It's January 1st, Bulgarians & Romanians are on their way to rinse our benefits dry, how are you prepared?!

I have a Daily Mail & Daily Express at the ready to usher them away....

has cameron not recently put something in place to stop the benefits getting rinced dry as you put it, to try and put them off coming to the UK?

Yeah it's 4 month period before they can claim apparently

Bring out a card similar to a driving license that you must produce to claim anything and use the health service for everyone, (small admin fee) and build more schools and train more teachers and I have no issue with it.

In fact living in London I'm hoping my house price goes up due to demand.

Do Spanish people complain about the migration of English folk over there?

I was at my Mum's on the East coast rcently, the beach was thronged with Daily Mail types unfurling huge swathes of razor wire to prevent the buggers landing.

I wouldn't be surprised.

When you think it's an ageing slice of our demographic who mostly do go over they must have a big impact on the small funds Spain have

An ID card? We already have one effectively, a National Insurance number. It's needed to claim most benefits.
I'm very, very wary of making people have to produce a card or ID of some sort at a hospital. I think the only minor problem that is health tourism can be solved in different ways.
But it's a nice bit of diversion away from the governments real term cuts to health and the real problems facing the NHS, and is a nice way of the government trying to look tough on those nasty foreigners.

No issue with 'foreigners' it's numbers on resources. If we can afford them and accommodate them ie school places,not over burden NHS then iI'm cool with it BUT can we?

Its been fifteen years since my dad came back to England to die but prior to that he'd lived in Benidorm for eight (or was it ten) years an he was the archetypal Englishman abroad although he did socialise with Spanish friends and he lived in an apartment at the back of town where all of the Spanish service staff lived - his use of the Spanish language after all those years was limited to a few words that couldn't be understood away from the coast when I'd visit and drive him back to the UK from time to time.

Probably more pertinent to your question he rented his apartment from a landlord who asked no questions for cash every month and so never registered as a resident (he'd have to pay local taxes if he did), his UK car that he took out there wasn't taxed in the UK anymore and because he wasn't technically in Spain at all he didn't have to register or tax it there either, he insured it in England on a tourist green card basis.

For health care he could use his UK NHS number to receive treatment at the Spanish equivalent of an NHS hospital which gives its citizens a basic level of care but most working Spaniards took out medical insurance to be treated at the private Benidorm hospital that you see in all the TV documentaries, when he found that he had prostate cancer he paid for private care there and had his prostate removed at a cost of £2000, later when he found he had the Benidorm desease (liver cancer, or kidney cancer, highest killer of retired folk in that town) he returned to the UK to die.

Thats how he rolled

any opportunity to stick two fingers up at authority, Tony Soprano had nothing on my old man

PS - his flatmate stayed on after my dad died and two years later and also dying from liver disease he repeated my dads journey back home to die but he left it until the very last minute and literally died on the plane - true story, its on the blog somewhere they were a pair of characters

Its been fascinating reading the comments section of these articles in the Mail.

"I'm not standing for these people invading my country. Glad I'm emigrating"

Oh the irony.

The Daily Mail act like we don't already have spongers and criminals, can we build a wall round Wigan and stop them entering England?

Well suppose that's one way to go!

I've often wondered about issuing death certificates if a person died in the air. I know from research you can get birth & death certificates "at sea", but I wonder how they go about it "in the air". Would it be the coroner for the country in which you were landing in or left? Same with the registrar.

Think it might be the country's airspace they are in

Is it not where the plane is registered?

Would you be comfortable acting as an unpaid border guard?

After all, the buses you drive are subject to massive taxpayer subsidy, so why shouldn't you be checking the "rights" of anyone taking advantage of such taxpayer generosity?

Migrant workers are net contributors to the state, if the state chooses not to invest that contribution back into effective deployment of adequate resource, that is a problem of the state, not of migrant workers.

As for deterring people from visiting doctors or hospitals, how will you feel when there is a TB epidemic?

I drove, not done that for a good few years.
And there's a little difference to subsidiary payments compared to zero contribution maximum allowance of a system.

I'm not blaming migrants nor am I deterring them from seeing a doctor but if they haven't contributed to the health service why should I be forced through Ni contribution and they roll up and get it for nothing. They want it then they pay for it like I would be expected to do in say USA if I was on holiday.

Like I say I've no issue with migrant workers as long as infrastructure is designed to take them seamlessly, if we are short or over stretched in any public service then open doors to millions is just idiotic.

As for a TB epidemic wouldn't an open policy with strict conditions including health checks be a better system rather than a simple opendoor policy with zero conditions other than being of Europe?

It's what we signed up to.

Put your xenophobia back in the closet and get over it

I wonder how the Wail and Depress readers felt when Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Cyprus went down the proverbial.

Were they wailing and gnashing over their cornflakes/continental breakfast?

Were we not INVADED by hordes from these countries who were at the bottom of the pile coming over here etc.?

Well seeing as you asked



This is absolutely true as related to me by an uncle who knew the two blokes involved.

When my dads flatmate had reached a point of near death with his liver failure - he'd never sought medical opinion or taken any drugs other than pain killers but knew exactly what was happening - he rang two of his friends at home and asked them to fly out to Benidorm and book three flights home, they were there within a couple of days and got him to Alicante and on a plane.

An hour into the flight they tried to wake him up but couldn't, it was then that they realised that he'd expired and rather than tell anyone and be involved with all sorts of hassle at Leeds/Bfd Airport they frog-marched him off the plane telling everyone he was drunk, wangled a wheelchair for him and got him out to a taxi - he was declared dead on arrival at the LGI.

Absolutely true and as fine a send off as I could think for him, he would have thought it hilarious and would have included the tale in his stage act for sure.

Just driving through Boston,Lincs - 3 coaches from Sofia unloading already.