Sim-O

I came across some graffiti yesterday, underneath a road bridge whilst out cycling, so I went back and photographed it today. (click the images to enlarge)

We all know Indymedia.org, don’t we? On the other side of bridge is

with a close-up of dear old Paddington Bear

The URL next to Paddington is noii.org.uk.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen overtly political graffiti around here (although I do have an appalling memory) and it’s hidden under this bridge.

Immigration detention centres. Not the nicest of places. The people in there are generally pennyless and have a big need to talk to solicitors and stuff.

So what does the ever so intelligent people who run the private companies think up for their detention centres? A new telephone system…

The trial at Tinsley House detention centre, near Gatwick airport, is run by Global Comms & Consulting Ltd (GCC), which specialises in secure telecommunications services to major government agencies and multinational companies. As a result, detainees will not be able to call free numbers and will pay significantly higher rates to call their family and solicitors. All calls will also be recorded, monitored and disrupted when necessary by the immigration authorities and/or the immigration prison’s management.

When a detainee arrives at the centre, they have their own phone taken from them and issued with one from the centre. These phones are described as ‘crap’ and cut out ‘after a few seconds’.

Along with the phone the detainee is also given a phone card…

Detainees will be given a Call4Five card when they are admitted in to detention. Call4Five, owned and operated by GCC, allows users to dial any UK or international number from any phone for “five precious minutes,” using a special code provided on a scratch voucher.

GCC claims its Call4Five cards are “a good deal.” However, a voucher of five minutes for international calls (10 for UK calls) costs £2.50 plus VAT. This works out at 60p and 30p per minute respectively, which is significantly more expensive than using pre-paid phone cards or even normal mobile phones.

The new system also means that detainees will be charged higher rates for dialling 0845 numbers and will not be able to call free 0800 numbers without buying credit, for example to use pre-paid phone cards provided by visitors groups or to call their solicitors and other support organisations that provide a free phone service for those who do not have credit on their phones.

What a lovely bunch of people run these services, eh?

I’ve just done my first post for the new media watch site Express Watch UK.

It’s about some immigrants and home owners getting scammed by dodgy estate agent. The Express blames the immigrants, naturally.

The Tories, eh? Nice and shiny and caring and nice and not nasty at all.

If they are as nice as they want to make us believe, then why are there so many shits on their approved blogger list?

Here’s another one from that list…

Apart from the outrageously high number of eastern Europeans who have flooded the city in the past few years, Peterborough is now an almost unrecognisable shadow of it’s former self. I happened to go into the city centre yesterday – the first time in around 4 months. As I walked down the street there were literally no English accents to be heard – and I mean not one. Groups of foreign ‘youths’ filed past the Cathedral, once resting place to Mary Queen of Scots, spitting on the newly laid block paving and chucking cigarette butts on the ground. For the first time I actually felt nervous and frankly rather scared to walk around a city I once called home.

‘Youths’? Wtf with the scare-quotes? Either they were young enough to be called youths or they weren’t. Unless they were old foreigners pretending to be youths. More likely, ‘youths’ is only the official word for them. We all know what they really are, don’t we? *winks knowingly*

And their dirty bastards, too, these ‘youths’. Fancy spitting, on new paving blocks as well! You’d never catch one of those nice Peterborough lads spitting, would you? They’re all brought up nice and proper like. Peterborough lads, when they’re smoking in the street put their fags out in the palm of their hands and put the dog end in a bin, or their pocket if a bin in not in the immediate vicinity.

TT titles her post ‘Labours migrant swan slayers’ but there is nothing about swan killing in the post, so by implication, every East European is tarred as a rabid swan muncher. Even though, the eating of swans is, well, bollox. (I will admit, though, I bet they are fucking tasty.)

No wonder Tory Totty felt nervous and scared. Probably worried about opening her mouth and revealing what shit she is.

Teh Guardian…

Scores of French riot police descended early this morning on the “jungle” camp in Calais, bulldozing makeshift tents and rounding up hundreds of illegal migrants hoping to stow away on lorries to Britain.

It’s a sorry state if affairs.

We all know why illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, whatever you want to call them, want to come here to this sceptred isle. Depending on who you ask the reasons range from: work; benefits; convert us all to Islam; endangered at home; want a better life; other family already here.

These guys in the ‘jungle’ in France, though. Looking for asylum in Britain. If they get here and can get a claim going, fair enough to them. But…

All the journalists and reporters I’ve heard on this story (and I don’t claim to have heard them all) have all asked why these refugees want asylum in Britain, but never asked why they’re not claim asylum in France when they’re already in France.

Is the French system that bad? Surely they don’t all have family here?

Just an observation. That’s all.

The Daily Mail hasn’t earnt itself the nickname The Daily Fail for no reason. This one is an epic.

Apparently some failed asylum seekers are to be allowed free health care on the NHS, that is currently denied to them. Sorry, I should’ve said ‘proposed’. They’re not currently allowed, and it isn’t definately going to happen.
It’s just a proposal.

According to the Daily Mail, the headline goes…

A million failed asylum seekers will get free NHS care in human rights U-turn

A million people will get NHS treatment. That is an assertion of fact. But it’s not a fact. It’s a proposal.

Digging deeper, but not much deeper. In fact only as far as the first line of the story itself…

NHS treatment will be available for tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers to ensure their human rights are honoured, it was announced yesterday.

So it’s not a millon failed asylum seekers, after all. it’s only tens of thousands. Not quite so shocking that number, is it?

The number has dropped significantly because certain criteria would need to be fullfiled, rather than just any asylum seeker. They would need to be destitute with children and various other things. So the proposal’s not open to all.

Strolling through the article the figures get a little more specific still…

There are understood to be around 450,000 failed asylum seekers who have not left the country, although only 10 or 20,000 are directly affected by the new rules.

So there is ‘understood’ to be less then half a million failed asylum seekers in the country and only just tens of thousands at the biggest guess or estimate.
Just think a little about what is being told here.

There are 450,000 failed asylum seekers. What proportion of total applications these failures are I don’t know.
Lets take the bigger 20,000 number that would be directly affected by the proposals. Which means that approximately 4.5% of failed asylum seekers are affected (for the better, remember).

But for the headline to be correct, 50x more failed asylum seekers would need to be eligible, which if it stayed at the same rate would mean there would have to be 22,500,000 failed asylum seekers. Let that sink in for a moment.

Twentytwo and a half million. Failed. Asylum seekers. A number equivalent to a third of the population of Britain.

As I said earler I have no idea of the proportion of total asylum applications the failed ones make, but how many applications are gonna be needed to get a failure rate of 22.5 million?

And where did this original one million figure come from?

According to the Mail, MigrationWatch.

Notes:

1. I originally came to this Mail article via a post on the BNP site. That article says pretty much the same thing but with out the 10-20,000 figure and a bit more pro-BNP propaganda.
2. I just realised that there is no time scale mentioned, either. Are these figure for a five year period? A year? Month? Half a week?
3. I hope my maths has not let me down

I’ve just been on the Official Practice Citizenship Test site*. What a strange set of questions to ask before letting someone become British.

(*Wordpress is making me out to be a liar. I haven’t just been on it, that was last night but the bloody post didn’t publish for some reason.)

What the fuck has question 1 got to do with anything?

In the 1980s, the largest immigrant groups were from the West Indies, Ireland, India and Pakistan.

True or False?
How many people know how many Parliamentary constituencies there are? Why would anyone need to know that? That is question three, btw.
Another true or false question: Six…

Ulster Scots is a dialect which is spoken in Northern Ireland.

No disrespect to whoever speaks Ulster Scots, but why does anyone need to know that?
Married women, when did you get the right to divorce your husbands? Number eight, that one. Not just a pointless question that shows knowledge of how to be a good citizen but badly worded too. How can an unmarried woman divorce? And who is a married woman going to divorce? It’s not the gardener, is it?

And it goes on and on. Either inane questions that serve no purpose and few of the indigenous population (I use that phrase in the sense of people who already live here, not the BNP mythical sense) know, or care, or questions that wouldn’t look out of place in an instruction book on how to use Britain properly, that again, not too many of the locals would be able to answer.

Question eleven…

The number of children and young people up to the age of 19 in the UK is…?

Who gives a shit? How is that going to stop an immigrant from offending someone, or getting run over or finding a fucking job?

The percentage of people in the UK in 2001 who said they were Muslims was…

Why is this question in there (Q12)? Is it to remind the Muslim immigrants just how few Muslims there are in the UK? Just to , y’know, remind them not to try anything?What purpose does it serve to have someone know how many Muslims there were in the UK in 2001?

Q18…

Schools must be open for…

I’m British. I’m a parent of school aged children. I don’t know how many days a year schools must be open for. Maybe I should. I do now but will it make me a better person or fulfil any civic duties better?
The final question, question 24…

Which of the following statements is true?

• The governing body of the EU is the Council of the European Union
• the governing body of the EU is the Council of Europe

Shouldn’t that be in a European citizenship test?

All that’s happening here is that the government has issued a standardised set of approved useless facts that people should know, but can only enforce them on some people.

What would be more help would be, I don’t know, mentors or something. Someone that the new arrival can call for help with anything, or pointing in the right direction. How to go about getting a job, Where to go to get a driving licence, tell the n00bs they’ll need a TV licence. That sort of thing. Not ‘How many children are there in Britain?’

“What do you mean I don’t get the job? But I know how many Parliamentary constituencies there are!”

Oh, I got 42%. I hope I get sent somewhere warm.

Via

An audience with a racist…

Sitting in his suit and tie, with neatly combed hair and trotting out psephological jargon, he comes across as a sort of racist version of Tony Blair: coolly spouting dodgy dossiers of misinformation to justify a “war” against weapons of mass immigration and miscegenation. Most people don’t believe him; we’re not sure whether he sincerely believes himself, but he’s going to keep pushing his line for as long as he can.

At the moment he is trying to soft-sell repatriation. “We’re not talking about turfing everybody out. We’re talking about encouraging some to go. It would benefit them if we did a proper, sensible deal with countries that have suffered hugely from brain-drain, with people coming here – it’s the final form of colonialism. Instead of stealing, erm, gold and old statues, we steal the people and best brains, and the countries suffer as a result.

“We would help to stabilise all sorts of countries if some of their nationals or people who originate from there returned to their homelands with some of the skills that they’ve learnt here and applied them to make those a better place instead of coming here because it’s convenient for Britain and easier than training our own people.” Xenophobia as humanitarianism is just one of his verbal gymnastics.

So. Nick Griffin isn’t a racist that wants to keep the white race on top and withdraw Britain just about every international organisation you can think of, because we don’t need them.

Nick Griffin is going to save the world and improve all those third world countries (is that still a valid term or is it ‘developing nation’) by returning all those immigrants that we have train. Nick Griffins’ flying monkeys are good flying monkeys.

How the interviewer managed to carry that through, I’ll never know.