Torquay United Fans Forum

Fred Perry wrote: ↑07 Aug 2017, 09:08 Solihull Moors will get a safety certificate WELL before BREXIT.

It is Solihull Moors not Solihull Borough.

merse btpir wrote: ↑07 Aug 2017, 07:42 Yes Fred!

Will Solihull Borough get a safety certificate after BREXIT as well then?

merse btpir wrote: ↑06 Aug 2017, 23:32 In the 2010 general election, Ukip fielded 558 candidates and secured 3.1% of the vote (919,471 votes), but took no seats.

Ukip won 3.8 million votes from 13% of the voters at the general election in 2015 giving them just one seat.

Three in ten (30%) of those 2015 UKIP supporters didn't vote for them this year giving them only 1.8% of the national vote from their 594,068 voters.

The Ukip vote collapsed across every age group..........they are once again a nonentity!

merse btpir wrote: ↑06 Aug 2017, 22:42 What 'major political party'? David Kurten has only just entered politics as a Ukip (London wide) nominee to fill one of the two seats they have been allocated on the assembly since the 2016 elections. He was not elected as a constituency member ~ and he only managed that through chicanery.....

The Labour Party received by far the most votes in the London-wide ballot ~ more one million. The Conservatives won just above 750,000, returning three London-wide candidates ~ two of whom were not present for the count.
The full breakdown of results from the London Assembly elections were:
Animal Welfare Party 25,810 
Britain First 39,071
BNP 15,833
Lib Dems 165,580
Christian People's Alliance 27,172
Conservatives 764,230
Green 207,959
Labour 1,054,801
Respect 41,324
The House Party 11,055
Ukip 171,069
Woman's Equality Party 91,772

The Greens had the third largest share of the vote with 208,000. Ukip received around 171,000 votes while the Lib Dems got about 165,000.
The 'other vote', and other ballot paper, helps select the 11 London-wide AMs, chosen from the party’s own lists. Picking these involves a mildly complicated bit of maths, but the point of the exercise is to ensure that the assembly is roughly proportional to London's voting habits. The system is designed to ensure that all parties with more than 5% of the vote get representation. This is how the LibDems, Greens, Ukip and BNP have been able to win assembly seats in the past and how Ukip got their two members this time.

The last time Ukip won seats in the London Assembly elections was 12 years ago ~ but the two candidates later defected. Nothing new there then.

Kurten attracted notoriety when he asked for a bogus address in the capital to enable him to stand in those elections. Kurten, who was living outside London, asked Ukip colleagues to help him bypass the rules by letting him “register at their address” to be nominated for Assembly elections in May 2016, a leaked email revealed. Rules state candidates must be registered to vote in London or have lived, worked, rented or owned property there for 12 months.....he patently hadn't!

His message to Ukip colleagues read: “I need to be on the electoral register in Greater London for the Assembly elections. Currently I’m living in Surrey at the campus of the school I work with, so I need to move or find someone who would let me register at their address until I move into London.” 

“I have my flat here in Weybridge till 31st March (2016) so ideally I don’t want to move until then, but that’s too late in terms of nomination eligibility.” He then asked directly if anyone would “let me go on the electoral register at their address”. Alternatively, he asked if anyone knew of a cheap room he could rent from February to May to “use as a pied-à-terre” for nomination purposes. 

Conservative Assembly member and MP James Cleverly said at the time: “Pretending to live in London just to qualify as a candidate is a serious breach of trust and, if true, puts a huge question mark over his suitability as a candidate.” 

Asked about the email, Mr Kurten told the Evening Standard he was working a two-term placement at a Surrey school which came with rented accommodation, prior to which he lived in Peckham. Explaining that he had become a candidate after getting the job, he said: “I sent the email to find out if I can meet the eligibility criteria while still renting the accommodation I have at the campus where I work, which is five miles outside the Greater London area, but was advised that I should move into the Greater London area at Christmas time, and that is what I now plan to do.”
A Ukip spokesman said: “Realising that he was temporarily five miles outside the GLA area, he was looking for a short-term solution. He has already been advised that a postal address is not good enough.”

Just to illustrate the calibre of the person you would like to see as leader of a 'major political party' Fred! :rules:

jonnyfive wrote: ↑30 Dec 2012, 12:24 Other teams play vacuous music when they score too. The club tried that but the groundswell of opinion was that it was completely brainless, and summed up all that is wrong with the plastic product that football is becoming.

No KitKat Crescent here, thanks very much!

merse btpir wrote: ↑02 Aug 2017, 21:55 A little bit (well quite a bit actually) of education for you and the '7/10 people in the UK who want proper control of Migration into the UK' Fred......

N.B that the UK joined the European Union on 1st November 1993 when the Treaty on European Union (otherwise known as the Treaty of Maastricht) came into force. No country could have joined before November 1993 as the European Union did not exist till the Treaty on European Union came into force.

Using references derived from:
THE CARIBBEAN IN EUROPE: CONTRASTING PATTERNS OF MIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT IN BRITAIN, FRANCE AND THE NETHERLANDS
by
Ceri Peach
Research Paper in Ethnic Relations No.15
Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations October 1991 University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL

West Indian migration to Britain effectively started in 1948, (although it has much longer antecedents) peaked in the early 1960s and was effectively over by 1973. By this time, the population had reached about 550,000 . Migration to France and to the Netherlands started ten to fifteen years later than from the British Caribbean. In France, the Caribbean-born population in the early 1950s (about 15,000) was similar to that in Britain and although it doubled during the 1950s and 1960s it was not until the 1970s that the major expansion in net migration took place. By the census of 1982, the Caribbean population in France was estimated at 266,000. The migration to the Netherlands began in the early 1960s when the British movement was at its height, peaked in 1975, when the movement to Britain had ceased and decreased in the 1980s although some family reunion has continued since then. By 1988, the Caribbean population of the Netherlands was estimated at 308,000.

The processes of migration affecting the three different groups are surprisingly different. The movement to Britain was characterised by free market labour economics; that to France by paternalistic government sponsorship and that to the Netherlands by politically motivated flight. This is not to say that sponsorship played no part in the migration from the British Caribbean nor that demand for labour played no part in the state sponsorship of migration from Martinique, and Guadeloupe or in the movement from Surinam. Nor is it to say that political considerations were not of critical importance in determining the peak of Caribbean migration to Britain, just as they were later to determine the peak of Surinam migration. Nevertheless, the generalisation holds true and the critical determinants of migration were very different in the British Dutch and French cases.

Caribbean migration to Britain was essentially powered by free market labour forces, but it had its origins in government sponsored war time recruitment. Post war direct recruitment by British Rail, London Transport and the National Health Service, although not numerically dominant, were important in shaping the movement. In Barbados, for example, the island most affected by direct recruitment, just under a quarter of the emigrants in 1960, left on sponsorship schemes. However, these schemes were introduced after the migration had got under way. Family and island social networks were by far the most important channel of diffusing information and arranging initial footholds in Britain.

Of major significance for the history of Caribbean settlement, was Britain's active recruitment of labour in the Caribbean to help the war effort: 8,000 men were recruited to serve in the RAF. Patterson refers to 7,000 Jamaicans serving overseas in the armed forces while smaller numbers volunteered from other parts of the Caribbean . Foresters were recruited in British Honduras (now Belize) to work in Scottish forests and workers were also recruited to work in the munitions industry. In all, 345 men arrived in Britain under the latter scheme, which was wound up in 1946.

However, the post war movement in earnest from the former British West Indies to Britain is often dated to the arrival of 417 Jamaicans on the 'Empire Windrush' in 1948 or to the arrival of 100 Jamaicans on the 'Ormonde' a year earlier. By the time of the 1951 census there were about 17,000 persons born in the Caribbean living in Britain. During the 1950s and early 1960s net West Indian immigration tracked the demand for labour in Britain, with perhaps a three month lag . The threat of legislation to curb immigration by British passport holders, who often had no citizenship other than that of the United Kingdom and Colonies, had the paradoxical effect of increasing immigration in a rush to beat the ban. However, it seems to have restricted the movement to Britain without drying up the supply of migrants. After 1962, net immigration to Britain decreased considerably, but liberalisation of the US and Canadian immigration legislation led to renewed migration, particularly of skilled workers.

Jamaica was the earliest affected by emigration. In 1948, 547 Jamaicans emigrated to Britain. By 1951 when about 1,000 West Indians migrated, only about 100 of them were not from Jamaica. Migration from Barbados was already well established by 1955 when 2,754 people left but for the smaller islands it was just becoming established. Migration from the Leewards seems to have been going in earnest by 1955 and movement from the Windwards by 1956. Trinidad also seems to have moved to large scale emigration in 1956 while Guyana did not get into its stride until 1960. Belize was hardly affected by the movement and in 1981 there were only 1,043 persons born in Belize in Britain out of a Caribbean total of 295,179 (OPCS, 1983, Census 1981, Country of birth, Great Britain, Table 1).

Illustrating the speed with which the movement gathered momentum in Montserrat in the Leewards, Philpott reports (1977, 95) that in 1952 only 6 Montserratians applied for passports to go to Britain, but that numbers increased substantially the following year when an Italian line began calling at the island on the return run from South America. In 1955, 1,145 Montserratians applied for passports. A Spanish line began to call as the migration mounted and in 1956 the construction of an airstrip made air connections with Britain possible. Between 1955 and 1961 3,835 Montserratians arrived in Britain (Peach, 1968, 107) out of a 1960 Montserrat census population of 12,167.

Direct recruitment of labour by British agencies post - dates the beginning of the serious emigration. The Barbadian government set up a sponsorship scheme in 1955 under which British Transport Commission, the London Transport Executive, the British Hotels and Restaurants Association, and the Regional Hospital Boards received workers. London Transport Executive sent a direct recruiting team to Barbados in 1956 and by 1958 it had recruited almost 1,000 workers. By the end of 1961 it had recruited over 2,000 Barbadians.. Between 1955 and 1960, the Barbadian government scheme had sponsored 3,680 workers of whom 40 per cent went to the London Transport Executive. The main conclusion to draw from this is that directly recruited or sponsored labour was an important but minority element in the migratory flow affecting people only from Barbados. In Jamaica, the government tried, if anything, to restrict the flow. It is also important to note that direct recruitment came into play after the migratory streams had been established. The movement to Britain acted as a 'replacement population', moving to gaps left by the upward mobility of the white population. Migration sustained significant parts of the service industries in Britain, in hospitals and transport and industrially it was concentrated in some of the least dynamic industries. Since the radical analysts of migration stress the dependence of the capitalist system on the inputs of raw labour, it is worth noting that it was the flagging social services and the weaker parts of the industrial economy which used migration as a prop.

The migration cycle from the Caribbean to Britain effectively began in 1948 and was over by 1973 . Net immigration from the West Indies to Britain for the period 1955 to 1974 was highly and significantly inversely related to unemployment rates in Britain. The Home Office ceased keeping embarkation figures after 1974, so that the sharp reduction in net immigration cannot be monitored as clearly as one would hope. However, an alternative, though not entirely satisfactory measure of gross immigration, gross emigration and net inflow is available in the International Passenger Survey (IPS). Figures 2 and 3 show that both the Home Office data and the IPS figures show a clear inverse relationship between unemployment and net immigration from the West Indies.

What I am illustrating to you is that the UK has and will forever be depended on immigration to fulfil it's labour force requirements. That they have more latterly come from within the EU is as much a result of a lessening of immigrants from what has been the British Commonwealth through the attractions of Caribbeans and Asians going to the USA and Canada as it is to immigration not being needed........if you doubt me try taking stock of the profiles of the transport infrastructure and the hospital workers to utilise just two aspects of the need for immigration.

Your UKIP inspired waffle about 'being in control of immigration' is just that and nothing to do with whether or not the UK would be better off leaving the EU.