In order to be able to fit 10 more students per year, my university had to rebuild every single lab. That didn’t take 10 minutes. Well, it did… 10 and 10 and 10 and 10… and a lot more 10s.
In our case, those 10 would otherwise have gone to chemistry, biology, industrial engineering or physics, and the difference we made was only 10 people every year. Where do the people in the UK who don’t pass the numerus clausus into medicine or nursing go now? Are those fields they go into not needed?
The anti-English racism I experienced during and in the aftermath of the independence referendum has largely died down.
The grades required for medical school in the UK are incredibly high:
Yes, I know. But the proposal is that we start training people who right now we reject for not meeting these high standards. And the rationale is that we need to lower our standards because the alternative would be having qualified foreigners do the job.
None of that smacks of good public policy.
I don’t see what the problem is with NHS staffing. It’s public policy we are talking about here. There will be lots of sectors allowed to bypass any immigration laws we implement; future Immigration laws none of us yet know the details of. Yet we are already fearing a lack of qualified NHS staff. I will give you all the worst possible outcome; a fairly minor shortfall in staff that will quickly be rectified. We’ll soon enough be poaching all those African doctors and nurses once again.
The potential difficulty isn’t so much course fees in medical schools: that’s covered by the existing deferred repayment loan scheme (at least until that collapses for everybody) for the first four years, and the NHS Bursary scheme for the final year. Thereafter, there’s the question of salaries for the training posts in the post-university foundation years and subsequently. These start at somewhere around or just under a fairly usual starting graduate salary, rising as they progress towards specialist qualification, so around £27k initially (which is also just under median household income in the UK, so not poverty), £30k in the second foundation year, and then in the later stages of specialist qualification £36k to £45k.
But the point is, this additional cost is apparently supposed to be found within existing budgets, at a time when these are based on the assumption that increasing demand will lead to a funding gap of £30bn, to be found from £8bn of additional government funding and £22bn of “efficiency savings”. In that mix, finding money for additional bursaries and training places must mean something else has got to give. Unless you’re a Cabinet minister, of course.
And so? Historically, we have not required such high standards. They’re only that high because medicine has been a very popular career so the NHS can pick the brightest. IMHO it’s also been a way of cutting back on training - “Why bother spending a lot of money training someone when we can recruit someone who’s already been trained?”
We’re waiting for the Green Paper but, afaik, at the moment the expansion is costed at around £100 million and the idea - currently - is to fund it from increased fees for foreign medical students.
I haven’t seen anyone suggest the plan isn’t feasible. Everyone seems agreed it’s the right thing to do, though I would imagine the funding mechanism will be looked at more closely through the Green/White Paper process.
I don’t think the nation has become xenophobic in general, but the brexit result does seem to have encouraged a subset of xenophobic assholes to start wearing their hearts on their sleeves.
I have a number of friends and colleagues who are either foreign nationals living and working here, or have officially become British citizens, but still retain an accent from their nation of origin (and/or of course, still have the skin colour they started with).
Without exception, all of them have reported a sharp uptick in explicit and directed hostility from individuals they met in passing. A couple of these cases occurred literally the day following the brexit result.
So, there are people in Britain so weak-minded that - although they never had so much as a bigoted thought before - simply reading about other people being violent or outspoken bigots is enough to make them give it a go? Just because it’s popular now, or in a panic that the nation might run out of bigoted attacks before they get to do one? You don’t actually believe that, do you?
I’ve got another theory:
The Leave campaign winning isn’t some ginned-up silly season media story that you can shrug your shoulders at and say “oh, it’s just reported because it’s fashionable in the media”. It’s a real, major, political event. They ran on hating foreigners and they won.
You can try and blame the rise of bigotry on the media for reporting it but at some point you have to account for the time that 52% of voters in the UK saw a nakedly racist campaign and said, “Yes, I’m on their side.”
No, but you do hear of Poles being assaulted and murdered. I linked to it earlier.
Most interactions in this country are between white Brits, so however many tens of millions there are is irrelevant. What we do know is that there has been a sharp increase in reported hate crimes and that foreigners (you know, the people who might be expected to actually experience this stuff) are reporting increasing levels of hostility, to the extent that some are leaving this country.
Whether we’re a better society is down to how we respond to this. “Well, hey, only very few people have been assaulted or murdered yet.” is one option, I grant you.
Well lets see, I voted out for couple of reasons related to foreigners, and they are very logical, and not racist.
That 52% vote was taken in the face of massive media push to remain, all the main political parties tried to shame us into voting remain, using scare tactics and simple moral browbeating.
It pretty much went along the lines of vote remain, or you become workless and poor and you will also be a racist.
Well this completely ignored the real debate and yet the media are still trying to sell us the idea of rampant racism.
Not true.
It was almost as if those who did have logical arguments had to apologise for seeing things in another way.
I wonder how many people felt pressured to vote remain, I recall that there was a dearth of opinion polls in the early weeks of the campaign - why do you suppose that was? Perhaps it was because the pollsters and their commissioner did not want to show that the Brexit vote was actually far larger than they had thought.
Yet despite all that campaigning, they could still only pressure 48% to remain.
I still am sceptical that racism is any worse than before - the more its reported, the more folk read about it, this does not necessarily mean the number of incidents are greater, it also leads to more awareness and more willingness to report incidents as having racist elements, but it still does not necessarily mean that the number of incidents has increased.
Increased awareness does not equate to increased events, you’d think that on this message board there would be some awareness of that.
Yes, of course. It’s just unfortunate that your vote helped racists find the courage to abuse people.
This just isn’t true. The Express, The Mail, The Telegraph and The Sun all backed Brexit. Half the Tory cabinet backed Brexit. The idea that there wasn’t a huge chunk of the Establishment cheering Brexit wrong is plain wrong. It is false. It is demonstrably not what happened. I don’t understand how you could think this is an accurate portrayal of events.
The main arguments presented by Leave campaigners were:
[ul]
[li]Britain is full to breaking point.[/li][li]75 million Turks will come over here.[/li][li]We need to take back control of our borders.[/li][li]£350 Million on the NHS.[/li][/ul]
Pretending that the Leave campaign didn’t rely heavily on xenophobia and racism is a mug’s game. It demonstrably did. But, again, voting for a racist campaign didn’t and doesn’t make you racist. It just makes you someone who helped racists feel good about shouting racist abuse in the street or assaulting people who talk funny.
Increased reporting is often linked to an increase in events, and you’d think there’d be some awareness of that. If you really think that last year we had gangs beating up Poles in city centres but nobody bothered to call the police because the media hadn’t told them to, I hesitate to strip your illusions from you. But the reports we are getting from immigrants are not just “It’s happened recently” but explicitly, “It didn’t used to happen before, and now it does.” Responding to that by telling the people on the sharp end that they’re wrong and that people *were *telling them to fuck off home last year but they didn’t really notice is dismissive, arrogant and grounded in nothing more than wishful thinking.
I realise it’s a hard truth. But Leave voters saw the racist campaign, they voted alongside it, and by doing so they unintentionally fired up the racists to go out and assault and abuse people. More than that, they fired up the government to pander to the emboldened racists. Denial and blaming the media are understandable responses, but they’re not adequate ones.
Stanislaus, you’re making the basic error the Remain campaign made: you’re conflating wanting control of immigration with being anti-immigration and thus racist.
As for the media, the BBC and STV were blatantly pro-Remain, as was the Guardian, and the Labour party - Corbyn aside. And I’m not sure you’re right about the Telegraph - I recall reading pieces from both sides there.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that pro-immigration Leave voters who merely wanted to bring control back to Parliament were nonetheless lending their vote to an explicitly racist campaign with the predictable effect of giving encouragement to anti-immigrants, xenophobes, bigots and racists.
Anyone who saw the “75 million Turks” or the “Breaking Point” posters and thought that somehow they could vote for that campaign and not end up encouraging racists was kidding themselves.
But that’s like saying Remain voters were encouraging those wanting to come to this country to drown in their thousands in the Mediterranean.
Do you want to include consequences for other forms of voting; what were the consequences of voting for the Conservatives at the last election on cancer outcomes in England?
I regret to observe that your post offers neither reasons for voting leave (you listed reasons why the remain campaign narked you off), nor are they logical ones.
OK try these,
I see no reason why others should come to the UK without first being cleared of serious offending behaviour, I do not care what country they come from - I want to ensure that we do not let criminals into the UK (frankly we have enough scum of our own without importing more)
I very frequently see extremely serious offences committed in a disproportionate level by non-UK criminals- don’t forget where I work, at least a third to one half of all prisoners are from non-uk backgrounds. These crimes are at the highest levels of seriousness.
I have the privilege of working with them, we can deport non-EU criminals post sentence, we cannot easily do this with EU criminals, its possible but the standard of rights for public safety are set so high that it is impractical.
We can disqualify criminals entering the UK from the rest of the world, and yet we cannot do this with EU criminals.Even when we wish to deport non-EU criminals, we are so bound up in EU appeals court rulings that it is often impractical to challenge the process through the courts - I want us to return to our own right to remove criminals on our own terms, we have a perfectly adequate legal system through which such individuals may appeal.
I see no reason why we should wait 8 years or more to remove terrorists to other jurisdictions where they have been accused of terrorism related offences. (and subsequently convicted)
Try going to the US with a record of significant criminal offences, see how your visa application goes.
Yet the whole argument against BREXIT by the Remain campaign tries to tar me with being somehow racist, all because I want any person coming to the UK to be checked for criminal offences.
Next, at present we have an EU that tends toward the centre left, and that suits those of us like me with socialist leanings, however, whilst we may at present like the sorts of employment protection law that comes down from the EU, we cannot take that for granted. If the EU imposes a directive, we can only veto certain things, so we can be in a position where we would rather not enact a directive into law, but we have to due to treaty obligations.
The political tone of the EU is ok for folk like me at the moment, however it will not always be so, if the EU moves toward the right, will workers be so grateful of the directives passed down to us then?
We have some EU leaders under political pressures at home, should the electorate across the EU vote for right wing governments we will be stuck with whatever they decide to put through the EU.
This loss of sovereignty I do not like, I look to the political future, and it will not necessarily be in step with UK views
Collectively the EU decided to allow a certain number of refugees into the EU, collectively it then decided to impose quotas from this number on each EU state, so what we actually have, like it or not, is no control over our borders.
Once an asylum seeker has attained the status of refugee and has leave to stay in Europe then they are free to move wherever they want to in the EU, so what is happening is that Sweden gallantly accepts asylum seekers, where they obtain refugee status, those refugees make their way here, and we have no say whatsoever in this process. - Sorry but that is not acceptable to me, a sovereign nation ceases to exist when it no longer controls who may enter its borders.
Bear in mind that these refugees are not EU people with the right of free movement, and we have no control over their applications, because this is frequently done in other EU nations who are only too happy to grant them their status to remain if it means they will move on.
Why is it that migrants are supposed to make an asylum application at the EU nation of entry, and yet they find their way right across the EU into slum camps in France? You don’t think perhaps its more convenient for law enforcers in the transit nations to shoo them onwards do you? This could not possibly be happening could it? And somehow France accuses us of 'encouraging them over ’
On trade, why should we penalise other trading nations outside the EU with tariff walls? This is well on the way to turning the EU into a self absorbed inward looking market. We have agricultural products around the world that are cheaper then our high cost neighbours in the EU, but we cannot touch them unless there is a EU negotiated trade deal - but the protection afforded to certain interests in the EU means that it is frequently restricted.
How the hell are subsistence economies to develop if we impose artificial barriers to the only export goods they produce? No wonder poverty persist when these nations find that there are significant tariff barriers.
When Cameron went to the EU to try negotiate some loosening of the trade rules, he was metaphorically patted on the head and told to be on his way, like a little boy, and was offered nothing, he then had to sell this deal of some vague promises to the UK electorate, seems the EU likes our money, but does not like it when we want some say in things, well you know the saying, its the one that pays the piper that calls the tune, the EU seems to have forgotten that, we are one of the three contributors to the EU budget.
No wonder the EU gave us nothing, they simply did not want to lose the easy money that we contribute, well maybe they will learn a little lesson - don’t piss down my back and tell me its raining.
The EU grants are a myth, because those grants will always total far less than we pay in, its just our own money coming back to us with EU strings attached.
Why should we pay benefits to dependents of EU migrants who do not even live in the UK? Yet we have a serious legal issue with that, the EU lawyers suck their breath through their teeth like dodgy builders giving a dodgy estimate.
All the while the Remain camp told you the issues were largely racist, they are not, its about having some say in our own parliament, its about public safety, its about world trade - they made the wrong arguments, and never really addressed the issues.
Have you noticed something absent from my post, nope? well I will clue you, I have no problem at all with foreign workers, we need them, we need their skills, we benefit from their culture, without them we would be both socially and fiscally poorer, it has never been about ‘foreigners’ for me, I want control over how we manage our borders I want control over our law making process and I want control in our courts.
Of course, you can consider that to be racist if you wish, you can pretty much justify any argument by putting in a few ‘what ifs’ it still does not make it true
Do we really imagine that Germany and France in particular want to lose their access to one of the largest markets in the world? Take a look at all the other EU products on our shelves, do all those nations really want to spite their own economies simply to make a political gesture, because lets face it, we can easily go elsewhere for our manufactured goods. This is why the idea of us having a heavily restricted trade agreement in the EU is not going to happen, with us in or out of the EU, we need each other and that will not change.
And your point is? Perhaps if the Remainers had bothered to listen to those who wanted control, instead of branding them racists, xenophobes, and bigots, and actually enacted restrictions then Remain might have won. Politics is the art of compromise, and the racists, xenophobes, and bigots were willing to compromise with those who wanted control; the Remainers were not. For Remain, it was all or nothing; they gambled and lost.
Now, however much we dislike it, the decision has been made and if we believe in democracy we must respect it.
Had Cameron got any kind of deal at all from Angela Merkel things would indeed be very different.
German imperial arrogance again did for the common good (witness Greece, Spain, etc).
I think the Tories made that pretty clear. They had the poster showing a long line of cancer patients, with the caption “Breaking Point”. They had the other poster claiming that if we elected Labour we’d have 75 million cancer patients knocking on our doors. They had senior cabinet members campaigning on promises that they’d reduce the cancer patient target to tens of thousands. They made “taking control of our cancer wards” a centre-piece of their campaign. Given all of that, I think the consequences were pretty obvious.
Or, if I can drop the sarcasm, are you *really *going to pretend that the anti-immigrant leanings of the Leave campaign were some abstruse mystery available only to dedicated policy wonks? Leave voters were shown exactly what they were voting for, time and time again. And they chose to side with the rampant bigots.
And no, they need to own that, and start fighting back.