h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Visible evidence is the number of languages in the waiting room and the plethora of multi-lingual posters."

Yeah, that does my head in, I mean do we really need signs in Welsh on the South Yorkshire trains? Only about 12 people speak Welsh and they all live in a hut atop a big hill somewhere in Llandui Bryffin or somewhere.

Morning Phsycorp

I presume that it has ocured to you that the offending trains may be shared between rail networks?

I was unaware that South Yorkshire folk spoke English, let alone Welsh

Novo

>>Young female immigrants often spend a lot of their time at the doctors because they are preganant<<

Yeah vast swathes of them clogging up the NHS - slight problem is that most immigrants are young and male, who come here to find work and earn money which gets sent back to the wife and kids. It's not until later on in the process that the family comes over here.

And don't accuse me of not knowing what I'm talking about Fanny, I'd lived in inner-city Manchester or Liverpool all my life until I came down to Devon a couple of months ago. All my family and the majority of my friends are still there.

The funny think is that in south Manchester, it's the (mainly) white, (mostly) middle-class students who push the local NHS to its limit.

The reason I made that remark is in the context of Bouncy saying young people spend less time visiting their GP. Nothing more nothing less. I thought the idea of saying young people needing their GP less completely naive. I'm not that old myself and yet I have to visit my GP regularly. Naive prejudice of any kind irritates me intensly. It shows a lack of awareness for people's very practical real life needs.

>>I'd like to point out that most immigrants, being mainly young, probably don't have much call to take up healthcare resources either.<< Bouncy

I'd like you to tell me where you get this information from Bouncy? Or do you have some sort of prejudice against young people needing healthcare?

Its a simple fact that younger people as a group tend to be healthier and thus to require less healthcare resources. This can be easily demonstrated by a quick look at how medical insurance costs increase with age.

There is no prejudice, there is no moral judgement about how much they *should* use healthcare, there is no naivity. This is a fact.

For example:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=1325&Pos=&ColRank=2&Rank=448
See 'self-assessed general health: by age, 2001'

I still don't know why you don't realise that young women frequently need to see their GPs far more than men though, because its women who have to carry the baby. This can put a strain on GPs surgeries if there are not enough GPs available. When a GP left my practice last year, it took 9 months to find a replacement because they just don't like working in inner city areas which have a lot of area specific problems and social problems. Also your statistics say nothing about the incidence of psychological/mental health needs of young people coping with the problems of inner city life.

Generalised statistics are absolutely meaningless.

But not as meaningless as anecdotal evidence.

I put the following point to you and SWL.

If, over a period of time, lots of people like you had moved into the area and started seeing your GP, leading to a strain on resources, would you have noticed this and started blaming them for the problem.

I would argue that you wouldn't even notice and would just put it down to the NHS being stretched in general.

Yet because you see more people with different skin colours and languages, you notice this change and put the problem down to them.

This is a common fallacy with immigration - in fact internal movements of people are of equal importance in overloading facilities or space in a given area. I had some friends who moved into a working class area of London - part of a wave of trendification if you like. The locals were just as peeved with seeing their boozers turned into sushi restaurants as they would have been to see their local butcher moving to halal - instead of blaming the immigrants, they blamed the posh people. In the Cotswolds, they would have been blaming the townies...

My point is that these movements of population are happening all over the UK - some people only see them when they see a different skin colour...

sprout

>>But not as meaningless as anecdotal evidence.<<

No point continuing this discussion then.

Nothing meaningless about anecdotal evidence in its place. The problem comes when people extrapolate their own experience to the whole country.

Thank you FB. I think I made it clear that I felt there was a problem in certain inner city areas. As I live in one I gave my own example. Anyone reading my posts generally on h2g2 would see that I do not have any kind of racist agenda. It's purely a question of practicalities. If there is a large influx of people suddenly in a particular area and the infra structure isn't geared up to deal with it, in the short term it puts a strain on the system. Vulnerable people who can't afford to go private medically will be particularly affected, this includes newcomers themselves. I certainly don't blame immigrants, I blame stupid short sighted bureacrats that fail to understand the realites on the ground.

I may have lost my temper a few posts back, but that was through frustration. Sorry.

As I have said before which I restate, the best way to combat racism, which extremist parties like the BNP are only to happy to exploit, is to improve infra structure and practicalities that cause many vulnerable people real hardship.

"I presume that it has ocured to you that the offending trains may be shared between rail networks?"

I presume that it has occured to you that I was being tongue in cheek??

As for the immigrants clogging up the NHS, I agree with the point made about South Manchester. I currently live in Sheffield near to an estate with a high proportion of immigrants. The reason I can't even book a doctor's appointment a day in advance is down to the thousands of students! It's a bit of a generalisation to say "all problems with x are due to y" isn't it?