What good is the EU ?

[WendyB]

Re: What good is the EU ?

A flawed argument because most migrant workers are desperate to get out of those kinds of jobs as soon as they can.

I'm not sure where you get this impression of them being happy little workers on £5.93 an hour? There's a reason why UK citizens shun the lowest paid jobs and equally, there's a reason why economic migrants from poorer EU countries take them. It doesn't make it 'right' that they do take those jobs just because they are the only ones willing to do them (which I think is incorrect anyway).

Most immigrant workers are quickly acquiring qualifications and moving out of those minimum pay jobs as quickly as they can. As fast as anyone else would.

Following your line of argument, we should always encourage a steady stream of new, cheap immigrant labour to do the 'c-rap' jobs no one else wants to do. Imo that's just another form of economic slavery and where do you draw the line on migration if you do that anyway?

Its just another form of economic abuse that this country is taking advantage of. It would be far better to pay better salaries for the so-called 'menial' jobs to attract back British workers. In point of fact, I know of several people right now who have tried to get those sorts of jobs and they're finding it well nigh impossible.

Far better in the long term for this country and our economy to start respecting all citizens reagrdless of what job they do and to pay accordingly, than to rely on de facto slaves working at the very minimum wage and whose incentivsation is to come to the UK to escape the economic privations of their own countries. I feel differently when migrants come here to escape persecution and torture 'n' stuff, but when it comes to ecomomic migrants I feel that the real solution is to encourage those economies to improve.

But following your argument, obviously they must be happier than they were in their own country otherwise they wouldn't be here working for 5.93 an hour, would they? And yes, they probably do want a better education/standard of life/way of living, as everyone should.

Also following your argument, if the crap paid jobs were shunned by everyone, because the money is crap and should be higher, that follows that my wages should be higher too, because (and I'm not being up myself or snobbish here) I get paid 8.00 and hour for what I do, which is a lot more complex than the "crappy" jobs you're referring to.

It is not necessarily economic abuse, it's a question of a lot of the population of this country being content to not work because they get just as much on benefits. That doesn't necessarily follow that that's because the wages are too low, might it not be that the benefits are too high?

Yes we should encourage the other economies to improve, but that isn't going to happen overnight is it. And with movement around the EU there is nothing we can do to stop economic migration is there. To be perfectly honest, if I was a lowly crap paid worker in another EU country with no prospects, and i got the chance to move to another EU country where I could get a better paid job, decent accommodation and benefits which far outweighed what I could get in my own country, I'd be on the first plane to the UK like a shot

I've done crap jobs myself in the past, minimum wages for long hours etc etc, hated every minute but had to do it to keep the wolf from the door. You do what you gotta do, don't you? And I did it because we didn't qualify for any benefits, we had a mortgage which had to be paid. However if we hadn't originally tried to "better" ourselves by buying a house and getting out of the council housing system, we would have been entitled to housing benefits etc. My Oh had been made redundant, but because my earnings took us over the limit by about 2 quid we got no benefits at all, apart from about 35 a week unemloyment benefit. Which when he had been earning 10 times that much made things a bit of a struggle, to say the least.

Enough said about the EU etc, the thing which really really really pees me off is that how, and why, when I have contributed to this country by way of NI, tax and god only knows what other taxes for the last 34 years, we have a health service etc that is creaking on it's hinges, yet allows and Tom Dick or Harry to just turn up and get free healthcare? At least the migrant workers are contributing, which is more than can be said for the Health Tourists, not only from within the EU which we can't do sod all about, but from non-EU countries too.

[Sapphire]

Re: What good is the EU ?

I'm not sure if any of you can remember back to before we were part of the EU and the Government were banging on how good it would be for us etc, Ok I was pretty young at the time but my understanding was that ALL EU member countries would be the same, ie the same health care, wage structure, pensions even down to the price of a beer, bag of sugar or even a litre of petrol, so what I am thinking is how come most of those things are a hell of a lot cheaper than here ? When you go abroad to certain EU countries their health and safety is appalling yet they are members of the same community? When you visit a foreign restaurant their cleanliness is of a lesser standard than ours have to meet (in a lot of cases) ?
I just cannot seem to get my head around this.

[enaid]

Re: What good is the EU ?

Well yes the Polish maybe here to do jobs our lazy gits wont do ie farm work, picking veg etc. There are quite a few around where we have a caravan and they have netted all the local ponds etc for they will eat any fish apparently,they have also been to known to kill the ducks and swans for food. Not long ago the police were called to an area where a fire had been lit and they had decided to help themselves to a cow and have a BBQ. Talk about bite the hand that feeds you, but only us decent and soft hearted Brits would put up with it.

[enaid]

Re: What good is the EU ?

Anyway more to the point does anyone know anyone who voted YES to the EU cause I don't. lol

[pompeyfaith]

Re: What good is the EU ?

Yup and when is new car pricing going to come into line with the rest of the EU cars here are on ave £2000 more than our counterparts.

I once worked for a dealer that only traded in new EU cars, so all that business was going over the channel.

[Sapphire]

Re: What good is the EU ?

@ Di, nope hun I didn't vote for the EU.

@ Pf, I suspect the answer to that will be when hell freezes over.

[leclerc]

Re: What good is the EU ?

Well yes the Polish maybe here to do jobs our lazy gits wont do ie farm work, picking veg etc. There are quite a few around where we have a caravan and they have netted all the local ponds etc for they will eat any fish apparently,they have also been to known to kill the ducks and swans for food. Not long ago the police were called to an area where a fire had been lit and they had decided to help themselves to a cow and have a BBQ. Talk about bite the hand that feeds you, but only us decent and soft hearted Brits would put up with it.

As an aside, killing swans is an offence since the Swan is a protected bird. A few weeks ago an injured swan stopped traffic for about an hour in Cambridge by just sitting in the middle of the road and you can't kill them

[Caspar]

Re: What good is the EU ?

Something to do with a Royal Charter and counting swans on the Thames, but I don't remember the detail.

[The Debt Star]

Re: What good is the EU ?

Wendy, I never said the jobs were crappy (which is what the inverted commas were all about). YOU implied they were crap jobs, not me. My point was that the stigma attached to low paid jobs should be completly done away with and workers paid properly. I also made the point that I know of several British nationals who can't find those jobs and who are more than willign to take them on. So, imo, its not true that British workers shun so-called menial jobs. I also think that when the present round of mass imigrants move out of those jobs for something better that we will need another tranch of low-paid foreign workers to do that work. So its a cycle of mass immigration which will never end and on which we have become dependant as a source of cheap labour. In my book thats economic slave trade. period.

[leclerc]

Re: What good is the EU ?

The only way manual workers from an EU country will go back will be when the economy and standards of living are similar to the UK.

[Sapphire]

Re: What good is the EU ?

The only way manual workers from an EU country will go back will be when the economy and standards of living are similar to the UK.

And the only way we will get our own people of the arses and into those jobs will be to stop the amount of benefits given out and make working more profitable than claiming.

[leclerc]

Re: What good is the EU ?

And the only way we will get our own people of the arses and into those jobs will be to stop the amount of benefits given out and make working more profitable than claiming.

Such as the Universal Credit currently being proposed by the current Government?

[leclerc]

Re: What good is the EU ?

If you've got any spare potatas then go to spain and spend em

BBC News - Spain town reintroduces peseta to boost economy

[Caspar]

Re: What good is the EU ?

I live in a very beautiful area, but an area where the culture since the mines closed is that you go to school until you're 16, then leave and sign on. That's it.

I find this such an enormous shame as you look at the intelligence of so many of them (my step son included) who are just wasting their lives away, and because there's nothing to do getting into alcohol and drugs, and often into trouble with the police as a result.

Even sadder is that there are people, myself included, who will set up things off their own back so these people have got something to do, but the ones who turn up are the ones from families who don't need to.

I honestly don't know how you address this as it is so deep rooted in the community. Often it's not that the people won't work, it's that they'll claim benefits and then work illegally (it's called "hobbling" round here) to top up the benefit to a decent wage. Off the top of my head I could name 30-40 people in our village who live this way, and I'm an Englishman so will always be regarded as an outsider!

This isn't a dig at the Welsh - they're lovely people. It's a go at the inbred culture that it seems impossible to break and just passes down through the generations.

[The Debt Star]

Re: What good is the EU ?

I live in a very beautiful area, but an area where the culture since the mines closed is that you go to school until you're 16, then leave and sign on. That's it.

Which is why, imo, we should have retained a mixed economy of both publically owned and privately owned industries. Industries that could not support themselves in a competitove modern market, like coal, ship building, steel etc should have remained nationalised (a) because it kept whole communities in work, which is of benefit to us all and (b) it retained in this country a skill set of miners, engineers, draftsmen etc the list is endless. Without these skills and without the actual resources of own fuel and steel etc we are at the mercy of other countries. We could never compete on a costs basis with overseas markets so we should have subsidized it all.

Now, entry of the common market (not the EU because no one has ever voted for European political and social integration in this country (we have to rely on other countries refenda fro that)) prohibited state nationalised ownership and funding so i understand. However, it has not prevented France in particular from subsidising its former state owned business. We of course won't do that.

No one raised so much as a whisper when Rover went under. The last mass car manufacturer in Britain. And yet somehow france, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Germany all cheerfully continue to mass manufacture cars and retain valuable skills and communities no doubt reliant on that work.

The answer is to secede from the political/social side of EU and redevelop from scratch back up again. We should retain a trade membership with Europe. If anyone tells you that Europe would npt permit a trade-only relationship then that should tell you something about the agenda of the EU. It was also the only raeson the UK joined in the first place - trade.