystic N_eg, at once! Never interact with digitally based devices again!
Only you’re not so keen on that, right? You’re all for digital technology that you think you understand and achieves your purposes. “Smart-phone” is terribly bad, invoking lip-curling contempt. But spending many hours a day posting your, ehem, interesting thoughts on someone else’s blog? Why – that’s just healthy and commendable to the point of being heroic!
It was – and is – through statistics and number crunching that we have identified the cause of much that has blighted humanity in medical science. The link between smoking and lung cancer (you believe that one, right?), and the evaluation of health promoting measures.
But somehow it all becomes vague, mushy, and frankly unbelievable when you don’t like it, based on some prejudice that you’ve cottoned onto from the outset.
Perhaps you’re happy to associate at close quarters with potential plague-carriers who refuse tests or vaccination. Maybe we could set up social clubs just for you, eh? Imagine how much you could all agree on there! At least while you all lasted.
Oh – and could you anti-vaxxers please sign a pledge that you REFUSE treatment when you get ill? Thanks in advance!
@glenn_uk
conflating a healthy scepticism against being turned into a lab rat for an untested frankenstein vaccine with the lunacy of a small minority of general anti-vaxxers is immoral and intellectually dishonest.
You must be scared of death a lot. Here’s what the great Bill Hicks had to say to all those who claim that health is a moral obligation..: “non-smokers die every day!” ..they sure do.
Wonky: “… untested Frankenstein vaccine…”
Err… here’s news for you chief – it’s been tested. A lot. Surprised a rigorous truth-seeker like yourself missed out on that information before posting!
I think Johnson is an intelligent man, capable of a wide and sensible understanding of real problems and solutions, but that he has no interest in pursuing these at all.
Why? Institutional pushback? Easier to go with the flow? Makes you wonder how much PMs are actually leading and how much they are being led? Certainly any idealism is quickly binned upon taking office.
Though opposing the Tories, I thought the one thing Johnson would bring as PM was a more socially liberal agenda, but the authoritarian drift continues unabated. And Starmer and his right-wing shadow cabinet aren’t going to oppose any of it; quite the opposite, him acting more like a handmaid of authoritarianism.
After 8 years as mayor of London, Johnson surely wasn’t an “idealist”.
I just found out he was a vice-chairman of the Tory party before then. That’s a position that’s all about brokering the supply of dirty money. Interesting.
The Queen’s Prime Minister might be an intelligent man but that doesn’t mean that he puts his intelligence to use for the good of the whole electorate. In particular, during this scare period, he has employed it for the good of a chap named Boris, taking advice that he believes will further his ambitions. I do suspect though that he is neither that interested in the ‘science’ of the pandemic nor capable of fathoming it even if he was.
CM writes….> the integrity of the citizen is officially disbelieved…< Are we not subjects rather than citizens? Or should that be subjecteds?
In all honesty I was once asked to leave my passport when renting a carpet cleaner.
A good idea, especially for any juveniles in such a position – the UK’s “dreamers”, to rescue them from a life of uncertainty – but I don’t see the Tories doing it. I’m not sure if any other party is interested in it.
Of course the elephant in the room is why would someone from the Middle East, Africa, etc. risk their lives and pay criminal to transport them to come to a (Trumpian sh*thole) country like the UK ?
Nothing to do with the Wars we continue to fund and support, nothing to do with the terrorist groups we continue to fund, nothing to do with the inhuman sanctions we impose, nothing to do with the corrupt dictators we support, nothing to do with the Oil and resources we steal ?
If honest and decent people governed our countries and ran our businesses there wouldn’t be so many problems overseas and at home. You reap what you sow.
Craig, an important point you’re missing is that what’s changed: the sheer level of identity theft – and it’s mainly due to the internet and poor online security.
The levels are insane, in the US over 25,000 people everyday get their identity stolen, each identity can be sold to up to 20 others. It’s literally too big a problem for cybercrime police investigators. It ruins lives as bank accounts are drained, the people doing it are often skilled hackers using metasploit and chaining proxies so tracking who hacked you is near impossible.
And that’s why you now have to produce a load of documentation.
The biggest identity thieves are the Government.
https://truepublica.org.uk/united-kingdom/us-spy-firm-at-centre-of-sensitive-nhs-patient-data-grab/
I agree – the world is much smaller than it used to be – and in some ways much more dangerous. Proving your identity is something we should welcome. Yes, it probably means identity cards (and vaccine passports) but I can’t see any way around it.
You’re conflating two separate matters – measures to prevent identity theft, and record of a vaccine/s. Anyone in favour of the former might not be in favour of the latter.
The netherworld of illegal migrants and legal migrants under persecution by the hostility Gestapo is a creation of the state. By creating an under-under class, the state has reinvented slavery, hence the rhetoric of racist exclusion is juxtaposed with the servicing of society by un-people. Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer and Fritz Sauckel did the same in the early 40s. Told you that liberals were fascists in cardigans.
Is there a government estimate for the number of slaves in Britain right now? For some reason the term “modern slavery” is often used. Presumably some kind of quantitative estimate informed the Modern Slavery Bill before it became an Act six years ago in 2015.
There is an “independent anti-slavery commissioner”, the thrice royally-decorated Sarah Thornton, former high-up cop. I wonder where she gets her car washed.
One difference between now and the early 1940s in Germany is that there is massive over-employment (from a capitalist point of view) now. Millions work in (or have “furloughed” status in relation to) jobs which don’t produce any surplus value.
For the ruling class to “deal with” this problem requires the ramping up of a brutalised culture. Capitalism would be doing itself a favour if it killed off a fairly large part of the population, but “culture” has been holding it back. That problem is now being addressed. That’s where stuff such as “Game of Thrones” comes in, and violent videogames too.
If the rulers are successful the death rate will be larger than it was in WW2 precisely because of considerations of labour. Even in circumstances of open war, mobilisation in countries such as Britain, the US, and Russia wouldn’t mean all males aged 18-45 were called up to the armed forces.
A sobering thought for those who live in Britain is that men such as Francis Galton, H G Wells, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, etc., who all espoused the cause of massacring the poor, have never been officially denounced and they retain their status as worthy contributors to society. That’s in a country where downward-pointing class hatred is probably unrivalled in both extent and intensity. (I doubt the German students who belong to duelling societies ever hold “chav parties” for instance.)
Government estimate is 10,000 but an independent estimate reckons the number is closer to 13,000.
This is out of a global total of c.40 million with Africa and Asia being the most prolific areas.
N_. Thanks, you are a very knowledgeable and thinkative person.
Doug Stanhope does a great bit on that sort of thing. I’m not sure what the policy on vulgarity is here but the funnier full-fat version is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0dh6HO0K4s
“They say if you give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day, but if you *teach* a man to fish… he’s got to get a fishing license. But he doesn’t have any money – so he’s got to get a job, and he has to get into the social security system and pay taxes. Now you’re going to audit the poor [guy] because he’s not really good with math. They’ll pull the IRS van up to your house and they’ll take all your [stuff]; they’ll take your black velvet Elvis and your Batman toothbrush – and that all goes up for auction with the burden of proof on you, because you forgot to carry the one – because you were just worried about eating a […] fish. And you couldn’t even cook the fish because you needed a permit for an open flame, and the health department is going to start asking a lot of questions about where you’re going to dump the scales and the guts. ‘This is not a sanitary environment!'”.
Even with all of the proper paperwork and a clean record it really does feel like every facet of life has been bought up and I have to spend hours and hours applying to borrow pieces of it. I know they say life is a rental, but not like this! I suppose a lot of it is for good reason, but god it’s exhausting. Even in the workplace I now need to document every second of my day to prove I’m worth my pitiful salary.
Apparently for some homeless people the daunting prospect of all of this bureaucracy is a big factor in their reluctance / inability to re-integrate with ‘civilisation’; for all of its horrors, it’s a more natural day-to-day way of living in some respects. I can imagine that if you’ve been able to scrape a living as an illegal immigrant there can be a similar fear in declaring yourself and getting sucked into the machinery of modern life – perhaps moreso than the fear of getting caught.
It certainly doesn’t help that our government has proven to be either openly hostile, inconsistent, or thoroughly incompetent when dealing with immigration. I certainly wouldn’t trust that this amnesty won’t eventually end with me being sent packing, if I were them.
The chicken-roosting just keeps on coming! Would it be a rhetorical question to ask whether we’ll even connect the dots between actions and consequences?
Virtue signal all you like when you have your own country on your own planet. This one is massively overpopulated and doesn’t need another Million human locusts.
Don’t be silly. They are here already.
I agree on the over-population front and I’d be happy to settle for a one in – one out policy if we could base it on keeping the nice folks and booting the arseholes.
Have you ever wished you lived somewhere more sunny, by the by?
Penguin – yep – that is why it will be illegal for Eton-educated English to move here after independence.
Too many penguins?
Penguin. In some people there is much anger. Usually because of personal trauma. In some people this inner distress is projected onto others. A lack of empathy and miserable outlook on the beauty of life. Some people follow the Grand Legitimating Narratives of their societies and are still miserable. A few question these Narratives that we are supposed to adhere to. If you view other desperate humans who have the misfortune of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time, your inner and and misery will never be soothed by dehumanising them. Vague constructs of Country, Purity of birth and Fatherland are tools to manipulate and divert attention from core inner matters. Cockroaches and other terms such as Locusts have been used before in Germany in the 30’s and in Palestine more recently. The division and carve-up of the lands, their ownership does not belong to any race or group. It is owned by a very few like the Monarchs and those who maintain their grip by pushing Nationalism and division to maintain their wealth. This small country conquered the whole world. At its peak with all the riches pouring in from all the colonies, its very own ethnic people lived in abject poverty. It was Enoch Powell himself that went to the Caribbean to recruit the Windrush generation. It was the Tories who destroyed the Unions and brought in free movement. Yet the working class still vote for them. Still drive cars for decades with Arab oil. I would look at your own life and have a Renaissance. Stop eating animals, stop watching TV, stop reading the papers, take up yoga and meditation. Sort out your own affairs and gain inner Independence.
First time I went to England there were no checks in the Tube. Next time, 2 years later, they were checking at entrance if you did not jumped over the turnstile. Add some years the fine had gone up from 10 pounds to 50, and they were checking at the entrance and exit. It is not getting better, it is what I call the ‘Osama bin Laden’ syndrome.
Checking for a valid paid for ticket is Osama Bin Laden syndrome, is it? No, mate, it’s called having laws and paying your way for the services you use.
Paying twice. (Can’t believe there are still brainwashed idiots who prefer privatisation.) And paying thrice if you get your way.
Transport should be free. Why billions in profits for private companies who have been given public assets.
Exactly.
Surely this is what the CHI, as the replacement for the old style NHS cards (which were themselves repurposed ID cards) is supposed to provide for?
Surely once one is in the system, there should be no need for any other impact from the “hostile environment” stuff? i.e. there should be no need to deal with that process.
At most the new practice could contact the prior GP practice which one is leaving, and liaise with them?
Boris is an intelligent man but…
My next door neighbour once told me he respected the British but he detested the English. So I suppose Craig is making a similar distinction. He thinks the British government has acted wisely in easing the pressure on the economy from the pandemic, but despised English Nationalism that caused Brexit.
Being unable to saw myself in half like a sheep carcass, I find it difficult to make the same distinction about myself.
Not English nationalism, anti-EU nationalism.
GB population in 2020 was as follows:
England 56,286,961 84%
Scotland 5,463,300 8%
Wales 3,152,879 5%
Northern Ireland 1,893,667 3%
So “your neighbour” is basing his opinion about Britain on 16% of the population. Anti English “racism” is just as nasty and nutty as any other sort.
Us plebs have to go through a zillion bureaucratic hoops to open a bank account or make an investment. Meanwhile the City of London – in cahoots with the UK’s crown protectorates – are the world leaders in money-laundering! Tough laws for the little people, while the mega-rich can get away with blatant corruption on a global scale. Just about sums up modern Britain (and the behaviour of Johnson’s ministers and cronies).
It’s the same with air travel: little or no security checks when you fly first class. When the rich do it, it’s not crime.
There is probably not a single occupation, that of GP or otherwise, where the unsuspecting worker is not doing some form of policing on behalf of the state, or some form of data-collecting for it or for the corporate sector (free of charge). That’s just one of the reasons why it is so important to get everyone ‘back to work’, do or die.
Looks like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were batting for the wrong side then: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on immigration (YouTube, 2m 28s).
I once tried to DEPOSIT cash into my account, to be told I had to prove where it had come from.
“It’s my money, I’m depositing it.”
Not good enough. I had to provide the ATM receipt to prove I had withdrawn it from my account at another bank.
I was also made to give a specific reason as to why I was depositing a large sum of my own cash into my own account.
It’s pathetic – what is a criminal going to say; I robbed a few thousand in cash and decided to incriminate myself by banking it?!
Yes, money laundering would be very easy if you could just deposit large sums of cash!
That said, of course people know how to launder money even with the restrictions, so now we need yet more restrictions, and so it continues.
The hard part is buying of the government official to the bidding. Laundering LARGE sums of cash then becomes very easy. Laundering “plebs-like-amounts-of-cash.” Now that is difficult.
As usual, you are pointing at the wrong enemy.
I once had to install a cheque scanning machine situated in a large foreign bank in London. Turned out they were scanning postal orders.as well as cheques. Hundreds and hundreds of postal orders, and I was quite surprised that that they were still in use. A few days later they reported an error message would appear randomly which no one could understand. The language skills in the back office were such that it took me some time to understand what the problem was. This error only occurred when they were scanning the postal orders.
The error code indicated that the file number already existed. Or in plain English, the image, or more correctly, the serial number, had already been scanned and saved before.
So i explained that the postal order had already been scanned. This was impossible, they said. So i searched the database and showed them the same image and number, and the date it had been scanned; only the previous day. With that they produced a cardboard bankers box with hundreds of postal orders all batched up in elastic bands. Didn’t take long before they had two identical postal orders in their hands. One or both were forgeries.
They thanked me and practically bundled me out of the door,
Later, when discussing this with colleagues we posited, in the absence of any other explanation, that postal orders were probably the cheapest way of moving money if one couldn’t have a bank account, Simply send the postal order to the bank and they’d apply the sum to a designated account in the country concerned.
‘Society deplores illegal immigrants while being highly dependent on their labour.’
This is probably the reason why even Covid as a cover would not allow for MPs to even consider amnesty for those who who’ve been illegalised by the state.
Never understood it myself. The xenophobia, not mistrust of Europe, was what caused the Brexit disaster. How easily the thick-headed working classes consume the lies the media tells, the scapegoating of immigrants. I honestly would like to see every xenophobic blue-collar redneck deported to Yemen or Myanmar for a month, with their bank account frozen. They might come back with a more enlightened brain. Sorry, but this subject makes me very angry.
The Leave vote was not predominantly working class, so you’re either revealing a mind washed by mass media or one twisted by a deep seated prejudice, probably both. Worth pondering too at this juncture whether the Remain movement was driven by love of immigrants or a burning hatred of Jeremy Corbyn and everything he stands for.
Brian c (18.35). Thanks for making this point. The bulk of the Brexit Leave vote in England and Wales consisted of solid support for ‘Leave’ from Tory voters. There were local exceptions, for instance in south Nottinghamshire, where voters in Ken Clarke’s constituency, encouraged by their MP’s firmly pro-Europe stance, came out strongly for ‘Stay’. And in the true blue Cotswolds many Tories voted ‘Stay’, probably influenced by local Witney MP David Cameron.and his local colleagues and friends. . But across most of E & W ordinary Tories voted ‘Leave’. What swung it for Leave was the lying campaign of Johnson, Cummings and Gove, who realized that they needed to stir up xenophobia (anti-foreigner or anti-Europe, it didn’t matter which) among enough Labour voters by foul means – or fouler means – to have a chance of scraping over the 50% barrier. .
I’d love to be corrected, and would love to have my faith in the working-class struggle restored; but I’m sorry, my sense of things is that the majority of Tory voters are the working classes or vice-versa. All I think I’ve said (in a moment of frustration directed at the kind of xenophobic hate criminals that are rife among Tories and working classes alike) is something that we all know, but don’t like to admit, because it is politically incorrect and sounds like betrayal. But who would deny that the vulnerability and the ignorance of the working classes (through no fault of their own, of course) turns them into their own worst enemies? This is no secret, but rather a kind of timeless and universal principle, one might say. You’d know this in your gut even more if you lived in the American industrial belt. It is an age-old fact that victims of power are turned against other victims of power, so that nobody sees what power is doing while the nincompoops are duking it out. Please do tell me I’m wrong or simplifying though. This is one reason I use this site, to be told off every now and again.
Why aren’t the Tories stopping the immigrants bcrossing the channel? They must be so right wing and xenophobic.
The situation you describe and lament with good reason, is more or less exactly the situation which exists in France. For the slightest administrative operation proof of identity and usually proof of your domicile, electricity or gas bill for example, is demanded. It can be quite ubuesque when in a couple, one has all these utilities registered in their name and the other in the couple needs a proof too. For a child, as they grow up, obviously utility bills are never in their name, you end up presenting the parent’s proof and then a signed statement that the child lives with you… which is oddly acceptable, whereas a signed statement of the adult child is not.
The question I have not managed to answer is if it’s the “dishonesty” of the French people which generated such lack of trust or whether the lack of trust generated a lack of honesty?
In Costa Rica opening a bank account involves proof of your address. Thus you trot off to the offices of the monopoly electricity company – ICE – and are issued with a copy of your last bill which contains their reference number for you but no mention of your address whatsoever, then trot back to the bank who are happy with this, presumably on the grounds that ICE must be billing you for something tangible.
Well said Craig. I couldn’t agree more about this general decline in trust that today impinges on all aspects of our lives and most especially at work. But as with the proverbial boiling frog, these constant assaults on personal freedom are more or less unnoticed.
“The system used to run on trust and honesty. ……The assumption was that you were telling the truth, barring any indication otherwise. Society has changed so the default, the presumption, is that you are lying unless you can prove otherwise. This is an appalling and fundamental societal shift that people have simply accepted.”
I think it is a gradual wearing away of the reset in values caused by the two world wars. It first became really noticeable around the time that the “Big Bang” deregulation of finance unleashed the “loadsamoney” culture on the nation. It became the case that you did what you thought you could get away with, not what you thought was right. This attitude is now the entire modus operandi of the political classes and has permeated deep into the fabric of society. Despite what all the xenophobes would like to believe, it has nothing to do with immigrants, either legal or illegal. All the checks are necessary because now it’s seen to be OK to lie in order to get something when it is the State, or another large and faceless organisation that is providing the something.
“The system used to run on trust and honesty.” Indeed. Yet here you are spotlighting your longstanding knowledge of, and friendship with, an illegal immigrant. Seems both of you have no issue at all about not being honest.
What’s not honest about not being a grass?
Dan Hardy (18.36); when you have a government that prides itself on making life difficult for the less well off and goes out of its way to create a hostile environment for certain groups, then all of us are entitled, and many of us may consider ourselves duty bound, to resist the imposition of police state methods, for instance by not co-operating with them. Well done, Craig.
It’s hostile to have an immigration policy, is it? Its hostile to remove those immigrants who fail to prove they have a right to be here, is it?
Totally agree, thanks Craig. Tacit acceptance of a labour force with no legal status is disgraceful; deeply damaging and completely immoral. Why can’t we have you as PM instead of Johnson? 🙁
Tacit approval? LOL! If so, then this illegal individual would not be afraid to provide his details. Your comment is a complete contradiction in terms.
Control of identity is pretty common in Europe before access to healthcare. In France, it takes place before you go to the doctor. You have to show your carte vitale. If you don’t have one, you pay. That’s the question, should illegal immigrants have the right to free healthcare? that’s the question, rather than should people have to prove their status. I don’t know the answer.
The form-filling is nothing to do with not trusting people; its about jig saw identification, enabling tracking for 24/7 surveillance. This year’s Census was particularly nosey compared with previous versions.
The government covid Amnesty would connect most of the missing dots in 24/7 spying, and it would enable law enforcers to identify that sub class of illegal landlords, employers and users of illegal services.
But that identification would never be used for eliminating that type of illegality because the State loves and looks after criminals who they use to spy on dissent and free-thinking.
There are at least eight households in my street in Birmingham who are actively engaged in spying by the police or intelligence services. The state is interested in finding out who opposes their MSM and integrity Initiative lies. They have no interest whatsoever in stopping criminality and illegal immigrants.
If you phone Prevent to nominate a terrorist, Prevent can recruit that terrorist to their colonial war propaganda machine. To be honest, in this particular instance, I am quite irritated by Craig’s feigned naivety about government collection of metadata. It’s absolutely nothing to do with checking on crime.
The Big Criminals, like Ian Duncan-Smith, who tried to claw back the benefits system for party political Tory dogma, are absolutely petrified that Huawei could find out about their posh end criminal activities, money laundering and other corruption.
I have absolutely no idea why anybody would want to spy on the private life of an ordinary citizen , assisted by recorded identification of that person through bank details act, unless for the purpose of fitting that person up , should they criticise the lies of the MSM and Integrity Initiative. For example , Alex Salmond Mark Hirst and Craig Murray dare to challenge the government Lies. Result : harassment , fitting up and threatening with a criminal record.
The British government is an illegal immigrant to the traditional Christian values of this country. They don’t like it up ’em . Prepare to be threatened and killed.
Giyane. What planet are you on ? Don’t you realise we need to create jobs for the millions of unemployed. We will need millions to spy on millions.
Wikikettle
I know , because you’re not actually on this planet, because you’re floating about a metre above it , like the Dalai Lama .
Giyane. I failed to be successfully sarcastic and subsequently sunk.
As for Dalia Lama, he has same views on refugees as Nigel Farage. Being one himself !
Wikikettle
I hope not literally sunk.
Are there not supposed to be seven heavens and seven earths? Google is telling me they have found 6 layers of the earth, so I suppose water might be the seventh. I hope you are still afloat.
We can see water so.not much faith needed to be elevated by it, but we can’t see air, so it’s rather amazing for us for birds and planes and holy people to be levitated by it. No sarcasm received or intended.
Just replying to your joke with another joke.
Wikikettle.
Are you referring to the number of re-incarnations Nigel Farage has had?
I’m not sure how typical Craig’s change-of-doctor experience is. A member of my family, also in Edinburgh, recently moved from one medical practice to another, and it was all arranged with a single ‘phone call, nothing else, and with relevant files transferred (I believe electronically) from one practice to the other within days.
Change of registration could be easy, if the identity is already proven.
GP registration is not quite what it seems. 30-40 years ago, the registration procedure was actually a very formal affair presided over by a gimlet-eyed receptionist. It might have seemed quite genteel due to the still cricket-and-high tea mentality of mainstream UK bureaucratic culture.
Registration details were forwarded to the “Area Health Authority” which also functions as the on-the-ground data gatherer for MI5 (or is it MI6, i can never remember?). Seriously. Their premises were and are more tightly guarded than Fort Knox.
This all changed when it was realized that young radicals were less likely to need medical attention. Even young ppl, tho, occasionally need a dentist. So dental registration is now the primary means of identification. Each and every dental procedure done in the UK is stored on their main computer in Eastbourne.
Tom, its not about transferring “relevant files”, its about allocating the patient to a cost centre.
On the question of immigration, it is a different one from access to healthcare.
Legal immigration from the EU is in strong decline, as a result of Brexit, and we are going to suffer from lack of workers. Even legal workers are leaving, as the expense of a residence permit is excessive. University teachers and researchers in particular.
It looks like xenophobic Brexiters are going to succeed in excluding legal migrants, at the price of destroying the economy.
There are few British doctors, i.e. those having passed a PhD, because the costs are so high, but we can no longer import the foreigners we used to. Classic Brexit.
Brexit merely brought all the contradictions of ‘Modern Britain’ into stark relief.
Personally, I have zero respect for all those who benefited from the status quo: privatisation of utilities to banking deregulation and who then complain about ‘foreigners’ despite encouraging the private market in education to raise costs beyond any supportable level, meanwhile other nations spend their hard earned wealth training doctors and nurses, only to have the UK poach those same doctors at little additional expense to them. All of which is the very opposite of the creed of personal responsibility they are so fond of quoting at everyone else. Fucking hypocrites, the lot of them.
J
You can only be a hypocrite if you profess to believe in the dogma of a creed, such as Mammon, or Thatcherite worship of the market.
Boris Johnson only speaks after being coached by spin doctors and Security Services wife on what to say. Nowadays, the only criteria for bei g a political leader is to be predictable and brain-wiped, then programmed by your minders to deliver the correct message.
The rah rah water-pedalling bluster gives him time to delete his own opinion and retrieve the party dogma opinion.
Now that she’s retired Theresa May regularly launches an attack on Boris ‘ policies in the House of Commons, as if her personal Alexa or TomTom are still on. You have reached your destination darling. I know it wasn’t exactly the destination you put in,
Short before the difficult but – if you want to withdraw large bundles of cash, just tell the banks you have a stag night, and need it for booze and strippers!
On the heavier points! Doctors should provide medicine under the (a) Hippocratic oath, without some state sponsored tyranny using them for its own gains, but then medicine – and even the scientific method – is almost completely a profit based cult these days. I trust astrophysicists, not pharmacologists! :p
However, the argument that a nation of 65m citizens would grind to a halt because it isn’t gorging on cheap labour for outside its membrane is short termist.
Yes – Brits often don’t want to work the crappy jobs for crappy pay. But then the counterargument is 40 years of post Thatcher/Reagan real wage stagnation whilst productivity skyrocketed, means they may see it more as getting their heads shoved down that Trainspotting toilet – the true definition of wage slavery.
Nigerians need to build their own nation (our “post”-colonial hegemons would help if they didn’t interfere and destroy third world lives and infrastructure), and if you cut immigration to 0, within a few years workers wages would rise to whatever balance British citizens and their employers found reasonable.
It happened during the Black Plague, when the common worker gained a stronger bartering position from the death of a third of the nation (why I never got the premise of that Marvel movie where Thantos kills half the Universe off.. fewer competitors, more resources.. once the years dry off!)
Certainly Brits would demand a much higher wage than where it is now on average, as we keep arguing about a living wage.
My example: I have a 5 year old.. and a lot of very wealthy Indian friends, back from my Harrow days.
They say it simply – ‘want a nanny? We find you the kindest, highest IQ, most diligent matron you will ever meet, all you have to do is buy her a ticket, let her live with you and share the food (as a full time governess would with small children, I assume she would), and pay her £200 a month.’
As a comparison, their chefs get £100/month in Delhi. Even at £400 – which they would send fully back to their families – it’s £13 a day.
For the nanny even that pittance is a godsend. She’d send it back to her family and they would all benefit. But then what of the British citizen that loses out?
Sure it’s opportunity, sure people benefit, but the question is this a stable solution? Imo it is not. It allows for brain drain from the poor nations (unless the rich nations take dummies, in which case the rich nations suffer), and it stifles and angers the accepting population.
Better let all nations develop to their utmost potentials, in peace. That last part, is where Britain, the EU, the US fail.
Africa would prosper without one sided treaties like China suffered in the 19th century. How much? Dunno – but more so than as now, when it is under the boot of western tyranny.
Great thought provoking article. Of course, the entry of people illegally into a country depends heavily on the hosts’ willingness to receive and exploit them as Upton Sinclair revealed over a century ago in his “The Jungle”. Legal immigrants are not always wanted by the established populations, because they threaten others’ livelihoods, but are welcomed by the bosses as long as they help to keep their labour costs down, and as Upton Sinclair also described, the media – then the newspapers – will always side with the bosses in their exploitation of their immigrant workforce, for who pays for the newspapers with their advertising of their products? The more that changes nothing changes and all that..
As for the other part of the article, I wonder if the idea of “concept creep”, which I suppose is a bit like “mission creep” in a different context, has something to do with the tightening of restrictions. Every single issue that is politicised seems to be expanded to draw all like issues into its scope (vertical creep). And every issue then identified draws more example of the type into it (horizontal creep), leading to more and more restrictions and control over people’s behaviour.