The risk of the thread being on the PL board is people might ruin it. I won't as it's serious, and I'm a serious guy. However I wouldn't let these two in... @PISKIE @Hoddle Is A God
I like ABBA, if that's any consolation. Also, I thought Roxette's "It Must Have Been Love" was a cracking track! I often thought I would love to have given her one.
We get the professional beggars here too. Always outside the supermarket, etc. I just ignore them. Except one old bat who's been around for years, I told her to go and get a ****ing job....she launched into a foul mouthed tirade using just about every Spanish swear word I know, and some I didn't!.... I've seen her old man picking her up in his car. ****ing scrounging sacks of ****e the lot of them....
There's no point denying the facts. These people, wherever they're from, are professional beggars. Scrounges, spongers, whatever term you want to use. That's not racial or any kind of ethnic prejudice on my part, they're just lazy, ponceing ****s, wherever they're from. Those I am prejudiced against!
I talk to quite a lot of homeless people I see while walking home from work. The rise in homelessness in Britain has been quite shocking since the crash and particularly since the Tories got in in 2010. From my experience in Cardiff, you definitely see a lot more homeless people on the streets than I ever saw before. There's a guy called Jason and his girlfriend who I try and help as much as I can, comes from Merthyr, it's heart breaking to hear some of the stories these people tell. And ever week or two you might see a bruise or something on one of them where some bastard has just decided to assault them for the crime of being homeless, as if verbal abuse wasn't enough! There's a law passed that the police will fine! - yes that's right fine! any homeless person they find in the city centre, and if they don't pay the fine (which of course they can't because, duh!, they've got no money, otherwise they wouldn't be sleeping rough), then they take them to court and give them a bigger fine! So if the homeless person reports an assault to the police, the police will usually punish the homeless person for being in the city centre in the 1st place! What a society we live in...
Do you think the people you speak of should be housed and helped out with their lives before any new-comers to the country are?
The problem is that sometimes it's difficult to differentiate between those who are on the street through no fault of their own, and those who are there of their own volition.
I think that charities and similar organisations should be properly funded - not cut so they have to close down, and mental health services should be given extra funding, not cut to the bone, so that they can help as many people as possible. I don't think we should ever look at two human beings in the face and say "sorry, I'm not going to help you because of my own prejudices, so you can starve, but this other person will receive my help". It's also a an easy lie to fall into the trap that certain groups have laid of saying "we've got no money to look after our own because we are giving it all to immigrants". The reason there's such an increase in homelessness is because of the huge cuts in affordable housing being built, the affordable housing we've currently got being sold off, the cuts in mental health support and the huge cuts in welfare and the austerity attacks on the poorest in society. On top of this there's been cuts across the board on support for charities, with charities helping homeless people being hit among these. We've seen the conditions and treatment that refugees have received when they've come to this country - companies like G4S (Theresa May's husband is one of the main directors for this company), over crowding refugee centres with people crammed in 12 to a room fit for maybe 4 max, while G4S claim huge amounts of money off the tax payer. Refugees being beaten, attacked, threatened and centres being burnt down. And that's the ones who are actually receiving help, let alone the ones who fall through the cracks and either fall prey to criminal gangs or end up on the streets!
Knowing a bit about how tough it is on the streets, and the number of attacks/assaults homeless people get, abuse from police and risks from hunger and hypothermia - I'd be amazed that many would chose to be homeless just for the bit of change they can get off people each day!
Surely it's more complicated than such a simple question. Even if you go down the "look after our own" argument, do you favour a 25-year-old English bloke on his own over a woman from Timbuktu with a baby or two? It seems like a standard Daily Mail hate-mongering scenario you paint of hardworking Brits scraping by while foreigners take their jobs and get given multi-million pound houses in London and an endless supply of benefits.