BaaLocks

My bad, I forgot Hartlepool were back in the league so cross checked against League Two - nearly did the same in reverse for Chris Porter. Bring back re-election I say, it was all so much easier then.

Already in my list
 
Ayala is at Blackburn - already in my list

Just need one of these to go with it

You're right - I apologise about the Daily Mail reference

You're right - I apologise about the Daily Mail reference

There are 30k a year trying at the moment, a percentage of those are economic but many are fleeing persecution. If we opened up a legal process for many of those to apply the boats would no longer be needed for them and we could do the right thing. The boats are partly our fault, we give the smugglers the opportunity.
As for being a small island being expected to behave like a Tardis - calm down on the hyperbole on that one. As for not being able to support, we perfectly can but we just choose to continue to elect parties who implement rafts of policies that do exactly the opposite.

Agreed. And no one is accusing you of having an issue with an immigrants colour.
The fact remains though that the UKs response to the Ukrainian crisis has been one of the most openly racist policies of my lifetime
I have good friends in Leicester whose kids have recently left home so they applied to house a Ukrainian refugee.
They were not only paid by the government to do this, but they also saw that the lady they took in was fast tracked for job interviews, offered free training for jobs that she had no skills in, and then once she got a job was offered subsidised housing
She was fleeing a warzone. The UK wasn't the "first safe country she passed through".  No different to many refugees from Africa or Asia.
There is no other explanation for the disparity in treatment. 
 

Now, today: we take in as many as have a valid reason to be here (risk of persecution, asylum). I don't think we need to cap that, we can live with the likely numbers. For all others, from whatever country or background, we set up a fair and reasonable points based system (or - bit of controversy - re-enter the EU and work with them on fair policy). It's probably a bit off track given the thread but still.
The future: Well, I guess the point is whether we want to work to limit the impact of climate change and leave many parts of the world able to support populations, or continue to work on a model of short term greed and leave our descendants to live with the consequence. If we can do that properly then - in the most basic form - people can remain where they live because they can. If we don't then quotas and application processes will be anything but the thing to be worrying about.

I doubt either of us will be here when this all comes to pass - it's 50-100 years down the road. Which is why very few want to care much about it here and now - and I do get that point.
The colour point is pretty darned evident - forgive me if I missed them but I don't remember too many Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq or Yemen flags flying in sympathy when their particular conflicts were/are in full flow. As I've said on the other thread, I'm not going there any more on that one.
But if you genuinely believe that the whole population between the tropics is going to sit there and just say "oh well, our crops have failed, we have no water, we've got nothing to live on. I guess that's all our fault then" then I would say that is equally laughable hysterics (no need for an apostrophe). And when they do come, we're going to be need something more than a couple of ladies behind a desk at St Pancras asking if they've got anywhere to sleep.
And, to answer your initial point, that is an immigration crisis. What we have here and now are a few fellow human beings who need help - not being treated like under classling criminals for no other reason than they happened to be born somewhere a little less fortunate than you or me. That, by any definition, is not a crisis.

I think the two are likely more linked than we would like to imagine. At the moment we have around 30,000 people crossing the channel every year in boats. They mainly do this because we have been effective at cutting off other routes (under trains, in the back of lorries etc). 30,000 is a drop in the ocean (and one that a country of 65m people could accomodate without even feeling the draft). And, if I may say, it is one we are willing to accept having allowed more than 100k of Ukranian refugees (OK - those ones weren't brown, I'll give you that, so maybe a little easier for us to accept as potentially living here).
But the broader question is not how many but more why - nobody pays a criminal thousands of pounds to cross a cold, dark sea in a dinghy unless they are really desperate. And while many might be coming here now because of fleeing civil wars and conflicts (many that have climate at their heart - Somalia being a very good example) you can be sure that when the crops start failing in a few years it won't be a few in a dinghy that will not be wanting to get here but having to get here. We are fortunate, we live in a part of the world that can likely tolerate some degree of climate impact - it will change things but we can still survive. For millions - maybe billions - that won't be the case and so they will have no choice, as humans have done for millenia before them, but to flee to where the food is. 
So the two are linked, and we'd better start planning for it - one way or the other.

I think the two are likely more linked than we would like to imagine. At the moment we have around 30,000 people crossing the channel every year in boats. They mainly do this because we have been effective at cutting off other routes (under trains, in the back of lorries etc). 30,000 is a drop in the ocean (and one that a country of 65m people could accomodate without even feeling the draft). And, if I may say, it is one we are willing to accept having allowed more than 100k of Ukranian refugees (OK - those ones weren't brown, I'll give you that, so maybe a little easier for us to accept as potentially living here).
But the broader question is not how many but more why - nobody pays a criminal thousands of pounds to cross a cold, dark sea in a dinghy unless they are really desperate. And while many might be coming here now because of fleeing civil wars and conflicts (many that have climate at their heart - Somalia being a very good example) you can be sure that when the crops start failing in a few years it won't be a few in a dinghy that will not be wanting to get here but having to get here. We are fortunate, we live in a part of the world that can likely tolerate some degree of climate impact - it will change things but we can still survive. For millions - maybe billions - that won't be the case and so they will have no choice, as humans have done for millenia before them, but to flee to where the food is. 
So the two are linked, and we'd better start planning for it - one way or the other.

TalkTV (OK, I get it, hardly the levelest of playing fields) just asked Twitter what Rishi's first area of focus should be as PM. This is what they said - the fictional immigrant crisis still getting twenty times the votes against the environment.

In other news, this village in Wales is being decommissioned as the battle to save it against rising sea levels has been conceded as impossible to maintain. I am minded to believe that, even here, there was at least one person who still thought immigration was a bigger problem.
Just how else are people going to get the attention needed to do something about this? Really, if throwing soup at pictures is not the answer they how - just how - can they get their point across? Greta tries it and she's a whining child, Charlie v3 does it and he's an old nincompoop.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220506-the-uk-climate-refugees-who-wont-leave

Now, today: we take in as many as have a valid reason to be here (risk of persecution, asylum). I don't think we need to cap that, we can live with the likely numbers. For all others, from whatever country or background, we set up a fair and reasonable points based system (or - bit of controversy - re-enter the EU and work with them on fair policy). It's probably a bit off track given the thread but still.
The future: Well, I guess the point is whether we want to work to limit the impact of climate change and leave many parts of the world able to support populations, or continue to work on a model of short term greed and leave our descendants to live with the consequence. If we can do that properly then - in the most basic form - people can remain where they live because they can. If we don't then quotas and application processes will be anything but the thing to be worrying about.

I think the two are likely more linked than we would like to imagine. At the moment we have around 30,000 people crossing the channel every year in boats. They mainly do this because we have been effective at cutting off other routes (under trains, in the back of lorries etc). 30,000 is a drop in the ocean (and one that a country of 65m people could accomodate without even feeling the draft). And, if I may say, it is one we are willing to accept having allowed more than 100k of Ukranian refugees (OK - those ones weren't brown, I'll give you that, so maybe a little easier for us to accept as potentially living here).
But the broader question is not how many but more why - nobody pays a criminal thousands of pounds to cross a cold, dark sea in a dinghy unless they are really desperate. And while many might be coming here now because of fleeing civil wars and conflicts (many that have climate at their heart - Somalia being a very good example) you can be sure that when the crops start failing in a few years it won't be a few in a dinghy that will not be wanting to get here but having to get here. We are fortunate, we live in a part of the world that can likely tolerate some degree of climate impact - it will change things but we can still survive. For millions - maybe billions - that won't be the case and so they will have no choice, as humans have done for millenia before them, but to flee to where the food is. 
So the two are linked, and we'd better start planning for it - one way or the other.

I think the two are likely more linked than we would like to imagine. At the moment we have around 30,000 people crossing the channel every year in boats. They mainly do this because we have been effective at cutting off other routes (under trains, in the back of lorries etc). 30,000 is a drop in the ocean (and one that a country of 65m people could accomodate without even feeling the draft). And, if I may say, it is one we are willing to accept having allowed more than 100k of Ukranian refugees (OK - those ones weren't brown, I'll give you that, so maybe a little easier for us to accept as potentially living here).
But the broader question is not how many but more why - nobody pays a criminal thousands of pounds to cross a cold, dark sea in a dinghy unless they are really desperate. And while many might be coming here now because of fleeing civil wars and conflicts (many that have climate at their heart - Somalia being a very good example) you can be sure that when the crops start failing in a few years it won't be a few in a dinghy that will not be wanting to get here but having to get here. We are fortunate, we live in a part of the world that can likely tolerate some degree of climate impact - it will change things but we can still survive. For millions - maybe billions - that won't be the case and so they will have no choice, as humans have done for millenia before them, but to flee to where the food is. 
So the two are linked, and we'd better start planning for it - one way or the other.

TalkTV (OK, I get it, hardly the levelest of playing fields) just asked Twitter what Rishi's first area of focus should be as PM. This is what they said - the fictional immigrant crisis still getting twenty times the votes against the environment.

In other news, this village in Wales is being decommissioned as the battle to save it against rising sea levels has been conceded as impossible to maintain. I am minded to believe that, even here, there was at least one person who still thought immigration was a bigger problem.
Just how else are people going to get the attention needed to do something about this? Really, if throwing soup at pictures is not the answer they how - just how - can they get their point across? Greta tries it and she's a whining child, Charlie v3 does it and he's an old nincompoop.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220506-the-uk-climate-refugees-who-wont-leave

I used to go out with a girl from North Wales, she called them 'dunkies'. I still call them that, no better phrase....

I gave up on it very early. I also found the premise of an inmate on death row helping police solve cases a little unoriginal 

I just find myself despairing at most of the series on tv at the moment, we certainly live in an era of "quantity over quality" thx to Netflix et al. Latest example is Inside Man on BBC - the basic premise is great, the actors are top drawer but it's just utterly flawed in it's outline. For example, a vicar gets caught with an incriminating flash drive - that isn't his - so instead of just saying "it's all in hand, I am talking to the police about it" he goes and does something so far in excess of what would be reasonable. Then someone follows up on this based on nothing more than the fact she gets a blurred photo on her phone. It's just farcical, no matter how good the rest of the acting or plot is.

I just find myself despairing at most of the series on tv at the moment, we certainly live in an era of "quantity over quality" thx to Netflix et al. Latest example is Inside Man on BBC - the basic premise is great, the actors are top drawer but it's just utterly flawed in it's outline. For example, a vicar gets caught with an incriminating flash drive - that isn't his - so instead of just saying "it's all in hand, I am talking to the police about it" he goes and does something so far in excess of what would be reasonable. Then someone follows up on this based on nothing more than the fact she gets a blurred photo on her phone. It's just farcical, no matter how good the rest of the acting or plot is.

Nice link

Nice link

Nice link

A friend of mine is convinced she has bought a haunted chest of drawers - I laughed in her face till she told me the stories. Weird!

1.87 posts a day, one temporary ban, more than a handful of late night posts removed, 9 angry face emojis given and 33 received - Norman is obviously more open with his emotions than I am ?