Preparedness for when

Doveling

armyknife wrote: »

It's against the law of the Sea to do anything but rescue people in distress.

It makes me sad that it's not the law of the lands as well

Have a good holiday Bedsit B.:)

Nuatha - hope you are getting good news

Frugalsod

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

I think tourism can/will have a workaround.

Airports aren't affected by the migrants, and there are alternative ports, for people/families travelling for work/holidays.

Agreed. A lot of the goods may go via Harwich and can be switched easily enough if there is space.

Frugalsod

Well these back up lights are now available on IndieGogo so if you want some SHTF lighting.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gravitylight-2-made-in-africa#/story

armyknife

Regarding the talk about migrants and refugees trying to get to England, I wonder how many of them might have been preppers?

And maybe for some of those this was their last best option to try in a SHFT situation?

Frugalsod

armyknife wrote: »

Regarding the talk about migrants and refugees trying to get to England, I wonder how many of them might have been preppers?

And maybe for some of those this was their last best option to try in a SHFT situation?

I suspect there will be hundreds of thousands of Irish, Greeks, Spaniards, Italian, Portuguese plus the Baltic nationalities already here trying to escape the austerity in their countries before we even add refugees from war zones in Africa and the middle east that we have bombed.

Apparently we spent £70 million bombing Libya and a not even £20 million rebuilding the country afterwards. If we had done a lot more rebuilding afterwards things in Libya might not be so bad as to drive millions to consider getting trafficked into Europe?

nuatha

Doveling wrote: »

It makes me sad that it's not the law of the lands as well

Have a good holiday Bedsit B.:)

Nuatha - hope you are getting good news

Thank you for the good wishes. I've three weeks before the next lot, so its head down and try to get a few things sorted beforehand.

I'm another who thinks rendering assistance to those in distress should happen on land as well as sea. I also think it should be illegal for the media to blatantly exaggerate and lie - but I apparently wish to live in cloud cuckoo land.

GreyQueen

Morning all.

MTSTM, I hope you always look into the back of your car, as a matter of course, before getting into it. Whether you've left it for a couple of minutes to pay for fuel or for a longer period. Basic common sense precaution. But the stowaways are more likely to be in container lorries/ coach luggage lockers or hanging off the undersides of large vehicles.

The difficulty with the issue of people moving across international borders in distress is that no one wants to be vile to other human beings who, through no fault of their own, are in terrible circumstances. On the other hand, the UK is a group of smallish and already heavily-populated islands. Look at us on a world map - titchy.

We don't have a vast hinterland which we can open to settlers, as the USA and Canada once had. What we have is an already over-crowded and stressed population. And there are hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of people in the world whose circumstances in their home countries are so terrible that they could make legititmate case under international law that they should be allowed into safe countries such as ours.

How do you square these contraditory needs? Do you say our duty as human beings is to open our country to the needy, regardless? It's like saying to yourself, I'll have a few people around for a meal. I can seat six, so that's me and him and four guests. Paying for it will be a bit of a squeak financially this week, but we've got to be hospitable, and it's only one meal.

Oh, hang on, let's not be stingy. We'll invite thirty guests, and have them stand elbow-to-elbow in the house, and keep them here indefinately. We'll ruin ourselves and make life miserable for us and our neighbours, but at least no one will think we're ungenerous.

I think one way around it would be to automatically detain anyone who arrived in the UK having traversed safe countries, and repatriating them immediately to their country of origin. As in about 48 hours. If the word got out loud and clear that you can struggle for weeks and months to get to the UK by land, and it will be fruitless, I think the numbers would reduce dramatically.Hey, my city is already hosting a big chunk of Poland's population, not to mention other eastern European nationals.Every second person on the streets seems to be from that neck of the woods, it's quite remarkable.

Our local authority, like others across the country, is fighting to enforce development control and building standards. The slums which were cleared in the years immediately pre and post WW2 are starting to come back. We have a lot of beds-in-sheds and chronically overcrowded accomodation, firetrap and insantiary accomodation and are working flat-out to stop it. It's like slipping back in time.I truly think this country cannot take more people, given the numbers already here, and the predicatable natural increases arising from family formation.

moneyistooshorttomention

That's put the point I am trying to make very clearly Grey Queen.

We are human and we do care - and we have been put in a difficult position too as to just how to handle this from our pov.

Hmmm...indeed a point re America and Canada having lots of spare space still. Come to think of it - so does Australia. I cant say I can see any sign of any of them "stepping up to the plate" on this....:cool:

You would think America would take some responsibility considering a lot of the Middle East situation has (shall we say) not exactly been helped by their interference over recent years:cool:.

I know what you mean about a basic level of expectation that most of the people we will see in Britain are also British iyswim - not "Where have we gone? We only seem to be a proportion of the population in our own country in many areas of it. We would have thought we would be the vast majority of the people we see". Same as the vast majority of people we would expect to see in France are the French and Germans in Germany etc etc. Its the difference between an "added flavour" that adds to the mix and, in fact, improves it in a recipe - and one ingredient absolutely predominating (and its not the main one - ie beef in a beef stew - iyswim).

How do we know who would accept our lifestyle and who would try to impose their own on us? How do you tell the difference? It's one thing to move from one part of Britain to another and realise that there are some different attitudes to what you're used to - but you keep doing your thing and they keep doing their thing and basically rub along together. But - if someone comes from a different country and one with a very different way of thinking, then they may or may not accept our Way of Life - some will and some wont.

It is a very difficult situation all round. It is a loss to these other countries that some of the people leaving them are possibly amongst the most liberal/intelligent/modern-minded and that, if people like that stayed, it would be a (big) cost to them - but maybe they would improve their own society enough to make it more liveable-in. I don't know and I may just be extrapolating upwards to living in an area of Britain that loses a lot of its "brightest and best" to elsewhere in Britain. They want what other parts of Britain has (better selection of jobs/no barriers in place to stop them getting jobs they are qualified for/different attitudes in some respects) and I don't blame them a bit for it - and its a loss to watch them decide they don't have many prospects here and leave. So - I do wonder if these other countries are losing some of their "brightest and best" - along with everyone else that are abandoning them. Or is this just a British thing - ie of people heading off from other parts of Britain into England for better chances?

GreyQueen

Unfortunately, not all land is equally hospitable to human settlement. Most of Australia is baking desert, for example. And large parts of USA aren't able to support the populations already there, without inputs in form of government payments such as military pensions/ disablement pay and non-military welfare payments. Weather above the 48th parallel is pretty extreme and unfriendly to homo sapiens.

North and South Dakota, which are very bleak, are becoming so depopulated that there is an argument that the two states should become one. The south-western states are only able to support their present populations due to irrigation and water transfer, and cities like Las Vegas are in a desert and will return to it. Their people, plus southern Californians, will likely become in-country refugees in a few years.

Of course, if you didn't have the situation in the UK where some families have control of tens of thousands of acres of land, which some of the aristocracy and wealthy still do, there would be more room for the rest of us.

I suspect that migrant popluations will end up jammed twenty or thirty to a small terrace house in urban areas such as mine, rather than squatting in the fields of Lord Hyphen-Hyphen of WellOffShire.:mad:

mardatha

I think what GQ says is only commonsense. An island can only hold so many people. Up here it's empty - but I still don't feel like throwing the country open to anybody who happens to walk in.
Charity begins at home - while sick people here are being found fit for work, and people on the dole are having their money stopped on trumped - up excuses, why should we take in more?
Fix the problems at home first. A govt should take care of their own and if they can't do that then they have no right to look after others.