Lib dems and labour crushed, where do we go from here?
You are quite right, John. Just got swept up by the election results and the discussions on the forum. I joined to get info on living in France as that is my intention. Even went so far as attending the Place in the Sun show at Olympia yesterday. Where I met a smashing estate agent who lives not far from where I want to move - Ruffec in the Charente!
Not about keeping me happy, i'm not bothered either way. I agree with your observations about people returning the UK. My point being (if you are interested Margaret ?) is that the loss of £200, however much that means to expats in real terms isn't enough to make them have to sell up and move back. However, as Doreen quite rightly states that allowance can buy enough logs to keep the woodburner going through the winter. So, useful but not indispensable.
Well, to make you happy, as far as I know people only return to the UK because they want to live near their grandchildren or because they're afraid of not speaking French when they get old. That's what they say. You may not be aware but people like me who retired here, not in the UK, have only had the WPA for about 3 years - before that the government reckoned we weren't entitled but apparently it was wrong. And very welcome it was too!
I thought the question was quite clear. If expats don't receive their £200 WFA how many of them/us will be forced to return to the UK because of financial constraints ?
A 'sniff of disapproval' is simply a difference of opinion to yours and others on SFN. I'm sure some members agree with me. I too have work tomorrow Margaret but I understand you not wishing to reply especially as you have other, more interesting things to do. Whether you 'care' or not is your choice. Personally I find the topic interesting, that's why I air my views. Isn't that the whole idea of a public forum ?
Have a good evening.
Mike, I had five years in Calvados and the annual rainfall in Basse Normandie is much higher than Bournemouth. The temperatures are different too.
Well most of the time I have difficulty pinning down what you might be trying to say - except I sniff an air of general disapproval. As that seems (to my mind) to just seek to put others on the defensive and as tomorrow is Monday and it's back to work, I've got better things to do than carry on trying to fathom what it is you disapprove of - or care.
As I've no idea what your question to me has got to do with anything, perhaps you'd explain why you're asking it. On the other hand perhaps you shouldn't bother.
Quite agree Doreen but I ask you the same question as Margaret. How many expats do you estimate will be returning to the UK because of the loss of £200 ?
You are 100% correct regarding the UK state pension. David Gay I believe it was intimated the same thing a few weeks back and I didn't understand just HOW low the amount actually is. It's criminal after a lifetime of paying into the UK system. I'm fortunate that my pensions are mainly french or private so i'm not affected too much. Even more reason then that a means tested system is introduced to help UK pensioners through the winter.
Yes, Margaret you are quite correct, I was merely postulating but then again i'm only giving my opinion which you must agree I am actually allowed to do ? I respect your right to disagree with everything i've said.
Just asking your opinion Margaret. How many expats do you reckon will be returning to the UK because of them not receiving their WFA ?
No problem whatever, Doreen. In fact I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who found Peter's statement showed a weird unawareness of how all sorts of things can happen that would make £200 a year very helpful.
Not to say that we do not use bus passes or get free tv licences!
@Peter
I've not seen any rejection of means testing the WPA, so presumably we're all agreed on that.
You write: "Ok, any extra money is welcome but no expat should have settled in France or anywhere out of the UK if they believed the difference between survival or sinking was dependant on £200/£300."
How fascinating (if that's the word) that you feel able to tell people you don't know nor their circumstances what they shouldn't have done.
Margaret, you can put your shirt on it.
If the Government acts illegally over this and is not stopped, who will be next.
Is it true that this shock election may lead to your interests.
Also if Cameron lives up to his promise we can go on voting for as long as we wish, as he will abolish the fifteen year rule.
Yes I did benefit from State Education, at a grammar school, now, unfortunately, a thing of the past.
What about all those Labour politicians who did the same and instead of improving the secondary schools dragged everyone into the middle.
Yes we did have private medical insurance because we worked for our own company and if we were ill we did not have the same benefits as employees.
We have inherited nothing, we live in a beautiful part of France in a beautiful house and we worked for it and we are still finishing it off ourselves.
I have never heard such a sick diatribe and yet again it is assuming that people who vote Tory do not care about other people, which is total nonsense.
That first paragraph nails it on the head Mike.
As for class, my OH spent a few years in the UK, even working at a senior level in academia. She was more accepted by 'toffs' for being from a particular country than UK citizens with the wrong accent and way of being - in other words, of a lower class than themselves. She has no idea how it functions. It is somehow odd that coming from a totally conservative and very catholic canton she also finds the Tory government just about exactly what you gleaned from your OH.
You become a pure Briton by integrating. If you work at it, it only takes a couple of generations. Then you can complain about the latest wave of dirty foreigners who have the impudence to sully the green and pleasant land.
But acquiring class takes longer, as the Maxwells and El Fayeds discovered.
I have done a bit of research (I asked my French wife) about how the Conservative government are perceived in Europe. It seems that they look like a bunch of arrogant snobs who think they are superior to the rest of humanity. It will be interesting to see what sort of a deal they will be able to negotiate.......
I think both Mike. I think I saw too much of it until a decade ago and in reality it was not dying out the way some people think. Let's say, there is a marked difference between people who say " 'igh farve" and those who say "High five, old chap" who appear to do the same things but those are valued differently.
In the mid-1960s when I went to university I was told I was not good enough to walk on the same pavement as 'them' by a tutor and became part of a small group of grammar school/grant and scholarship students who the majority of the rest ignored generally. Those who were different were really different but then they had real 'class', but that is another thing altogether.
When I left that same city 11 years ago some of that had changed. Colleges had admitted women but it still remained a male dominated place. Ironically, all of the best students (post grads especially) I taught one to one were women. Only a couple have really been able to make careers they are good enough for whereas men who were mediocre seem to have gone to very high places where they were predestined to go instead of the women who were better. The truly outstanding men mostly chose academic life but women never found it as easy to get in, although one is now a professor with her own academic institute. Above and beyond that, the sense of superiority of males with particular backgrounds changed little over the years unlike women who changed a lot, which is not to say that some of them are not as snotty as hell too.
Mike, the British do not exist. The British Isles are full of such a vast mix of people that to claim such a thing as English is an oxymoron. After all, that denotes somebody of England, a country deriving its name from invading Angles, one of the Anglo-Saxon tribes, who came from Angeln, a district and once tribal territory on the Baltic in what is now Schleswig-Holstein, the northern state of Germany, and into the bottom of Denmark. We Scots are a mix of Gàidhlig speaking Irish in the West to mostly Nordic people in the east where my family are from and various Germanic groups as you head south until back to Nordics on the borders and into NE England. The Welsh, Cornish and Channel Islanders are left over from the larger Celtic tribes who are 'purer' in Bretagne to this day. Then start sorting out the rest. Even the Normans were Nordics, then the large numbers of Hugenots, various Jews escaping pogroms through Europe, various Africans descended form slaves from the Elizabethan period on, Empire citizens brought for labour and servitude, a wave of Latin European and then 'modern' migrants. Name the pure Briton please?