Anecdotally, on my few visits to the US (NY and Colorado), the driving I saw was absolutely atrocious compared to Europe. People were swerving and failing to stay in their lanes on Interstates, everyone was speeding well above the limit (everyone speeds on Motorways, but it seems it's taken to another level in the US). Then you have turn right on red meaning drivers just don't care and turn regardless. Then you have everyone driving massive fucking trucks where you can't see anything from inside.
It seemed every morning I got up and turned on the hotel TV, there was another news about some crash on the Interstate that morning
A difference I haven't seen mentioned here is: the police.
In the US there's a melange of different police forces in any area. Only one of them (Highway Patrol) cares about driving. And in my experience they don't care much about anything pre-accident (except for revenue-raising efforts like speed tickets for 10mph over the limit).
E.g. in the US you'll see countless vehicles with one headlight not working. In the UK (at least when I last lived there) you'd be pulled over and fined for even headlights that aren't correctly aimed.
Totally agree. When someone in my family got their license in the US they had to drive around a parking lot, parallel park and pull into a normal parking lot. That’s it. This was during COVID so the tester wasn’t allowed inside the car.
It absolutely reflects in the quality of drivers today.
I often drive in Europe for business and cry a little on the inside when I’m back on New York streets.
>Can anyone really point me out the real problem about the immigrants?
This minimises the problem. The UK voters have consistently voted for reduced immigration, with polls showing the preferred number to be somewhere between 0-100,000. Those elected have consistently ignored them which has raised tensions.
In the last few years, the UK had around 1 million people net per year. 1 million people is bigger than most cities in the UK for comparison, so imagine a new city of people, every single year. The infrastructure could not, or did not keep up and has contributed to worse living standards through overly-subscribed national services, increased living costs, etc.
>for example the lack of funding of the NHS or the hyper funding of other initiatives such as war in Ukraine.
The NHS is already the single biggest expenditure of the UK's taxes. I remember it being more than 25% of the total budget. How much should be spent on the NHS? 50%? 90%?
The cost of defending democracy and freedom from a tyrannical Russia is also barely a drop in the bucket, while having huge meaning for many. Only 2% of the budget for the entire Armed forces, let alone just some support for Ukraine, compared to the 25+% on NHS. It's nothing.
I think there's some conflation happening here (not necessarily from the above comment).
Those figures relate to general immigration, which wouldn't be affected by ID schemes since people are given approval by the government to arrive and work in the UK. If the government wanted to reduce regular immigration, it could just decide to award less visas.
The ID scheme would only affect irregular immigration which is much lower (approx 50,000 a year by the governments stats, obviously hard to know how accurate that is, but much lower than 1 million[0]).
You are absolutely right to point this out. However, I don't think many people in this thread are actually confused. It's rather clear that this scheme has about as much to do with immigration as the Online Safety Act has to do with protecting children. The UK government is just getting more and more bald-faced about these sorts of things.
Thank you for the numbers. Could you please clarify how much money this translates to, both in terms of income and expenses generated by skilled workers who are legally employed in the UK?
I must say I am not doubting nor being pedantic. I am indeed trying to have a conversation based on the facts and people I know. I would happily change my mind if I find reasons for that. At the same time, I would like to share my views which might give some perspective on my opinions.
Based on government figures I've saw, the annual economic contribution from skilled workers alone is estimated to range from 4 billion to gbp. Moreover, it's important to note that these skilled workers generally don't receive government benefits.
Literally. They pay double on nurseries, they pay for NHS in advance, they do not have any financial government assistance at all, contrary to what people believe.
I do not understand what kind of problems they cause. Would you mind explain it to me? I am not being pedantic nor ironic. I want to understand what is the complaint?
I agree about drug dealers, rape gangs and etc, but they in the UK before and they will remain independently of the political changes regarding immigration.
Ten years and no settlement will only put away skilled workers as they will not be able to retire on time, nor have any financial safety as the UK only provides 8 weeks for them to leave after the contract termination.It also means spending more on health, education, and living, which is already a struggle.
Refugees receive £50 per week, which isn't enough for groceries and rent. The system is broken, but attacking another unrelated group does not seem to be the answer.
While I acknowledge that some individuals are abusing the system, I maintain that the overall impact is likely positive, especially when considering the near-zero population growth among native populations.
Who will pay for pensions 10 years from now? The money you pay now goes towards current pensions, and the government does not save taxes for future generations.
So 1 million people per year was the supposed peak, right? The actual numbers are definitely far lower than 5 million, I think.
More than that, NHS workers in hospitals are immigrants because no British person is insane to work for it under current conditions.
At the same time, no Brit wants to increase taxes even more to cover the costs of paying more for health.
A short-sighted solution will be another blow to the UK economy as the Brexit was. Well, they are being orchestrated by exactly the same folks.
This also bothers me because there's a clear conflict of interest. Trice is married to an editorial lead at The Telegraph and receives funding from Lloyds.
Not sure about Sky News and others, but I would not be surprised that some digging would lead to the same people.
There is a clear financial cost related to the war in Ukraine. Whether it is a fair cost or not is a moral and ethical point, which I think is an individual opinion. But there is a cost regardless. Money spent in war is money that will never ever come back at any proportion to its society.
The digital id is not the reason for that comment, or not solely.
I mean having AI cameras, legalised racial profiling, attack on vessels in international waters without proof (likely killing innocent civilians too when it could be intercepted easily on the coast), we have politics talking about cultural incompatibility of their own people because different religion, we have a post truth media, etc
A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - a paper birth certificate is also acceptable (and paper can be lost, damaged, forged), as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.
A NI number is not ID, it's a reporting number.
Lastly, a national ID is a tried and tested scheme in many, many countries and brings a lot of positives. The only "negatives" are slippery slope make-believe scenarios not based in reality.
A birth certificate is not proof of citizenship or legal presence in the UK for anyone born after 1983.
Anchoring proof of citizenship is going to become a very obnoxious problem going forward if there is not a population register or universal ID system introduced, as you'll have to go back however many generations it takes to reach birth before 1983.
I think the UK and Ireland are the only countries in the entire world that have non-birthright citizenship and no citizenship register, which is a less than ideal combination.
The UK has no notion of a person number or national ID number that is tied to citizenship. Therefore it is not possible to prove British citizenship except with a British Citizen passport, naturalisation certificate or pre-1983 birth certificate.
It’s therefore a lot harder to prove citizenship for an initial passport application in certain circumstances than you might expect. You need to prove that you have an unbroken link of people born in the UK to someone born before 1983, and as time goes on that will mean even more generations. Right now you typically need to provide your birth certificate, up to 2x parents birth certificate, and up to 4x grandparents birth certificates.
In many other countries the birth certificate will have the person numbers of the parents, which will mean there’s essentially guaranteed to be a record of the citizenship of the parents that the state can check. Alternatively there’s a national ID scheme that helps bootstrap this information early in life.
> A Brit can pass a RTW check without a drivers license or a passport - paper birth certificate is also acceptable, as neither a drivers license or a passport a mandatory. Getting those can be expensive for some people while this ID is free.
This policy would absolutely sail through, with no controversy at all, if it had just been "free passports for all" reusing all the existing rules, existing IT and existing bureaucracy; and "Optional digital passport on your phone" for those who want that.
Why they're doing this in the most expensive, unpopular way possible - I have no idea.
You don't currently have any National ID. You have forms of ID, which others might not have, but none are national mandatory ID that every citizen and resident has. As such many benefits in streamlining and simplifying processes cannot be achieved when everyone has a UID as such. Imagine making a system where you used various ID formats, and you couldn't guarantee anyone had one in particular, and some people had none.
Your NI card literally says it's not identification. A NI number is not linked to a passport as it's not mandatory to have a passport, so that would not work for many people. It is just a number used for tax accounting.
Ok then 'Government issued [photo] ID' so what if it's not a 'national ID'? They have all the data they need to tackle this. You can't get a NI number without proving who you are, if the government don't trust NI numbers (which they are minting?) then they could simply re-issue them? That would be far far easier than a new national ID.
>You can't get a NI number without proving who you are
That's not true either. You're sent your NI number just before 16 years old without providing anything.
Also, an NI number is just a number. There is no photo. How can you look at it and say it belongs to the person presenting it? And no you can't look up a passport or something in another system based on the NI number, because those other IDs aren't mandatory so the person might not have them.
The only way to really ID someone is to have mandatory photo ID, whether that be digital or not.
How do you think HMRC know to send you a card? If they're giving them out like smarties to foreigners then they could simply... Not (a British person gets one as a function of having a birth certificate)
Now that ID is required for voting, it's reasonable that the government provides a form of ID, for free, to all citizens. Passports cost money and not everyone has one. Same for driving licenses. It should also streamline other government services.
I think it would be simpler to repeal the ID requirement for voting. I don't believe there is any evidence of widespread voting fraud, so it adds unnecessary cost. I certainly wouldn't try to sell the ID as preventing illegal work, which is obviously ludicrous.
> The only "negatives" are slippery slope make-believe scenarios not based in reality.
This is an exaggeration. There are countless examples of how this has played out in the past, a quick google search will yield many of them[1][2][3].
The point is that any kind of data collection by a government can and will (eventually) be misused and abused. The UK government is currently abusing its powers to access Facebook and Whatsapp private messaging to arrest regular people for words (i.e not CSAM)[4].
This particular national ID introduction has about as much to do with illegal workers as the Online Safety Act has to do with protecting children.
After having lived in a country for a while that doesn't change its clocks, coming back to a country that still does has emphasised how annoying and archaic changing the clocks is. It also doesn't help that countries don't even change clocks on the same date.
We need to just stop it. After the first year everyone will forget it was even a thing.
It seemed every morning I got up and turned on the hotel TV, there was another news about some crash on the Interstate that morning