Bullying for Britain!

[xela]

Surprise, surprise - having won at the polls, Britain's bigots are now out in force, bullying people:

Edit: So, it turns out you can only see the page I linked to below if you're logged into facebook. So, a quick summary: It's a page of links to tweets. A few samples:

Daughter tells me someone wrote "[Child's name] go back to Romania" on the wall in the girls toilets at School today.

... @Tesco [grocery chain]: "this is England. Foreigners hace 48 hours to f**ck right off. Who is foreign here? Anyone foreign?"

Older woman on the 134 bus gleefully telling a young Polish woman and her baby to get off and get packing. Horrific.

So less then 20 hrs after Brexit results announced, I have the pleasure of being called "a Paki c*nt in a suit" by a homeless man.

I think she's entitled to be a hell of a lot more than anxious.

---

Part of the facebook page linked below, as seen by me when logged into facebook.

Warning Signs [in] Post Brexit Utopian United Kingdom

I'm trying very hard not to think about how it may play out in the US if our bigots grow bold on success.

Comments

[siderea]

Link is not resolving usefully.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads-up. Turns out that for at least some facebook content, you have to be logged into facebook to view it. At least, I can look at that page --- set up by someone I've never met --- when I'm logged in but not otherwise.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I've now edited the post to share some of the awful with people that aren't logged into facebook.

[siderea]

So, can someone explain for me what the role of EU membership was for immigrants in the UK? Are a lot of immigrant UK residents going to be forced to leave the UK with the Brexit, or is it just that the Leavers believe that outside the EU they will have the opportunity to change residency/immigration law in the UK, or is it all just symbolic where EU==damnedforeigners in the minds of the right?

[tla]

EU membership (and, in fact, access to the common market if you're Norway or Switzerland) comes with free movement of people within it. It also arranges for work-related benefits (e.g. maternity allowance, child tax credit, in certain cases unemployment) to be administered and paid in the country where the work happens, regardless of the citizenship of the employee.

Ever since the former Eastern Bloc countries went into the EU this has been viewed (rightly or wrongly) as a problem, and the refugee crisis of the last year or so has made it worse. The UK does (despite commentary) have plenty of border controls—they are not part of Schengen, and you cannot get there from France checkpoint-free—but they are indeed not allowed to turn away EU citizens who get a job offer in the UK, or their families. In 2010 the Tory-led government made a pledge to reduce overall immigration to some absurdly and unworkably low number, and a lot of people pointed out at the time that this was impossible because they are not allowed to have a quota on EU immigration. Before that point I don't think EU immigrants were really seen as "bad", but from that point on the pressure against EU immigration grew since it was a roadblock to this pipe dream that foreigners in general would just stop trying to come.

Since then there has been this hue and cry about "benefits paid to EU migrants" as if everyone is coming to the UK and claiming unemployment and sitting around getting drunk. And so the UK was even allowed to not pay child benefit (the equivalent of child tax credit) to an EU migrant working in the UK if the kids were not also in the UK, which is something I find frankly ridiculous - the whole point of the system is reciprocal benefits in the country of work, which goes hand in hand with being taxed in the country of work! I'm sure the next thing to go would have been health coverage or similar. Such an attitude in the rest of Europe would have thoroughly screwed me over when I was a UK citizen resident in Switzerland and working (thus claiming maternity benefit and health coverage) in Belgium, a few years ago.

As for who will be forced to leave where, that entirely remains to be seen. No one knows. It's clear that many of the Leavers believed that all migrants would be thrown out tomorrow, but it was also always clear that this was never going to happen.

[siderea]

Ah! Thank you for this, very illuminating and exactly what I wanted to know.

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

I said this would happen, and I've blogged about why I am so intent on fighting this racist crap, why I refuse to be silent, or let racists spout their shit without calling them on it.

I suspect it's only a matter of time before I get beaten up trying to defend someone from abuse.