Could just go with lukas jut..., he has prem experience with everton, is home grown, up and coming, and is of polish descent. ticks all the boxes! (also is cultured having played abroad with motherwell...)
Now guys. A statements or 4 before I continue and I expect I will get stick for what I say. Ahemm Firstly - My wife is one of those 'economic migrants' She is Portuguese. Secondly - She is black too with parentage from Africa. Thirdly - No I didn't marry her so I could portray myself as non-racist Fourthly - I am proud to inform people my wife is black, not a british citizen and that my children have multi-cultural heritage. Now onto what I will get stick for - I agree almost totally with Saints 4 Life (excuse me if I got your username wrong.) I don't agree about a signing must be British. This is football. I do agree with 'foreigners' lowering the labour costs though and 'nicking' our jobs. I have very real experience of it. Those of you saying 'they got the jobs because they were more skilled' are barking up the wrong tree. I have no problem with welcoming immigrants/migrants that are filling needed 'skilled' jobs however I assume that 'Saints 4 life' like me is talking of unskilled manual jobs. Factories, Farms etc. In the good old days people filling these jobs were low paid people. There was no NWM. Subsidised tranny vans would pick them up from the Council Estates as they did not have nor could really afford cars. The workers would each pay £10 a week for this They would be delivered to the workplace miles and miles away (10 - 40 miles in most cases), do their work for a pittance and then be delivered back to the estates. Over time the NWM came in and the benefits kept rising. Many British thought they were were above this kind of work and wage seeing the difference between the NWM and benefits was virtually non existent. The wages in these factories was now above NWM to get the workers. So these companies were subsidising transport and paying higher than NWM. i.e. it was about £1 per hour more than the NWM at the time. Then over came the Portuguese. Not too many our factory filled gaps with Portuguese agency workers. All of a sudden the factories had workers that worked out cheaper than the British (after adding together NI, Tax, Holidays, subsidised transport etc.) At this time the egg factory I worked at (The largest in Europe) had 95% British, 5% migrant workforce. The the Eastern block joined the EU and within 3 years It was 5% British, 95% migrant. The 5% British were management, QC etc, not shop floor!!!! Why was this? Because in that time (just 3 years) the company reduced the wage rises which meant that by the end of that time the wage had been reduced to exactly the NWM. The subsidised transport was cancelled leaving people with a choice of sorting their own transport out or leaving. Those that already drove to work in car shares etc, were watched like hawks for any minute thing they could get a disciplined for until they could be sacked. After this had happened to quite a few the other Brits upped and left. No point waiting for the hammer to fall!!! What is the government reply when this claim is made? They are not working for less, there is a NWM. Errm they are because the wages were previously higher than the NWM and now they are also not subsidising the transport. Not only did they prefer the migrants because their 'agencies*' would deliver them in for free, They were now paying lower wages (compared to the higher than NWM before.) They now had a workforce that would work 7 days a week if required (illegal by EU law at the time, Don't know if it has changed) and back to back shifts (20 hours) if required (illegal by EU law at the time, Don't know if it has changed.) They either filled the 'opt out' of the max 48 hours rule or they didn't get a place on the van. Most of these were working 80-90 hours a week if required (not asked, they were informed) * These were no longer agencies as in supplying agency workers because the companies had paid the fees to buy these workers from the agencies however the agencies were charging their former agency workers £20 a week to be delivered into the factory. At this point I tol my wife she would be a housewife and was not paying any money to these crooks. Luckily for me I do have these extra skills. I worked in that factory for 5 years after 2 redundancies left me pretty unambitious however I returned to the offices in my city on much more annual salary than I earned in the factory. Wish I hadn't needed to though because I really enjoyed working in that factory So No it isn't a racist or bigotted thing to say. It is a truth. The way that the NWM is bandied about as evidence they aren't working for less is a falsehood and the fact that more are leaving the UK than are coming means nothing. If the skilled are leaving yet the migrants are taking unskilled jobs then it means there are more unskilled workers left on the scrap heap here in the UK. Now they may well not want to work in those jobs and rightly so we are told that they will be made to work or lose their benefits however which jobs exactly are they going to be made to do? They are unskilled and the English companies don't want them. They have already shown that? I assume from most of the comments on this above that many haven't seen this situation from my side of the coin. Of actually watching whilst your fellow nationals are gradually pushed out of their jobs in their own company to be replaced by a cheaper option. I also bet you don't believe that I as a qualified accountant, someone who has had £40k a year jobs pre and post the factory job preferred that £12k a year (basic not inc O/T) factory job and would still be there now if all this hadn't happened. As it is I have been hit like above and am now on the JSA wondering how to afford to survive on a measly £23k a year (JSA+benefits+child allowance+free fruit and veg vouchers.) Quite nicely really Labour's free money give aways that broke the country (Tax Credits and benefits rises) are sitting quite nicely in my savings account. Why? Because I do not have Sky, 50" plasma or leather couches. That is why people think the cost of living is high. because quite literally almost no-one in this country lives in poverty no matter what the NWM was supposed to have been brought in to do, That tax that I have paid heavily in the past was given away by Blair/Brown to people not for them buy vitals to survive but so they could pay their £30 a month mobile bill, £40 a month Sky bill and their £50 a month DFS bill (plus all the added extras like extreme energy usage for all manner of electrical goods.) I now live on a council estate. I have never seen so many Brighthouse/Argos/Tesco Direct delivery vans, Never seen so many satellite dishes and they all leave the curtains open to show off the 50" plasma that they spend 16 hours a day watching!!! They even get taxis to the dole office and all their groceries delivered to their door!!! How is any government going to force them to work or lose their benefits? Where are the jobs? If they were there then there would be more migrants coming over to get them I can assure you and my wife agrees that there are far too many migrants coming over!!! I am setting my own business up now because 3 redundancies and a 'forced out' peeved me. I'll look after myself from now!!! Rant Over Remember I live in Farming country (Lincolnshire), low wages, very high percentage of manual work and not much in the way of high salary work.
which I agreed in my post above however most of those coming in aren't replacing the jobs that the ones who left vacated. They are grabbing up the manual work!!! I have no problem with Doctor's Dentists Teachers etc coming in. That is good immigration policy but how are the government supposed to get the dossers off their asses when the jobs are filled instantly from abroad? These factories are giving their migrant workers the vacancy details to inform friends family colleagues overseas before they even hit the job centre/papers.
Great post Imps and I don't have time nor passion to reply to every bit of it so I'll just pick out one major point. "Many British thought they were were above this kind of work and wage" This is exactly the point. If it weren't for the British mindset of luxury (as you so detailed with your council estate plasma TV comments) then there wouldn't be any kind of job theft because people wouldn't feel they needed to be put on an undeserving pedestal. The point is that people CAN take those jobs, they just don't want to. Jobs that foreigners are taking (well S4whatever's view of foreigners, not the ones who become doctors, lawyers etc) are the ones below the brilliant British mindset. As well as this it is in the name "unskilled". I'm certainly not to look down on people in unskilled manual work brackets but there are definitely things they can do about that. What do you see as more productive - sitting at home watching Jeremy Kyle while preaching to the world about how an immigrant nicked your job, or going out to an apprenticeship to become an engineer or something. I know someone who has no qualifications, left school after failing GCSEs and couldn't be arsed with the crappy part time **** shovelling jobs he was being given, so went out and found training to become a welder, where he now earns more than most white collars I know. The point is that nobody denies more of these unskilled jobs are being taken by immigrants. However they are not being stolen - if you want a job, either work for less in an unskilled job or go out and get yourself some qualifications. The only people who stand on their soapbox (in this case, sitting on their sofa) rolling in dole and screaming about immigrants stealing jobs are just making excuses for their laziness in not actually going out and doing something for themselves.
Just don't be a dosser. The lesson here is that if you get a decent education you'll be alright. Now the debate will inevitably turn to education and the lack of opportunities for some people, but that is where I believe the foundation of the problem lies. Fix the foundation and in turn you'll fix all the problems stemming from it. To just cut down on immigration in order to ensure that dossers can get jobs is just accepting that there will always be dossers. It's a compromise that misses the big issue.
I bet the Portuguese employees are considered as very good one's aren't they? But over here Portuguese are sooooo lazy
Wow, a political debate. I came on here to talk football but if you are talking politics then I will leave sharply.
I think it was Labour who came up with the ingeniuous plan of trying to get 50% of the youth population into university and graduated. Because of this more people are attending university, running up large debts in the process and graduating with very little chance of actually using their degree to obtain a job. A friend of mine recruits graduates for a big company and there are usually around 10 positions per year on the graduate scheme. Last year there were over 2000 applicants. This obviously means that there aren't enough jobs for the "skilled" workers, so they move down the sort of job ladder if you will and end up taking jobs that 20 years ago would of been for somebody who didn't attend university, but they have been hired because they have a degree so unless the person without a degree has lots of experience in that particular job then they won't get it. It can work the other way as somebody I went to uni with is now on the graduate scheme at a large supermarket chain, basically being fast tracked to becoming the store manager of one of those big out of town supermarkets. He told me that it has almost become an unwritten company policy to not hire people with degrees for the cashier/shelf stacking etc roles in supermarkets because they are only there to fill a gap whilst they are looking for another job and will leave pretty quickly. When I left uni 2 years ago I was told by a couple of job agencies when applying for certain jobs to not put down my past work experience or my degree as I was too over qualified for the job so they would be suspicious of my motives of why I wanted the job. So finding a job basically becomes a bit of a lottery for young people as you have loads of people with virtually identical CV's applying for a job and the company clearly isnt going to interview all of them so it becomes pot luck if you are selected to even go for an interview and try to impress.
Probably playing FM. That's what I'm doing (whilst staring in disbelief at John Alder's book on constitutional and administrative law in loading screens wondering how I'm going to get a degree out of it)
I wouldn't think anybody does! Horrible, horrible subject. I can proudly say, our constitution can go and **** itself.
That whole year I was just thinking "why can they not just write it all down in one ****ing document?!"
