The outrage about “illegal migrants” - or Turks or Eastern Europeans pre-Brexit -“stealing our jobs and leeching off the State” is a complete confection whipped up by first UKIP then Reform (and lately segments of the Tory party and its supporting press) in order to achieve a) Brexit and b) the UK’s removal from various international human rights treaties in order to allow for the further erosion of people’s rights within the UK.
Most immigrants are perfectly legal (just like Brits in France) and pay into the system more than they take out (they have to pay extra to use the NHS for example); asylum seekers are a very small minority who we have a statutory (and moral) duty to help, and thirdly “illegal migrants” (an even tinier minority) by definition are outside the system so do not get any help from Government.
I don’t think any regular on here that would make such a statement.
Around twenty years ago a close friend of mine sold his half of his successful solicitors practice to his partner (business, not life) and became a barrister practising in the area of Immigration & Asylum Law. He finds it very rewarding.
Whilst I understand, a friend, a UK citizen from birth, fell on hard times recently after years of working. He recieved nothing, no help at all and slept on park benches, night busses or train carriages that were parked in sidings over night. No hotel, no £50 a week.
If he made his way to a beach in Dover maybe he would have been given something.
Clearly that’s wrong and the system has failed him - but there is help in place, whether it’s via the local authority (who have a duty to help) or via charities. Sometimes people don’t manage to access it, especially if they don’t have online access or don’t know how to start finding help.
Obviously I don’t know the details of what your friend’s situation was and how it all came about.
But even a monumental screw up like that is not a reason to withhold help from others.
Given that there is a social safety net in the Uk - albeit with many ways to fall foul of the DWP, I’d want a fuller story before accepting “he got not help” and the reasons for that.
He was told by his local DWP office he was not ill enough to qualify, sleeping rough he became very ill almost died, we informed the hospital he was homeless with no next of kin, the hospital spoke to social services who admitted he needed help, and they put him in a temporary place so as they could free up a hospital bed. Hopefully you can see why I ground my axe?
I don’t have family friendly words that I can use to describe DWP, even less so for the Home Office, but taking it out on asylum seekers is simply victim blaming rather than aiming at the true villains of the piece. But then, that’s exactly what Farage, Yaxley-Lennon etc, want.
He nearly died before receiving any, he had been sleeping rough for almost 8 months until he collapsed and an ambulance was called. A little different to rocking up on the beach and its all taken care of.
First of all, asylum seekers do not “just rock up on a beach” - they face difficult, arduous and often expensive journeys and most are desperate.
Hmm, yes I can quite believe that it is possible to fall between JSA/Universal Credit and disability allowances such as PIP (which are getting harder and harder to get) if one feels too unwell to work/seek work but the DWP disagree. I could get quite angry on lot’s of people’s behalves on that one.
However despite some horrendous fitness for work appraisals where DWP assessors have literally assessed dying people as fit for work - I’ve posted on this previously - most people who need help do manage to get some support so you would have to have detailed knowledge of exact circumstances to see why your friend fell afoul of the system
But, as has been pointed out this is - emphatically - not a reason to begrudge asylum seekers the little support they get from the government while their claim is processed. The Tories deliberately slowed processing of claims so they could rattle the cages of the right wing. If claims were processed promptly we could get these people out of the system and into productive work.
Not begrudging asylum seekers, just making an observation, new targets are migrants, forget last years targets. A bit like our new government raising quite a lot of revenue, I know when we will be making real progress when food banks close.
They also refused a French offer to have an asylum claim processing centre at Calais, in order to deal with requests before people braved the Channel crossing. I seem to remember some spurious excuse for this being given such as “it will only encourage more people to ask to come to the UK”.
Why Labour haven’t set this up I can’t fathom. Making it a necessity for people to cross over in small boats before they can lodge a claim is tantamount to manslaughter, and that’s putting it mildly.
In a large town near where I used to live, there was a scandal where DWP assessors, employed by Capita on the basis of getting paid more if you fail people assessed lots of people as fit for work because they could climb a flight of stairs as part of the assessment. Trouble was, the assessment center was in a single storey building with no stairs. Whoops.