Have you any idea how long a single person would need to wait for a council flat ?
There are flats available *today* to take. I have a good friend involved with housing in Aberdeen who assures me that if you want a roof over your head, you can have one tomorrow. Of course, your neighbours will be mostly the scum of the earth and you can expect to have at least one heroin addict in your block, but that's not the point. The flats themselves are habitable, they're secure and pefectly livable.
Of course, if you want something in a good (or even just an average) area, you'll be waiting a long time. I'm not denying this - but the point is that you can have accomodation for 50 quid a week. If you *need* to live in a better area, it's your choice. But the whole "I CAN'T LIVE ON MINIMUM WAGE" is nonsense - of course you can, if you accept that you won't be living in a palace.
I work in collections for a major High Street bank and as I have said before on here, the percentage of foreign nationals in debt compared to the percentage of foreign nationals in the country is wildly different. You're talking about 30-40% of a bank's bad debt book being made up of foreign nationals, but they are in no way 30-40% of the population.
I can believe it. So much easy credit was thrown at foreign nationals, many of who were working in clearly-temporary jobs - and I think the people responsible for authorising such lending should've been taken round the back and shot. It's clearly nonsense to go giving overdrafts and loans (and indeed, debit/credit cards and chequebooks) to foreign nationals with absolutely no track record in the UK. One look at Poland should have told them that credit isn't so easy to obtain here and to lend accordingly - people unused to easy lending will by nature go wild.
Do you have any means of enforcing debts on people that have gone by to Poland, for instance? If not, then it points even more at utter incompetence by those running the lending departments.
I have friends in the manual labour industry back home most of them are very hard workers and used to earning good money, many of them have mortgages and children. The fact that 100,s of thousands of Poles came to England and worked within their industry for less money directly affects their life styles.
That's the nature of free competition. As you say, they were 'used to good money' - but the game changed and they didn't adapt, thus they fell by the wayside. It's called evolution - and as we evolve, some win, some don't. Why didn't some of these manual workers take advantage of Polish immigration and set up recruitment agencies for manual labour jobs? I'm sure with their experience in manual labouring, they would've made a killing.
Don't forget that the EU also brought the ability for the British to take advantage in Poland. Look at all those British property speculators in Poland - some made an absolute killing here. This money isn't being spent in Poland, it's being spent in the UK. Tesco is making a killing here - there's 5 supermarkets in Poznan alone.
Personally, the real issue with the amount of immigration was in public services - most of which were struggling to cope before 2004 and were pushed to breaking point. Schools are a great example - I was reading about one school that had Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians and Latvians all in the same class - with huge problems with language as a result.
How about we all move to Aberdeen, and then when we can't afford to live there either - where do we move to next?
If you can't afford to share a flat with a private bedroom on minimum wage, there's something seriously wrong with you.
Look at this for instance - it's pretty much in the city centre of Aberdeen.
aberdeen.gumtree.com/aberdeen/12/46183712.html
If you can't afford to pay 75 p/w along with 25 p/w council tax on minimum wage, where are you spending your money?
Let's not forget something here - it was the infamously loathing of the EEC Margaret Thatcher that sold off all the council houses. It wasn't the immigrants!