Not before Ine.

[Workingman]

What incenses me is the ones who come here with no intention of finding work, and the ones who can't get work because they have no skills to get one. Why are we letting these people in?

Cameron is in no way serious about reducing immigration. If he was, he could halt all but a fraction of non-EU immigration - but he doesn't, despite all his fine words.

He could also do it with EU migrants, the ways and means are there. Other EU countries use them quite effectively: we don't.

[Suff]

I have a 50:50 agreement with you there WM. Yes they have pretty draconian rules covering working and being registered and able to work and if you are refused the right to work then you won't get any benefits either. Chucked out on your backside more like. They also have some damned stupid rules too like you can't own a limited company in Belgium unless you have a degree....

However there is the other side. This was amply demonstrated in Brussels when they broke down the doors and found 8 people living behind one name on a door. 7 of whom were working on the black, illegal and off the radar. The first response was sheer panic as they realised they had absolutely no clue how many people were living in the country, what they were doing and whether or not they actually liked the Belgians or their regime or not...

The response was pretty much panic. They started rabbiting on about stripping citizenship for harbouring terrorists, the whole gamut of post horse door slamming and nailing up... This was part of what prompted me to head for the hills, I could see all the legitimate tools being abused to try and fix a situation which should never have occurred in the first place...

So whilst they do have the tools and do use them, the Schengen open borders just drive it all underground...

[KateLMead]

I remember as a small child when I went to live with my mother, going with my five brothers and sisters two in a pram walking to the fields with the rest of us one born every year numbering six. We lived in two bed roomed cottage in the midst of Vegetables and cornfields, my mother would make sandwiches, pick apples from the tree in our neighbours garden, and make bottles of tea that we would drink, and the sandwiches that we would eat at lunch time. Potatoes, peas, would be picked in the season. At night we would take our turn to be bathed in a tin bath that was heated on the fire range.. Today we see very few of our own countrymen and women working on farms, but we do see foreigners working on them living in caravans and being paid much less than they should be paid. And our own unemployed Looking in disdain at the thought of being reduced to working in the fields. How times change.,,

[Suff]

Sadly we have to compete with the rest of the EU and the rest of the world. As a country which is one of the most expensive to live in, in the EU and with the highest benefits, it means that we either lose that trade or we bring in eastern Europeans who will do the work for less money.

We cannot operate like we are an island independent of the rest of the world. Although our politicians would like to make believe we can. So, in the end, we wind up sucking in eastern Europeans.

When the new 10 came into the EU and the majority of governments blocked those workers from coming in to work several Germany companies went to the German government and told them that they, the government, would tell the workers they were going to work longer hours with less holidays and less conditions with a pay rise lower than inflation for the next decade. OR. The companies would take the hit and move the manufacturing to Eastern Europe.

The German government folded and the workers lost pay, rights and holidays and the government told the unions how it was.

The UK, on the other hand, just sucked in millions of the "new 10" instead.

Whatever way it was going to go, the net result of adding the new Eastern European countries into the union was never in doubt. The existing low paid workers, throughout the union, were going to lose.

That is the reality. Everything else you politicians speak (with forked tongue) about it is a lie to some degree or other. The EU is nothing more than a government sanctioned cartel to keep prices artificially high inside and low to the outside world.

In short the UK cripples itself competitively by selling outside of the EU because it is so much more lucrative inside the EU. The main issue being we compete with Germany and France inside the EU. Which means we must sell outside. Because the rest of the EU would rather deal with Germany or France than the UK.