- BY Sarah Pinder
A breath of Lush Air
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Am slightly behind the drag curve but I could not let pass that the chain of stores Lush Cosmetics has teamed up with the No One is Illegal Campaign. You may already be familiar with the stores: hand-made soapy and bubbly stuff that smells (in my view good) from a mile away. Am certainly a fan but have become even more excited since it joined forces with the campaign, in May, calling for the abolition of immigration controls.
Granted this was only for a week but during that week, all of its 95 stores across the country featured the No One Is Illegal (NOII) declaration:
“People should be free to live and work wherever they wish and enjoy all the same rights as all residents.”
The posters featuring those words were big and bold and displayed in the front windows. Customers and passer-bys were also able to sign the declaration in-store and online.
Now not everyone will agree with this particular campaign but it certainly represents “a welcome antidote to immigration hysteria” as reported by the Guardian on 26th May and I don’t think that I can name a single other high street company who has taken such a stance in respect of immigration. The store and NOII also commissioned a YouGov poll which according to their respective websites, showed that 54% of those polled agreed with the NOII declaration. 72% of the people asked also thought that they should be allowed to live and work in a foreign country and 46% thought people from foreign countries should be allowed to live and work in Britain.
When many people’s views on immigration are unfortunately shaped by fear and a mammoth dose of mis-information, this is certainly up-lifting. In stark contrast we have the announcement today that Ian Duncan-Smith will be making a speech in Spain to say that controlling immigration is “critical” to avoid “losing another generation (or young Britons) to dependency and hopelessness” and appealing businesses for help in ensuring that British citizens are awarded jobs. Mmmh… Echoes of Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers”?!
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Yeah, “bloody Poles coming over here with their work ethic.”
IPPR’s take on IDS’ fallacious arguments
http://www.ippr.org/articles/56/7698/ids-sows-confusion-on-immigration-welfare-and-work
So basically, anyone from anywhere can go wherever they see fit? Is that the general idea?
Well so far EU citizens can live and work in any of the 26 other EU countries, as well as their own.
Also a Texan and a New Yorker can live in each others state or any of the other 50.
Historically its not unheard of, and immigration controls don’t date back that far in time.
Still with half of the number of humans that have ever lived still alive today, I guess unrestricted people movement across all borders is a bit much. However overly restrictive controls that stop people living with their family, or stop people from swapping their locations in a balanced manner could be relaxed.
No borders, ergo, no ‘immigration lawyers’, hmm, tempting . . . . . . . very tempting.
No ECOs , no POs, no immigration fees, either.
Wow, we finally agree on something, “very tempting”.
If UKBA and ministers only listened to the Immigration Law Practitioners Association there would be very little if any need for immigration lawyers. Instead we get ridiculously complex beasts of laws like the Points Based System – what used to be a simple application one could make oneself now needs a lawyer in order to be successful because the scheme is so complicated. My theory is that UKBA secretly love immigration lawyers. Nothing else could explain the changes they keep making to the law and rules.
As a regular Lush customer (read ‘incurable addict’) I did see this campaign and found it quite positive. Trying to joke with the shop assistants that they were attempting to put me out of a job didn’t go down well for some reason, tho.
There was a part of the campaign literature which said something along the lines of “Immigrants don’t get their cases heard by real judges they are heard by ‘immigration judges’, who don’t know anything and don’t have the same qualifications’. Or somesuch amusing nonsense.
“People should be free to live and work wherever they wish and enjoy all the same rights as all residents.”
Does that include convicted criminals as well? Just curious as to whether the policy applies to the small proportion of foreign nationals who commit serious criminal offences in the UK. Should rapists be allowed to live and work wherever they wish and enjoy all the same rights as all residents?