The NHS is not an insurance scheme.
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Of course itâs racist if you only apply whatever made-up test it is to people born outside of the UK.
What is it called when you apply different criteria for people from certain countries but not others, solely on the basis of where they were born? Is it âracismâ? Yeah it is actually. You want to argue about whether that counts as âracismâ - does it make it any better?
[quote=âDaemonworks, post:20, topic:14415â]
Thereâs functionally no such thing as a sham marriage. The only thing that makes a marriage valid, legally, is the paperwork.[/quote]
Completely agree. I, as a private citizen, can chose to describe a coupleâs marriage as a sham based on any flexible criteria that I choose. Free speech, no power, no consequences, blah blah.
But when a government organ, speaking officially, starts describing something that has dotted all the legal 'iâs and crossed all the procedural 'tâs as a sham, and asserting there will be legal consequences as a result of that arbitrary shamness ⌠something has gone deeply wrong with the system.
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Thatâs because the Home Office hasnât explained why it believed the marriage was a sham. I followed the links back to an earlier article on MacIsaacs, and the marriage was intended by all of his pupils and their parents, and many of MacIsaacâs friends from the U.S. flew in for it. In addition, Mrs. MacIsaacâs elderly parents moved in with them, and MacIsaacâs is an official caretaker. And on top of that, thereâs the whole ongoing cancer treatment thing.
All the home office did was issue a terse statement that it was unsatisfied the marriage is legit before backing down without admitting fault. Itâs not something you can fault the Guardian for.
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I hate to retread this, as Iâm sure Iâve read it on this BBS about once per topic, but-- just because a category is socially constructed doesnât mean itâs somehow unknowable. Using your Irish example: if you mean by âdifferent âraceââ nonwhite, then no, Irish people are not now thought to be nonwhite, even though they used to be. This shift is not due to any change in DNA or lines of inheritance, but rather social factors. I think youâll find that though there may be heated disagreement about how to draw the line between racial discrimination and other discrimination, very few people would throw out the idea of racial discrimination existing as a category on that basis.
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âRaceâ does not mean âwhite or notâ.
The state is a construct. Given its existence to enforce things by force, you have ask the question of to whom can it apply that force.
For example, the USA canât tax the UK, and apply force to extract the tax.
So there is a notion of being in or out of the club. That club has the rights to decide who can or canât become members.
Now where I agree, is that its completely immoral to apply the test in a racist way. So the question is whatâs a non-racist way of applying the test.
My view is that it should be economical. If you joined the club, will you pay your dues or will you force someone else to pay your dues, and get all the perks. Nothing racist about that.
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Personally to me this sounds more like an attempt to co-opt the power of the word âracistâ in order to shut down any further debate on the topic. Since âaâ is deemed racist, thereâs no discussion to be had. Any further attempt to talk about the issue is now a defense of racism and the person who managed to claim that definition first is unassailable.
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While our rules have their own special brand of idiocy, you could still try Norway - weâre slightly less regressive, even if we did elect the conservatives to government a couple of months ago. Sure, you wonât speak the native language, but you can still get rather far with English alone.
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âYou keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.â
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There is so much âconventional wisdomâ pouring out of your comment its hard to know where to begin. You have clearly and utterly absorbed the neoliberal mindset, whereby there is a tiny pie and we must all, individually, fight for whatever bits of it we can get, and the only way to measure policy is on a dollar basis, for after all, dollars make the world go 'round.
The flaws with your type of thinking are myriad and boundless, and one could almost not blame you for thinking this way: its the way the neoliberal economists, politicians and institutions are training people to think. The problems begin when you start to realize this type of thinking is the structure built on a foundation of tissue paper.
Let me elucidate. A key premise underlying neoliberal thought is, as I stated above, that there is a limited pie and we all must, roughly equally, fight for our share of it. That is the key flaw because as we have seen over at least the past 5 years, but really the past 25, for certain sectors and classes of society the pie is limitless: when they get themselves (and the rest of us) into economic trouble there are central banks that come in and shower them with pie under the ridiculous premise that the people who just flushed most of the pie down the drain are the keys to keeping the pie growing. Thus the âlogicâ goes we must provide this class (i.e. the financial class mainly, but also multinational corporate giants with their own private banks, hedge funds and political parties etc.) with what amounts to unlimited pie so that they can, in their undiluted wisdom, give pieces of that pie to those who have won or will win (again with the clear-sighted wisdom of the financier) in future.
Even assuming this class of financier has such wisdom, which obviously they donât, even this bit of âlogicâ has failed for at least the past 15 years, but very obviously the past 5. In fact, most of that pie the financial class has been showered with has been rotting in their coffers, and when some of it is allowed out it flows into financial markets where it creates bubbles. The S&L scandal of the 80s/90s, the dotcom bubble, the housing bubble, and now a new stock market and bond bubble. This pie has done less than nothing for the real economy because not only has it not been used to grow production or employ people, it is causing massive asset inflation that makes important things like shelter unaffordable for the average people who only have access to what little pie they can actually make with their own two hands.
The idea that this artificial scarcity of pie means we need to treat human beings in inhumane ways (separating mothers and fathers and children in the UK in this case), or other even more godawful and monstrous âmarketâ solutions to human issues, or that it should be used as a cudgel in myriad other ways to crush labor and any nations that donât want to be part of this quite insane and cruel delusion, is a disgusting and repugnant notion. Yet it is so commonplace these days they donât need to beat us over the head with it, most of us are all too willing to buy into what, at least on the surface, appears to make sense.
When you begin to realize that this surface ârealityâ they are promoting, and you are imbibing whole, somehow only applies to âthe little peopleâ (who are relentlessly propagandized as to how small (and shrinking!) the pie is), perhaps you will begin to cast the veil from your eyes and see that money, and all the bogeyman they set up around it (HYPERINFLATION OMG!!!), are not what you have been trained to think it is. Isnât it funny how, despite all the shrieking from the financial class weâve heard over the past decades about inflation and âcrowding outâ, etc., the financial classes worldwide are still so eager to buy up US treasury bonds despite our IMMINENT INSOLVENCY? Its a game my friend. A game from top to bottom, and YOU are the target of the game. For the likes of you and me there is never enough money for our healthcare, our education, healthy food, solid shelter, etc. For them its a never-ending gravy train that doesnât stop no matter how reckless, criminal, craven or selfish they act; and its always us who have to pay for their deeds. And unlike them, when we pay it comes from the sweat of our brows, not from the discount window of the Fed.
Neoliberal economic thought is so pernicious because it seems to make sense. But it only makes sense if you accept the terms of the game they are proposing for you. If you see the terms as they really are: harsh rules for you, no rules for them, it stops making so much sense. If you want to get the most realistic view of how finance and the world economy actually works that we have at this time, check out Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). If not, you can continue with the delusion they have so successfully peddled to you: that the world, with all of our technological breakthroughs, food and energy overproduction, etc., is yet somehow full of scarcity and limited supply. And yet, if they cared one whit about alleviating that supposed scarcity, and what it means for regular people, why is it that every solution they come up with only manages to take more money out of your pocket, and put more money into theirs?
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I assume thatâs a barb aimed at the financial class, your Jamie Dimons and Lloyd Blankfeins. If there is a class of people who donât do anything 99% of the world would call work, its them. Its funny though, how when poor people donât âworkâ they are treated like scum. Yet when rich people donât âworkâ they are trumpeted as titans of ________. The day we stop treating âworkâ as the defining achievement of humanity it will be a great day indeed. âWorkâ, as defined in the protestant sense (and what other sense is there really?), is the cudgel the âsinfulâ batter themselves with. And since theyâre so busy battering themselves with this cudgel, and they are such miserable wretches for doing so, well hell, theyâve gotta beat everyone else with it too. I mean fairâs fair.
Work as a concept, as a word, should be banished entirely. It has too many negative connotations. First we need to get rid of useless jobs (defined as jobs no one will miss except those who are earning profits from the people doing them). Once we do that, there will be so few jobs that really need doing, that we can all share them a few hours for a few days every week, so that it wonât be work anymore it will be volunteering to help humanity function. And the rest of our time will be our own to create, socialize, sleep, procreate, eat. You know, live. Oh but wait, we are SUPPOSED to be miserable because we are full of sin. Damn it, I forgot.
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My brother is in a relationship with an American girl. She has a degree from Cambridge and a masters from Harvard, but she is just on the limit of points to stay in the country. I have another British friend who had to leave the country as he wasnât earning enough for his wife to stay here. I was only able to get my adopted son into the country because he was related to my (German) wife, and the visa rules are easier for family members of European citizens than they are for family members of UK citizens.
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A lot of people seem down on limiting immigration but itâs a real problem in the UK and around Europe. In Brussels I work with a lot of British expats, this is in the IT sector, who tell me they left the UK because there was hardly any work except around the London area in which case they could just as easily go live and work in Brussels since the rent is cheaper and theyâd have to leave their family anyway. When highly qualified people are leaving your country, a supposedly ârichâ nation, something has gone awry. Limiting immigration in this case is a perfectly natural response since it puts an extra strain on a system already under pressure.
I think some limit on immigration is sensible. The alternative policy, of unbounded immigration would be impractical, if only because people could arrive faster than we could possibly build housing or integrate them into employment. The trouble is that we do have unbounded immigration from Europe. Literally anyone in Europe can come to live in Britain if they want to, with very few exceptions. We could precipitate a crisis if every eligible person in Europe decided en masse to move to Britain. The only restoring force is economic, so in principle people could arrive until Britain is not an attractive economic destination.
The side-effect of an overly liberal immigration policy for Europe is an overly restrictive policy towards the rest of the world, hence the pressure to deport arguably economically viable Americans.
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Well actually not, because we canât force the less economically productive of our native brethren to leave these shores, even if it would make sense to replace them with more highly qualified or more motivated foreigners. Whatâs wrong with deporting all the unskilled Britons abroad to some other country, where they donât represent a burden on the tax payer? Maybe the Job Centre could offer employment in and free one-way travel to foreign countries elsewhere in Europe to the least qualified or lowest earners who have signed on, and then cut the benefits of anyone who refuses to leave the country voluntarily?
I wouldnât conflate selfishness too closely with racism. Perhaps I chose the wrong term. A better term might be âelitistâ, a case of only allowing in the best and brightest, regardless of race. Universities and companies practice this all the time, and so do many countries.
Immigration is largely a symptom of inequality. People are not coming to the UK for our wonderful weather, they are coming for economic reasons. The cost of living varies wildly across Europe and this is part of the problem.
One often overlooked point is that immigration can have a negative impact on the country of origin. There is often a brain drain effect which can damage the economy due to the flight of people with vital skills.
