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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Illegal immigrants: the grease that’s constantly squeezed to keep the wheels of our corrupt world running smoothly.
“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 wonder why and how society has changed in those ways. Is government reacting to the dishonesty of the people, or vice versa?
It seems to me that a broad hint can be had by reading Gustavus Myers’ great book “History of the Great American Fortunes” (available for a trifling sum as an Amazon Kindle e-book).
Myers explains, in great detail, that the great American fortunes were created by men who were all of strikingly similar character and methods – ruthless, single-minded, and focused with white-hot intensity on the accumulation of money, usually to the exclusion of almost everything else. Some began life rich, most poor; but once they started to pile up the cash, it seems to have become almost like a game of Monopoly to them. (Although unlike the game, every dollar they got was stored away and thus denied to the legions of poor who were desperate for decent food and drink, clothes, housing, health and education). Cheating seems to have been their chosen sport: cheating the public, the government, their competitors, even their own partners. As a result, government was thoroughly corrupt right from the very start. In that respect, nothing has changed in the past 400 years.
Men like Astor, Vanderbilt, Gould, Sage and Morgan were about as far from being virtuous citizens as it is possible to imagine. As Myers remarks, American society has always been an undisguised kleptocracy – perhaps the worst form of government known to man.
One of the worst aspects of it all was the utter detachment with which financial magnates ran their empires. They had absolutely no concern, or even interest, in how their enterprises worked or how employees were treated and paid. Customer satisfaction (or even safety) meant nothing to them. All that they saw was the balance sheet – and especially the bottom line. Of course this attitude, which is still common today, is extremely destructive. It leads to factory farms full of miserable sick animals, producing vile unhealthy food; and to the notorious short-termism that does so much economic and social harm.
Myers wrote:
“Whatever in the line of business, yielded profits, that act, whether cheating, robbing, or slaughtering, was justified by some sophistry or other. Astor did not debauch, spoliate, and incite slaughter because he took pleasure in doing them. Perhaps – to extend charitable judgment – he would have preferred to avoid them. But they were all part of the formulated necessities of business which largely decreed that the exercise of humane and ethical considerations was incompatible with the zealous pursuit of wealth.
“In the wilderness of the West, Astor, operating through his agents, could debauch, rob and slay Indians with impunity. As he was virtually the governing body there, without fear of being hindered, he thus could act in the most high-handed, arbitrary and forcible ways. In the East, however, where law, or the forms of law, prevailed, he had to have recourse to methods which bore no open trace of the brutal and sanguinary. He had to become the insidious and devious schemer, acting through sharp lawyers instead of by armed force… The result was precisely the same as in the West, except that the consequences were not so overt, and the perpetration could not be so easily distinguished. In the West, death marched step by step with Astor’s accumulating fortune; so did it in the East, but it was not open and bloody as in the fur country. The mortality thus accompanying Astor’s progress in New York was of that slow and indefinite, but more lingering and agonizing, kind ensuing from want, destitution, disease and starvation”.
Myers concludes:
“Through all of these pages have we searched afar with infinitesimal scrutiny for a fortune acquired by honest means. Nor have the methods been measured by the test of a code of advanced ethics, but solely by the laws as they stood in the respective times. At no time has the discovery of an ‘honest fortune’ rewarded our determined quest. Often we thought that we had come across such a specimen, only to find distressing disappointment; through all fortunes, large and small, runs the same heavy streak of fraud and theft, the little trader, with his misrepresentation and swindling, differing from the great frauds in degree only”.
“There has been a fundamentally authoritarian swing in society and I detest the way that so many people simply accept it.”
So I’m wondering how you feel about vaccine passports/certificates?
I think they would be a bad thing (other than for international travel, where vaccine certificates exist for many diseases and are perfectly normal). But I don’t expect them to happen.
It will be an internal passport with data fields defined according to an international standard that looks at the moment as if it will include vaccine status and test status. They will say that some people have legitimate reasons not to be vaccinated but before they “allow” a person to be in that category (which will probably soon disappear anyway) they will require their “legitimate reason” to be certified by a medic acting as a state official. One of the guys helping to push for this to be introduced internationally is Tony Blair.
The word “passport” is used in order to connote freedom. It will be international because pharmaceutical interests, big finance, and the California-based Hitlers such as Google and Facebook are international. The international travel side of it isn’t the key thing, except insofar as they don’t want people to be able to avoid it by fleeing across borders.
Three days ago the state media agency the BBC asked “‘Vaccine passports’: Will I need one for going out, work and travel?” and then specifically “Would I need a vaccine passport to go to the pub?” They answered that second question “A passport could also theoretically be used within the UK, to allow visitors entry to venues such as bars or sports stadiums.” By “visitor” they mean anyone.
A government announcement is supposed to come before 21 June or whenever the date for “step 4 of relaxation” is publicly confirmed, which makes sense. “The price of freedom”.
See the World Economic Forum’s “Common Pass” project.
It’s all about data collection. Ultimately the government wants to build a huge database containing everyone’s personal details. This allows better control over the public and it allows that data to be sold on and traded. This has already been happening with the digitising of everything and CV-19 has provided opportunity to accelerate the process.
ID cards are on the way.
Presumably Priti Patel’s Stasi Stormtroopers will now be beating a path to break down Craig’s front door to demand that he snitches on the details & whereabouts of his undocumented friend.
The Government already has a database of our personal details and has had for the past 200 years. They probably don’t know as much about us as Google or Facebook though.
The concept of “state” needs to be updated to include Google.
If they already had a personal database of everyone, they would not be asking for one. It’s not like Germany.
“It’s all about data collection.”
This, and only this. Do whatever you can to thwart data accumulation at every possible turn. In the long run legislation is required to prevent its collection and storage.
“ID cards are on the way”
They are already here and have been for years. Passports, NI numbers, driving license, phones, bank cards and a slew of others…………
I don’t get why every now and then there is a media thing about ID cards and they never get implemented. It’s fluff. That’s because they don’t need them because they already have the ability to take the data ID cards would give them.
ID cards are about creating what we in IT call a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier). It makes it easier to ‘hoover ™ up’ data from many disparate databases.
How are ID cards bad? I never understood that particular brand of UK/US nonsense, I’d very much prefer to show my ID card than to give others my utility bills (which are at once much greater privacy breach, and far easier to steal/forge and use if someone wants to impersonate you) to see them scrutinizing how much I pay and utility X I use.
I especially like the hilarious argument that it ‘helps to build a huge database containing everyone’s personal details’ – hello, the government already has all the data that goes into your ID card on your birth certificate. If anything, not having to present your bills or alternative ID means keeps whatever is on these private…
As far as I am aware the Plod, not even Sturgeon’s State Security Plod, can demand to see your utility bills. Nor is it an offence not to carry one.
I did have to cough those up when I got my last couple of jobs. I’m not sure teenage HR apprentices are that interested in who supplies your gas, but I’d certainly be happier to have a less… personal… form of personal ID when crossing the Is and dotting the Ts.
Though I suppose convenience is the carrot that lures us into surrendering our privacy. At least they aren’t asking me to register with a company via Facebook yet. Yet.
I’m worried that ID cards are the thin end of the wedge to dictatorship. The future integration of 5G, AI, ID cards, surveillance and face recognition technology, digital currency, UBI, and social credit score in the hands of an openly corrupt elite is concerning to quite a few of us.
Covid is the weapon being used to destroy what’s left of democracy and bring about the ultimate surveilance state… Akin to China.
Isn’t that obvious yet?
There’s enough evidence based upon scientific enquiry (although of course not by officials) to clarify that the pathogen was created in a gain of function laboratory.
The question is… Was it released deliberately or by accident.
Seems deliberate to me…. So as to initiate the pandemic response, lockdown society and blame covid for the disastrous state that the economy was in… Prolong the suffering and chaos for long enough and then the masters of society can then step in with the solution which is now transparent.
The Great Reset…. Techno Feudalism.
The corporate masters have transferred a staggering amount of social wealth their way this past year….
And as the WEF states in their Great Reset manifesto… By 2030, You will own nothing and be happy…. 2020 was the year of controlled demolition of what remains of the economy and democracy.
They will own everything and we will be in debt slavery to them in their transhumanist dystopia, which they have long envisioned.
The vaccine passport is a significant part of it…
You forgot about Bill Gates, orbiting laser cannons in space causing earthquakes, 5G and the lizzard people. That’s such an obvious set of omissions, I rather suspect you’re in on the whole plot, James!
Maybe you should address the points James is making, Glenn? It is well known that the intelligence agencies concoct and circulate outlandish conspiracy theories of the kind you mention to try to discredit valid alternative viewpoints. It would be better for us here to stick to the matters at hand.
– “It is well known that the intelligence agencies concoct and circulate outlandish conspiracy theories…”
Maybe you, Tom74, should supply evidence of that to James Hugh, because he seems in danger of being taken in by one.
I wouldn’t mind seeing it either; the conspiracy theorist in me has long suspected it, but I’ve never been able to prove it. Many people seem to generate, embrace, embellish and promote conspiracy theory quite enthusiastically and spontaneously. It seems to be an inherent vulnerability of human thinking, like the common optical illusions.
Here’s a good one for you and glenn_uk and other sceptics, who can’t seem to find the forest for all the trees:
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-office-russian-media/
I believe this has been buried proper on the island. I also happen to think it is a positively huuuge story.
Oh, and while you’re at it, perhaps you can explain why staff of GAVI, Gates’ “let’s vaccinate the world with experimental transgenic slurry and digitally track everybody 24/7” HQ based in Geneva, has been granted diplomatic immunity in Switzerland? Maybe this website’s host can shed some light on this rather glamorous yet widely unnoticed exception, not much unlike the diplomatic privileges enjoyed by the frigging Knights of Malta..?
Why are you asking this of me and Clark – what possible bearing has this got on the conversation?
I mean, obviously you think it’s some amazing “gotcha”, but it’s rather tough to see why.
One does wonder at the worth of the intelligence being used to imagine that the following is a great idea …..
amanfromMars 1 Mon 8 Mar 09:02 [2103080902] …… asking on https://forums.theregister.com/forum/2/2021/03/05/something_for_the_weekend/
Re: All urBases Belong to Us. What Do You Now to Succeed? Fight Defeat or Concede Victory?
And what could possibly go wrong with the following Fuzzy Wuzzy type action? …..
The Biden administration is gearing up to carry out cyberattacks aimed at Russian networks, the New York Times has reported, describing the provocation as a retaliatory measure designed to send Moscow a message. ….. https://www.rt.com/usa/517481-cyber-attack-biden-russia-solarwinds/
What are they toking/dropping/injecting in the USA?
To enter into that field of endeavour without the right stuff is to be trapped into whole new elevated level of pain that delivers the fool tool negative gain, and opens the way for manner of almighty daemons and untouchable ghost hosts to lay waste to the wannabe enemy.
Tom74: “Maybe you should address the points James is making, Glenn?”
If he had any sensible points, I would.
Why should I spend time entertaining the evidence-free musings of some conspiracy theorist, when they refuse to entertain provable facts from scientists and medics?
“Why should I spend time entertaining the evidence-free musings of some conspiracy theorist”
Stop doing it then.
J: “Stop doing it then.
No. If someone wants to advocate, say, drunk driving as a really good idea, then I would oppose it. Doesn’t mean I have to actively engage with the notion of how drink driving might actually be beneficial.
Along with AI, 5G, ID cards, surveillance and face recognition technology, digital currency, UBI, and social credit score in the hands of governments that have proven themselves corrupt to the core.
I recently registered with a new GP in Scotland. It’s certainly my recollection that you are normally expected to provide ID. But in the current COVID circumstances I was asked to regiser online. I notice that the registration form specifically states:
“it is not mandatory to provide identification to register”
Claimed a pension online earlier this year and they wanted not only a scan of my passport but a picture of me holding it.
“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.”
But if you tell them you are a woman…
My thought precisely!
At a time when the government demand irrefutable identifying evidence, we’re equally being sold the ludicrous notion of self-ID via the GRR Bill.
Lol! Nice one.
“But if you tell them you are a woman…”
..”scientists” will go as far as to deny chromosomes!!
I am afraid you are being rather inconsistent Mr Murray. Firstly you expect everyone to believe that everyone is honest until proven otherwise, then you extol the value of illegal immigrants.
In order to be an illegal immigrant, you have to be dishonest at every stage of the process. You wilfully ignore legal procedures to obtain a legal immigrant status. You clearly seek out employers who are dishonest in employing illegal immigrants, you do not declare your earnings for taxation (because if you did, you would rapidly be discovered to be an illegal), you have to live in places where landlords turn a blind eye to illegal immigration etc etc.
The reason everyone assumes dishonesty at every stage nowadays is that dishonesty is hard-wired into society, through the rampant illegal immigration that is promoted at every turn by self-righteous faux socialists primarily in the SE of England and in London in particular.
Basically there is a huge raft of London employers who refuse to pay the proper wages for legal employees and organise themselves to keep the politicians and the police schtumm about everything.
What I don’t quite understand is how you can be the child of an illegal immigrant. There has to come a time when if you want to go to school, you have to be registered by the system. Do you have a birth certificate? Quite possibly not. Registering a birth means registering the father and the mother. Difficult for illegal immigrants.
What is actually required is a focus on all those employers who refuse to act legally. If you make it a crime to hire an illegal immigrant, rather than punishing the immigrant, the job market for illegal immigrants would dry up much faster than if you prosecute the immigrants but protect the employers.
It is illegal to hire an illegal immigrant and has been since at least 2006. Punishable by unlimited fine and/or up to five years.
And yet the following remain open:
* nail bars
* car washes in supermarket car parks
* dodgy “language schools”.
If that law is enforced at all, it’s probably mostly used by prosecutors doing the bidding of gangs by cracking down on their competition.
* takeaways employ every large number of illegal immigrants. It is odds on whoever is preparing your chips n cheese is an illegal immigrant. And restaurants too depending on the ‘class’ of the establishment.
And yet the following remain open…
Because they employ people legally. Easy targets for racism have to be more careful as they are targeted by the Home Office regularly, whereas using the id of someone else is commonplace. It is not that long ago that cleaners at the Home Office were found to be working illegally.
Illegal and immoral are not the same. Illegal is what some authority says is wrong, based on some assinine law. Immoral is what the wider base of humanity, through centuries of experience learning about what makes it possible for living things to exist more harmoniously on the planet, says is wrong.
Persecution, oppression and economic hardship are surely key drivers of immigration. The pursuit of freedom, freedom of thought and speech, and economic opportunity are what many/most will be seeking. Granted, not in all cases.
Illegal immigration is often the result of huge injustices which are implicitly (if not explicitly) exacerbated, or at least not helped, by the actions of the countries that illegal immigrants aspire to flee to. Often these countries – as you point out – also create/allow/tolerate the conditions that allow the illegal immigrants to contribute to society, but not benefit from it to the same extent.
Which is a greater dishonesty is not as clear cut as you would have us believe.
Illegal immigrants are mostly poor and seek a better life and more security. In most cases it’s got little to do with “persecution”; nor are they seeking “freedom of thought and speech”. Most people’s day-to-day problems in the third world don’t involve those categories at all. More important considerations are things like
* being unemployed
* their mum and dad not having access to proper healthcare
* not knowing when you go out of your house whether someone will rob your phone off of you at gunpoint.
The latter is a common experience not just in Caracas but also in many cities in Brazil for example.
A lot can be learnt from how hard the British state is making it to migrate to Britain now from Black Africa and South America, blamed as lergy-spreading regions of the world by the Daily Heil, the Scum, and the BBC, but which actually have much LOWER death rates “with Covid-19”, and in some cases MUCH lower, than her Britannic majesty’s united kingdom.
You are suggesting that there’s a significant number of illegal immigrants coming to the UK from Venezuela and Brazil?
Can you expand on “A lot can be learnt from how hard the British state is making it to migrate to Britain now from Black Africa and South America”?
“you have to live in places where landlords turn a blind eye to illegal immigration etc etc.“
As do a large proportion of those among the bourgeoisie who employ “home helps”, “au pairs who study English”, and so on, as well as c***s from local councils who are supposed to licence places such as nail bars and car washes where many of the workers are slaves.
Soon the authorities will introduce a “propiska” I think. A stamp in the internal passport will say a) you’ve got a right to live in such-a-such an area and b) you currently live at such-and-such an address in that area. Internal passports are certainly coming, justified to the white majority as showing you’re clean and law-abiding, not like “residents in concentrated areas”, members of “our diverse communities”, types who don’t worship the “National” in “National Health Service” sufficiently fervently.
You will have to be “ID’d” before boarding a train or coach, and there will be many surprises – perhaps when buying petrol as well as when entering supermarkets. Shares in G4S may rocket. (That company’s share price has already trebled since the onset of fascism in March 2020.)
Perhaps there will be special buses for “vaccine refusers in our diverse communities”. After all, the state has to look after those who do as they’re told and respect the public good of the nation, right…
No doubt some whoosh-merchant smart guys will say that this is just like saying we’re ruled by lizards.
“If you make it a crime to hire an illegal immigrant, rather than punishing the immigrant, the job market for illegal immigrants would dry up much faster than if you prosecute the immigrants but protect the employers.“
This is true. That’s what they do in Switzerland for example. For most “illegal immigrants” in Britain the immigration is only “illegal” in the sense that they are very poorly paid, work very long hours, and have very little labour protection.
This closely connects with the interface and cooperation between criminal gangs and state agencies such as local councils, the police, and customs and excise. For example in many cities the local council’s housing department has an “understanding” with criminal gangs.
Mr. Rhys Jagger,
” What is actually required is a focus on all those employers who refuse to act legally. If you make it a crime to hire an illegal immigrant, rather than punishing the immigrant, the job market for illegal immigrants would dry up much faster than if you prosecute the immigrants but protect the employers”
If you substitute the word ‘prostitute’ for the word(s) illegal immigrants – then what:-
What is actually required is a focus on all those employers who refuse to act legally. If you make it a crime to hire a prostitute, rather than punishing the prostitute, the job market for prostitutes would dry up much faster than if you prosecute the prostitutes but protect the employers.
So – the law punishes the weak and powerless and protects the rich and powerful.
Is it really too much to ask of people, that they provide evidence of who they are, or would you rather live in an anarchic society where people live without rules?
I too have been through the re-registering for a doctor, a bizarre experience where you must turn up in person with your passport. I am, this next week or two, about to remove some cash from the bank, previous experience shows that’s damned near impossible without a complete interrogation. I thought this time I might just say it’s my money and I want it…I will let you know how that goes.
I’ll be interested to hear how that goes, @EasilyConfused. In many cases when companies ask for information they are trying it on and will provide the service even if you don’t, or when you tell them something that’s obviously false. When a bank asked me that question once, I treated them with contempt and gave them an answer that was obviously almost content-free. The counter clerk was as happy as a sand counter clerk. Asda’s once asked me for my postcode and the checkout girl said she had to type something in, and I suggested she could either make something up or enter her own. The postcode of Buckingham Palace is easy to remember – it’s SW1A 1AA.
What happens if a person tells the GP’s goon that they don’t have a passport? Millions of British citizens don’t have passports.
I believe the fact is that it is not your money, if it is in the bank. Legally, it is the bank’s money, as you may discover someday with negative interest rates, or in a short time, with that wonderful concept of a cashless society.
” The system used to run on trust and honesty. ”
Unfortunately there are some people who betray that trust and we all have to suffer accordingly.
Yes. The ultra-rich. Too bad these thieves just point at the poor to deflect blame and find too many gullible idiots agreeing with them.
To prove the point, the benefits fraud in Germany is estimated at 60 mln euro. The cost of extra bureaucracy that would merely stop most of it, not all, and made a lot of honest people lives much harder? 100 mln euro, a big net waste of money. The tax fraud committed by ultra-rich in comparison? 50 bln euro. That’s *billion*, a thousand times more. Guess which one far right politicians and media controlled by 1% will loudly scream needs to be immediately stopped and which one quietly ignored?
The establishment seem to be getting quite desperate. After the various other attempts at divide-and-rule (including Scottish independence or lack of it), now it’s dog-whistle racism based on their statistical lies.
At least the laughable attempts of Boris Johnson’s far-right government and his client media to take the spotlight off their own treason provides a bit of entertainment in these rather drab times.
But we should all remember that the media is being paid directly by the government at present to peddle its propaganda – and therefore take with a pinch of salt any of their stories on political issues.
Agreed, @Tom74, there is huge and growing dogwhistle racism in Britain right now…
This was predictable when the Powellites won the Brexit referendum after many years of “sending a message” by either voting UKIP or at least watching UKIP with a certain approval.
Fascism is pretty much always racist, even if “theoretically” one cannot “prove” that it “must” be. It’s to do with the national community and building up a feeling among both cops and administrators of all the different kinds (including medics and schoolteachers) and if possible among the majority of the population that it is increasingly necessary to crack down on the disobedient and in particular those who dare to group together to be disobedient or who have some kind of culture that doesn’t mesh too well with the “clap for the NHS” culture and who are therefore a social danger and a threat to decency and everyone staying alive and things being as they should be. Not a good time to have a black skin right now, nor to be a traveller, homeless, etc.
Ironically, it’ll be the rogues who are best able to navigate the system.
Normal people struggle.
It also harvests personal data.
Put you in Caracas doing a low-paid job and then take your job away from you and you might not altogether sniff at the idea of paying a wide boy on the black market for a dodgy passport, @Douglas.
Sorry but your optic of normal people versus rogues isn’t the whole story, not by a long chalk.
“An amnesty will bring millions of people within the formal economy and able to pay tax.”
Illegal immigrants, and poor people generally, do pay tax. The standard rate of VAT, now at a level previously considered appropriate only for luxury goods, means they pay tax at a very high rate. Bringing them into the formal economy will make them eligible for the minimum wage and in-work benefits while, in all likelihood, remaining below the income tax threshold. From the Tories and bosses point of view, things are fine just the way they are.
Some 70 GP surgeries have signed up with the Centene corporations who have taken over AT Medics. Centene are the largest US primary health care providers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centene_Corporation
Operose Health, their English named operation, is mainly focusing on inner City GP’s at present, but they will try and grab anything they can from our willing Tories.
There is a petition we can sign. https://weownit.org.uk/act-now/stop-sell-49-gp-practices?fbclid=IwAR0H-4Nwaf6osImHxDTS1lW77oLytpsECttGyFwS8YoLftExkHvQmiUdeOs
I believe that this once creeping privatisation is now galloping and that the end of lock down, our very well fed police is preparing for large scale demo’s already, with a 100k contingency being prepared. It is the real reason why the NHS is not getting more than 1%
In Manchester a fair pay for nurses organiser of a’ socially distanced demo’ against the misery 1% offer was fined 10.000 pounds, by police, not by a judge and or relevant person who can issue fines.
“I believe that (…) our very well fed police is preparing for large scale demo’s already, with a 100k contingency being prepared. It is the real reason why the NHS is not getting more than 1%“
Can you explain what this means please. What is a 100k contingency? The police are preparing for a demo of that size? And are you saying the reason for the 1% is that the government wants to make sure that the parts of the “NHS” that it hands over to private companies will have nice low labour costs? I suspect that in addition to that, this channel has been deliberately created for “oppositional” feeling, probably with cooperation between government and union leaderships. I’m not wholly clear why. 1% is about the same as the rate of inflation over the past year. It may well be, ahem, significantly different from the inflation rate in the year to come. But there’s a damned sight more to fight over – including many people having been denied the health treatment they need, for a long time – than nurses getting real salary cuts of a fraction of 1%.
Opening schools for the children of “key workers” only also has had a lot behind it. It is rather as if what is being talked about here is not the “health” service but the army.
some 100,000 well fed police are being prepared for the end of lockdown as they, the Government are expecting demonstrations.
Hope that is clear enough, N_. And because there are companies hovering to take over GP surgeries and or the 40 new hospitals the Tories promised to build, they would not want major pay rises to pay for.
you might not want to give more money to nurses, or care workers; maybe your marxist ideals will lead you to look after your own parents, as happens in many countries.
Maybe a positive change to come after the many mistakes made by this Government, as thousands have died in care homes, as fewer immigrants are available to look after them. Free health treatment will soon change and pensioners will face having their pensions cut in the same ways we all face more austerity from our pandemic profiteering cronies in lieu with Labour.
Craig
This is a sensitive and well-written article, that highlights something which is not really in the public discourse (the shift in the social norms towards a _distrust_ of citizens).
For me, it chimes with an essay the American poet Jorie Graham wrote many years ago about the state of American English. You may find it interesting too: https://www.joriegraham.com/prose_friendly_fire
Thank you very much for continuing to produce such excellent articles.
Craig:
– “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. […] 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 agree wholeheartedly. I am finding it increasingly difficult to live in such an atmosphere.
– “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.”
Precisely. It’s a self-reinforcing downward spiral, and utterly miserable.
Couldn’t they simply change the law so that immigration was no longer illegal? Wouldn’t that solve the problem?
There is a once in a decade Census being conducted in a couple of weeks.
EVERYONE, is supposedly at home! It should therefore be the most comprehensive census for a century.
It should be picking up all persons regardless of their ‘status’. It is anonymous and doesn’t require ‘personal’ identifying information information.
I know many are flouting restrictions and travelling when they shouldn’t. Exceptionalism is hard to give up, like a hard drug. But they will be completing it too with these white (supposedly innocent) lies beloved by exceptionalists.
I have suggested for quite some time, that the local difficulty in getting Bozo the fighting cock clown, to agree to give Scotland another fixed referendum is easily circumvented by using the census to ask an additional question of the houswholders who are 16 and above , if they want to see a Scotland independent of Westminster control.
A simple yes or no would give a clear ‘vote’.
As for the ‘rights’ of being a ‘citizen’ or ‘subject’ or ‘tax payer’ or say ‘housewife’ etc. The state has been rolling thes back for decades now.
The degradation of Unions has led to worsening of income, H&S and uncontrolled gig economy – the modern serfdom.
The removal of Legal Aid has taken recourse to a fair and equal justice away from all but the richest and tgese who are handed ‘insurance’ through them being essential employees of the scalpers of public funds. Insurance cover which is in itself tiered to encourage stratification and exceptionalism within these organisations – and tax deductible by these firms!
The current preparation is being moved to the long planned, wholly Americanised health and medicine regime, is not objectedu to by the presstitutes.
So much data collected for Covid is going directly into US based sales and marketing support companies. – way way more than just a simple infringement of GDPR.
The destruction of peoples health by denying basic Dental and Medical attention is being done on purpose to encourage a mass take up of payable and medical insurance bonanza.
These not registered will find it harder to get any reasonable GP attention soon.
Should one participate in a census? providing all sorts of data so statistics and policies can be developed, which, as we all experienced in one form or other, will lead to more of the same, with not much change, except, the race to the bottom?
Probably not, if it is being coordinated by Lockheed Martin.
I am surprised that some comments on here betray such ignorance about anarchism. The usual nonsense. You shouldn’t be using it as an adjective or noun if your highly truncated understanding of it only extends to what your high-school teacher might have said about it.
n, I get your sarcasm.
In terms of knowing where you are going to, you need to know where you are first.
A census is vital. Most of the data probably exists from day to day societal interactions in multiple corporate and state databases – hell, even in measuring sewage!
But yup I would like to have a fairly good idea of how many schools, hospitals and OAP homes , amongst many other such things, we will need over the next 100 years so that we could at least have most ready before we need them!
There was an illuminating long read in the FT at the weekend which identified the area of the UK most ravaged by Covid as being 3 east London boroughs containing some of the largest proportions of illegal immigrants in the country. The so-called “Covid Triangle”.
https://amp.ft.com/content/0e63541a-8b6d-4bec-8b59-b391bf44a492?segmentid=acee4131-99c2-09d3-a635-873e61754ec6&__twitter_impression=true
Financial desperation has forced people to take dangerous jobs. Another factor is overcrowded, substandard accommodation, a national disgrace in the Olympic borough where so many legacy promises were made by the likes of Boris, Lord Coe, Dame Tessa, etc, and hailed by our media.
Have you seen the ‘village’ recently?
Or the whole ‘corridor’ down the Thames?
It pretty much looks like Dubai/Bangkok/Chinese new cities – infact a costly new Chinatown with streets designed to accommodate street food!
A perfect home to home for the millions of Hong Kongese on their way!
All immigrants have it bad, legal or not. I was staying in the UK for a year in 2010, before May, and the amount of hoops I had to jump through to simply open bank account and get National Insurance Number to work was unreal. I especially remember the really stupid requirement to have a landline – wot? The room I was staying in had none. The whole floor I was on had none. No one I knew had one, all cell phone users (but using one was no good for some reason). There was maybe one in building manager’s office, and it was strictly off limits. In the end, I had to beg foreign student office to let me use theirs two times to get that stupid crap done. If I wasn’t doing a course at the university and had no one to turn to, I’d probably work illegally too despite having all the papers and permits. And that was before extra decade of far right hostility piled on top of already nonsensical process…
I have personally listened to a small number of former soldiers recount their duties while stationed in Helmand, guarding the vast expanse of poppy fields from Taliban fighters who wished to destroy them. On the other hand, HSBC are (or perhaps were) some of the largest launderers of drug money in the world. Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Alastair Campbell et all, are not only free and feted by the so called ‘left’ media but very well recompensed for high crimes. Cameron and May will continue to live extremely comfortable existences despite their crimes. Mr Johnson’s friends are striding the world with more than £37 billion in cash that everyone in the UK is now being asked to stump up. But yes, let us continue to investigate and interrogate you and I and the undocumented workforce of the rich and powerful, the nannies and the factory line workers.
It’s easy to see why this process will continue to accelerate. Though we are already in the twilight of democracy, after a lifetime of exposure to propaganda, far too few are willing to reject the entire premise. It is already so late but their own eyes and ears continue to deceive them. Look around.
Ref the war criminals’ spin doctor. I happened to spot him (Alastair Campbell) on the box yesterday. Something to do with Alan Titchmarsh and gardening!
_______
He Tweeted
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL
@campbellclaret·
10h
Well, this is very weird. Am proof-reading Vol 8 diaries, out next month, and see this entry for Feb 2 2012: Off to ITV to do Alan Titchmarsh show. Nice crowd and he was always very easy-going. A mix of the book and the bagpipes and a bit of David M and Ed M’ 1/2
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL
@campbellclaret
·10h
Well nine years on, ITV today at 10a.m, me talking to Alan about the book, playing my pipes (popular demand), and a bit of David and Ed (and hopefully they have not edited out my Tree of the Day which at least suggests my life is a not a total re-run of the past!) 2/2′
_______
Gardening must make a nice change from assisting the war criminals I suppose. I assume he is referring to the Milibands above. Yuk.
Vol 8 of his ‘diaries’. Who on earth pays money to buy his rot?
The obvious calculation from the powers-that-be is that amnesty for illegal immigrants would give them options, including that of refusing the dirty, back-breaking labour no one else wants and that they have to settle for, and that would lessen their usefulness to the said powers-that-be.
Not to mention that even though all Doctors and 1:1 Nurses etc have had a vaccine shot, and even if you have had one yourself, they still treat you like a leper at their surgery. I don’t think they ever intend to go back to before in this
What News of Craig’s Court Case?
It’s been a while?
I really hope you are wrong about this, but that is my fear too.
“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.“
That certainly seems to be how the authorites will play it. Guess what happens after that.
.
The authorities are using the pandemic to whip up racism and xenophobia.
They wish native white British people to view themselves as on the side of the authorities seen as upholding the public good (including cleanliness and hygiene) against those in other demographics who swan about thinking they have the God-given right to refuse vaccines and do what they want in this white man’s country that suffers them to live here, and yet they are so ungrateful and selfish. That’s the mentality that is being encouraged. It’s Alf Garnett. You can hardly listen to a BBC radio 4 news item reporting the progress of vaccination without hearing side-of-the-mouth references to “our diverse communities” and so on.
Meanwhile, take a look at the list of countries on the British state’s “red list”. They are confining people who enter Britain from those countries (even if they are British citizens) in “quarantine hotels”, usually with windows that don’t open. It is another case of what’s described in this blog post, because it involves treating people as if they are liars. They aren’t told that they must quarantine in their homes. No, they are accompanied by security guards to “hotel rooms” near airports, once they’ve been made to cough up nearly £2000, and told they mustn’t leave their rooms for 10 days.
Most of the countries are in Black Africa and South America. Funny that, because Britain has had a HIGHER reported death rate “with Covid-19” than ALL of those countries. Yes, higher than in EVERY country in Africa, including South Africa, higher than in every country in America, including Brazil, and higher than in most countries in Europe, including Portugal.
What’s the problem with Africa? Africa has had a much lower death rate “with Covid-19” than Britain.
Scum who knock on doors trying to sell double-glazing (usually part of a criminal gang network, based in the case of Everest in the Manchester area) are trained not to waste too much time on Polish people and others from Eastern Europe because they tend to be wiser than native British people about what those who knock on their doors offering them “great credit deals” are really all about.
It’s the same with vaccination.
When the propaganda moves to the problem of “pools of Covid continuing to exist within highly concentrated communities living in dense populations”, it ain’t going to be pretty.
There is no requirement to provide passport style ID to register with a GP. I agree that the average surgery jobsworth is likely to demand one but just politely tell them no. Job done.
GPs have a legal duty to provide primary care to anyone who rocks up, regardless of how legal they are or otherwise. There is an exception that if they regard you as living outside their “catchment area” then they can refuse to take you on. So just make sure you provide a suitably conformant residential address.
Good point. I found this NHS leaflet, which is very explicit about it. Craig’s friend could take this leaflet to the GP and let them fill out the form explaining why they declined to register him. (It almost suggests that NHS HQ are a bit annoyed that surgeries are demanding documentation.)
https://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/AboutNHSservices/doctors/Documents/how-to-register-with-a-gp-leaflet.pdf
I wonder why surgeries ask for documentation. Perhaps it’s beneficial for them to keep their numbers low? or perhaps it’s a way to filter out certain demographics?
Whether intended or not, these latest thoughts/observations just reinforce the movement by authoritarians to rule by FEAR, as you have so eloquently observed on a number of fronts – registrations, controlled movement, immigration, covid, finance, law&order.
Your thought patterns are falling into line nicely with the agenda. It is slowly taking root and working!
Regarding your comment about Boris Johnson’s quest for personal wealth. Last year? BJ was widely reported as being unable to live on his Prime Ministers salary, after which it all went quiet. I wonder if this was a plea to wealthy donors for donations?
The man , who has not been vaccinated with an experimental gene therapy drug, which has never been used before as a vaccine, that has no medium or long term trials, no independent scientifically peer reviewed papers, a legal indemnity clause and in the AstraZeneca case the estimated final trials are for February 2023, the Pfizer-BioNTech case January 2023, is a very fortunate person.
To my knowledge this was part of the Tories ‘Health Tourism’ story. They were pushing the story via the media that our NHS was under strain due to ‘foreigners’ coming either specifically to use our NHS or ‘illegals’ using our NHS and not paying for it. They said they would ‘come over here’ to get expensive procedures and walk away because the NHS was ‘too lax’ to ask them for the money.
Perhaps there have been cases but certainly this is not the reason the NHS is struggling, that’s entirely down to deliberately under funding them for many years. But the Tories do LOVE blaming foreigners, especially if said foreigners aren’t white skinned. So they introduced stricter protocols over registering with a doctor. This will create more problems and cost more than it could possibly save as well as being an embarrassment to the nation. Now it will bite us on our collective backsides as we don’t get an entire section of society vaccinated.
Ah yes, that argument. I recall the Left whining that no more than 3.5 million EU citizens were here and they, along with illegals, had and have nothing to do with the stress on services, jobs, wages, housing etc. Well, Right to Remain is now at 5 million and we still have no idea how many illegals there are.
You’re at the wrong blog, mate. Farage.com is further up the road.
Politicians will never assume honesty on the part of the public cause they themselves are among the most cynically dishonest people in the land. Witness their fake common sense that the poor and disabled had to redeem the banker bailout, their consensus on the lies and quarter truths underpinning Iraq, Libya, Labour antisemitism ‘crisis’, Nicola’s innocence, school reopenings and on and on. For them it is always about bending or obscuring the truth or outright lying to get whatever you want. All the time. Naturally they assume everyone is like them and the people they know.