palfrey

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Reminder
  Apropos @34: we've got a big problem in this country: not enough chefs willing to work in Indian take-aways. Seems the second generation want to go to university instead, rather than work long hours in the kitchen. So the restaurant trade has been importing non-English literate Bengali and Punjabi cooks ... until the Immigration Service unintentionally yanked the brake handle; there's no exam for excellence in methi gosht preparation, it seems. As ben @37 puts it: do we need to put up gates? Personally, I think that free trade and free movement of capital is an obscenity unless it's accompanied...
• Feòrag commented on Reminder
  Suzy@49: According to the most recent Migration Statistics Quarterly Report from the Office of National Statistics, immigration is static, but emigration is rising, and showed a particularly steep rise towards the end of last year. The immigration statistics include British citizens returning to the UK after an extended period living abroad. There are still about 100,000 more people coming to the UK than leaving, but 75,000 of them are returning UK citizens. There is, of course, an extremely simple way of cutting the UK population by about 5 million......
• DaveBell commented on Reminder
  It's a practice test. It doesn't use questions from the real test. It's a .co.uk domain And it's pushing training aids. Seems a bit dodgy to me, but if the questions do represent the real test, there's something seriously broken in the design of the test....
• Charlie Stross commented on Reminder
  ajay @64: or alternative 5: no limits on movement across frontiers of capital or people. You're not considering that one because the received wisdom is that it will create chaos, despair, and the collapse of civilization. And in the short term it will. But in the long term, ask yourself: who do these arbitrary restrictions on immigration serve? Prior to 1914 you could move around Europe without a passport, settle where you would, and that was that. I'm descended from folks who lived that way. (The branch of the family that settled in Poland and left it too late to...
• Charlie Stross commented on Reminder
  cod3fr3ak: the biggest wave of immigration to hit the UK recently was from Poland -- around a million incomers in the period 2000 to 2007. Now Poles (and other Eastern Europeans) are the largest demographic of emigrants from the UK -- they seem to have decided that if there's a global recession rendering them jobless, they'd rather be jobless back home with their families....