Saturday 28 March 2009

Why is Hazel Blears going to charge students and migrant labourers £50 a visa ?

by johnofgwent

Now our regular readers know that over here on the GA Blog we do our best to tip the hat in the diretion of whoever gives us an idea for an article. But here's a line I haven't been in a position to put up here - until now. This post comes to you courtesy of a hat tip to Nick Griffin himself.

I'm sure many of you have heard that Hazel Blears has recently come up with a wizard wheeze to make a bit of money for our cash-strapped country by tapping the wallets of the seemingly endless queue of people who want to enter Britain from a non-EU country either to study, or to work. Yes, I'm on about the extra fifty quid she intends to charge those two groups of people for a visa to get in here.

Now it's a bit odd, this one. I mean, ok, let's look at who it's hitting. Students, and Workers . Why do this ?

It's not as if the money is actually enough to do anything useful. "Migration Watch" has plenty of facts and figures - or lies and statistics if you prefer - that suggest the money this wizard wheeze will pull in won't even pay the salaries of the people that will rubber stamp those visas. It certainly wont do what Ms Blears says it will, and alleviate the costs local councils face as a result of having to cater for large numbers of immigrants.

And why are the people coming here as overseas students bring forced to contribute to this burden ? Are they the people that cause this burden ? No they damn well are not. Part of the bargain I had with my university as a postgraduate research worker was that they paid me money on condition I held tutorial groups for medical and biological science students,. Now those groups did not have three people in any session with the same skin tone but all communicated in spoken and written english. Their examination papers were completed in english. Those who like me went onto prepare scientfic papers for publication prepared the draft in english and gave the presentation sppech in english. I went round with my daughter on several of her fact finding university open days and I can assure you the multi-coloured research teams that took up the cudgel where I dropped it and continued to fight the good fight still prepare their notes and present their research in the language I used for the same task - english.

And it's not as if people wanting to come here to work and take up British Citizenship don't pay handsomely for the privilege. Contrary to what you might have been told it costs rather a lot of money for someone to get a British Passport and the ID card fiasco has nothing to do with it. By the time one person I heard of has finished shelling out for their nice shiny British Citizenship they will have kissed goodnight to two and a half grand courtesy of the fees imposed by the government "to ensure the process is self-financing". Which is only fair since Canada wanted to do exactly the same to me when I had an offer to emigrate there to work in their defence industry.

So what the hell is the point of this fifty quid surcharge then ?

It's mind-blowingly simple really.

New Labour have woken up to the realisation that the majority of the people who have a vote are just fed up with the way it seems all manner of people are allowed to wander in to this country, do what they damn well like, and expect someone else to pick up the bill.

And they need to be seen to be doing something about it.

And just as with their mind-blowingly stupid rhetoric and hype that removing the right of law abiding sane ordinary citizens to posess firearms for sporting and recreational purposes was certain to reduce the number of people killed and injured as a resut of the illegal use of firearms in criminal acts (remind me again how many children have been killed in the last couple of years through the illegal use of illegally heldfirearms) so too this mind-numbed government have come up with a mind-numbingly stupid idea that they hope and pray will make it look like they are trying to do something.

But WHY bother ? Why go to all this trouble and expense ?

Because they know quite a few other - smaller - political parties out there stand to gain political success from their dismal failure, that's why.

One of those only needs a swing of a few per cent to start the ball rolling toppling New Labour heads from their position of power and arrogance.

No prizes for guessing which one.