Xenophobia?

[The Grand Nudger]

No, as the article alluded to, the concern involves the NHS, which has less checks involved. The conversation has gotten side-tracked onto the more general problems in welfare. The original article (and my original comment) was about immigrants taking advantage of our already overburdened "free healthcare" system, which is paid for by taxpayers, and used by anyone. The government wants to restrict access so only citizens and tax-paying immigrants can use the NHS for free; others would have to pay.

Sounds reasonable, outliers like rattlesnake bites aside. I know you guys don't have rattlesnakes but we could just replace that with some other life threatening crisis.

Exactly; I don't expect to find many cases, and if one was suspected, I'm not even sure there would be a fair way to go about determining guilt (unless of course we find a "baby-making manifesto" under their bed. )

LOL, now -that- would make for a good news day.

Did I cry epidemic? No. I simply said they were a problem. You said they were a problem in the US but you couldn't find any. I can (at least) find references to some actual families.

Look, I'm aware you don't like the word "welfare queen" because it is associated in America with lying about welfare cheats. That's fine; over here it's not. I didn't even realise it was invented by you guys in the Reagan era before this conversation. I only use it because that is the term we use over here; it's what the papers use, it's what people use.

I've also already explained the difference I see between simple benefit cheats and welfare queens. It's scale. Just as there is a difference between a pickpocket and a career criminal burglar.

Maybe I cant view the entirety of the contents of the link...but I didn't see any mention of that manifesto we might want to find under their beds. Honestly, those two links are of the same quality and tone as any of the articles we had here in the states about our own phantom welfare queens. It was a wildly successful narrative, people actually had to argue against the existence of something no one had ever taken the time to establish as existent in the first place - and people still rattle on about them anyway...btw-. In light of that it's unsurprising that the term and mythos seems to have found new life in a new market. Now you mentioned above that welfare queens and fraud are somehow different - but given your doubts about how guilt for the one could even be established just how much sense does it make to change a policy to solve the "problem" - and from where has your opinion on this been drawn, clearly not from welfare queens who have been found guilty as charged? I think you should stick to railing against fraud and let the welfare queen thing die the death it deserved when it was exposed for what it was the first time.

Tibs, it's the same thing over there that it was over here, until you find those manifestos.

---

I did see, by the way, a suggestion in those links that one might imagine would be a good idea - an idea difficult to object to at first glance. The idea of limiting benefits to two children. Trouble is, this amounts to targeted population control/manipulation of the impoverished. If they wont stop fucking like we tell them too we'll starve them into submission. Not that I think it couldn't work, maybe we can make poverty vanish by helping the impoverished to vanish. What I found to be the most puzzling about that article and it;s suggestion was that the writer chose to open the peice with the statement

"It is extremely rare to identify a simple solution to a complex social problem."

Yeah, seems so, but it doesn't seem as though the writer actually had that in mind when offering the solution.