By Isle of Wight Observer
Having offered the council some brilliant financial advice last week, I have another tip that could save thousands. That TV ‘money-saving expert’ Martin Lewis has nothing on me!
One of my children says he wishes he’d gone to Eton. Despite the £5,250 monthly cost, which now includes Labour’s spiteful 20 per cent VAT, Eton is oversubscribed. Other less well-known boarding schools are not quite so fortunate.
Last Friday, this newspaper revealed the shocking amount the council pays to look after 18 unaccompanied migrant children. For June alone, it averaged an astonishing £6,800 per child. If the IW council sent them to Eton instead, we could save over £1,500 a month, per child!
Impressive, isn’t it?
Better still, we’re always being told what a fantastic benefit immigration is to the nation, so imagine what an Eton education could do for them? These kids could well become the Nobel Prize winners or prime ministers of tomorrow – a win-win for UK plc.
Everyone knows that raising kids is expensive, but how on earth are this lot costing so much? It’s baffling. I’d guess private foster companies are getting the dosh, while local foster parents – paid directly by IW Council – receive £737 to £1,295 per child each month. Kindly Islanders are evidently not in it for the money, are they? So why is the IW council picking up this ruinous tab at all?
When the boats started arriving Kent’s children’s services quickly became overwhelmed, so the kids were shared around the country, basically every council got some. Mysteriously, fewer than five of the current 18 live here, and none of those that have left care, but we still pay for do
Back in 2018, Sajid Javid declared the boat crossings a ‘major incident’. Seven years on, nothing’s changed; it’s the number one issue with the electorate. Even soft leftie, Angela Rayner, says, “The UK faces civil unrest, unless the government can show it can address people’s concerns.” For seven long years those gendarmes ‘fermer les yeux’ as the dinghies departed – while our politicians promised solutions they didn’t deliver. So far, 174,000 have come across – costing billions the nation can ill afford.
Most people believe it’s unfair and wasteful – but the European Court of Human Rights prevents our government from dealing with it. The only possible way forward is for the UK to take back control. Should that ever happen, I wonder if the lawyers representing migrants so profitably would find new ways to fight on at our expense? Ministers always seem in thrall to the Whitehall blob; so, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
The majority of boat people do get to stay eventually, so why do we pay for their hotels and expenses while bureaucrats dither about their status? When migrants show up, they should be interrogated, and their phones seized for intelligence purposes. If they seem eligible to stay, let’s put them to work, and let them pay their own way. If not, send them packing.
No-one believes the government will ‘smash the gangs,’ and migrants already leave their hotels to go and work for Uber and similar employers. The money earned is all theirs, and that’s just dumb. Why not loan them the money we spend instead? If they get to stay, we’d get the loans repaid – eventually.
Demonstrations outside migrant hotels are concerning but understandable, and so is the sight of ‘anti protesters’ demonstrating against them. UK migrant policy makes no sense whatsoever.
People are fed up with it because we hate unfairness. It can’t go on. Unaccompanied children should be sent straight to boarding school. That could also give us a return on our generous investment, and thanks to Labour’s 20 per cent VAT, many good boarding schools do now have vacancies.