Cyprus-Forum.com

[Nikitas]

The quality of life in the UK was crappy in 1976 when I left, and that is not comparing it to anything. Basically the British assumption is that quality of life is deserved only by a few, the rest can drink beer, eat crap and fight outside the pub/football ground. Any ambition above that marks you as a bolshy upstart. Best move I ever made was leaving the UK. All the power to the rest who try to break out of prison Albion.

[miltiades]

What a load of bollocks!!

Quality of life in the UK has been deteriorating for many years now , bit by bit the government , local authorities
the huge influx of third world immigrants , who unlike the Brits in Cyprus that Eliko said do not adapt , still live in the 14th century .
A new restaurant we recently serviced has a policy that men and women do not eat not only at the same table but have to eat in separate rooms !! This in Britain in the 21st century !!
Its a disgrace that we have seen fit to allow hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants mainly asylum seekers , (my foot) , and failed miserably in devising means in order to bring these people into the 21st century , in informing them clearly that forced marriages , honour killings and 14th century practices are outlawed in the UK.
Our schools have been forced by local authorities to abandon cultural events that shaped this nation for hundreds of years in case the "immigrants " are offended.
Other areas responsible for reducing the quality of life , again indirectly sponsored by the government and local authorities have been the extension of power given to local authorities in raising revenue from the motorists . There are more cameras in the UK than anywhere else in Europe , not installed for reducing road accidents as they tell us but purely to raise more money so that it can be distributed to the single mothers , lazy scroungers , and fraudsters.
Our institutions starting from the Banks , Insurance companies , Utility providers are all dedicated legal crooks ,
and our MPs , bless their expense sheets , are there for the take , and more take and more and more , greedy bastards who will use every trick in the book to inflate their expense claims. Recently we were told that Gordon Brown included a small some on his expense sheet for light bulbs !!! Even the paper that they wipe their arses on is paid for by the tax payer ""
I have had many "remonstrations " with the traffic director office in London. All I can say is that these people who are earning in excess of 100 thousand pounds a year are nothing more that bloody parasites , absorbed in their continued efforts in devising more ways to suck more money from the motorist.

In short , the UK is rapidly disintegrating , the time is fast approaching when we shall no longer be able to include the most fundamental part of our British breakfast on our plate !!
We have become a nation of Traffic wardens , unmarried mothers , unsightly immigrants and lots and lots of bastards and greedy government officials. Apart from that the UK is the greatest nation on earth !!!

Elaborate please !! Bullocks to what ? Unless you are a bastard or a Traffic warden in which case same thing !! Before letting bullocks slip out of your mouth make sure you have the balls to back up your bullocks theory ! Cant quite remember , are you one of the Plonkers ??

[roseandchan]

both our kids are over school age now, one is still in the uk and the other is here in cyprus and doing very well thanks

[Oracle]

both our kids are over school age now, one is still in the uk and the other is here in cyprus and doing very well thanks

I endeavour to be broadminded, but even I can not help but notice by your rantings on various posts just how intolerant, narrow-minded and racist your thinking is.

Frankly I met very few people like you in the UK, so thought you were all a dying subclass ... now I know why you were getting fewer ... because you have all found your natural resting place in the most racially extreme "section" of our continent.

The racist "trnc" is living up to its ideology; a safe haven for racist bigots.

[tessintrnc]

both our kids are over school age now, one is still in the uk and the other is here in cyprus and doing very well thanks

I endeavour to be broadminded, but even I can not help but notice by your rantings on various posts just how intolerant, narrow-minded and racist your thinking is.

Frankly I met very few people like you in the UK, so thought you were all a dying subclass ... now I know why you were getting fewer ... because you have all found your natural resting place in the most racially extreme "section" of our continent.

The racist "trnc" is living up to its ideology; a safe haven for racist bigots.[/quote]

Oh, I wouldn't say that, a walk along Kyrenia harbour shows just how hard some elderly english ladies are trying to improve race-relations by mingling merrily with some of our younger local lads..........

[Oracle]

both our kids are over school age now, one is still in the uk and the other is here in cyprus and doing very well thanks

I endeavour to be broadminded, but even I can not help but notice by your rantings on various posts just how intolerant, narrow-minded and racist your thinking is.

Frankly I met very few people like you in the UK, so thought you were all a dying subclass ... now I know why you were getting fewer ... because you have all found your natural resting place in the most racially extreme "section" of our continent.

The racist "trnc" is living up to its ideology; a safe haven for racist bigots.

Oh, I wouldn't say that, a walk along Kyrenia harbour shows just how hard some elderly english ladies are trying to improve race-relations by mingling merrily with some of our younger local lads..........

Have you been tempted tess?

[Feisty]

What a load of bollocks!!

Quality of life in the UK has been deteriorating for many years now , bit by bit the government , local authorities
the huge influx of third world immigrants , who unlike the Brits in Cyprus that Eliko said do not adapt , still live in the 14th century .
A new restaurant we recently serviced has a policy that men and women do not eat not only at the same table but have to eat in separate rooms !! This in Britain in the 21st century !!
Its a disgrace that we have seen fit to allow hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants mainly asylum seekers , (my foot) , and failed miserably in devising means in order to bring these people into the 21st century , in informing them clearly that forced marriages , honour killings and 14th century practices are outlawed in the UK.
Our schools have been forced by local authorities to abandon cultural events that shaped this nation for hundreds of years in case the "immigrants " are offended.
Other areas responsible for reducing the quality of life , again indirectly sponsored by the government and local authorities have been the extension of power given to local authorities in raising revenue from the motorists . There are more cameras in the UK than anywhere else in Europe , not installed for reducing road accidents as they tell us but purely to raise more money so that it can be distributed to the single mothers , lazy scroungers , and fraudsters.
Our institutions starting from the Banks , Insurance companies , Utility providers are all dedicated legal crooks ,
and our MPs , bless their expense sheets , are there for the take , and more take and more and more , greedy bastards who will use every trick in the book to inflate their expense claims. Recently we were told that Gordon Brown included a small some on his expense sheet for light bulbs !!! Even the paper that they wipe their arses on is paid for by the tax payer ""
I have had many "remonstrations " with the traffic director office in London. All I can say is that these people who are earning in excess of 100 thousand pounds a year are nothing more that bloody parasites , absorbed in their continued efforts in devising more ways to suck more money from the motorist.

In short , the UK is rapidly disintegrating , the time is fast approaching when we shall no longer be able to include the most fundamental part of our British breakfast on our plate !!
We have become a nation of Traffic wardens , unmarried mothers , unsightly immigrants and lots and lots of bastards and greedy government officials. Apart from that the UK is the greatest nation on earth !!!

Elaborate please !! Bullocks to what ? Unless you are a bastard or a Traffic warden in which case same thing !! Before letting bullocks slip out of your mouth make sure you have the balls to back up your bullocks theory ! Cant quite remember , are you one of the Plonkers ??

To the first sentence of your tirade.
How exactly has quality of life been deteriorating for years?
What effect has immigration had on this so called deterioration? The fraudsters, single mothers and lazy scroungers you speak of are not usually immigrants but people who have been bought up generation after generation to live off benefits. Do you want to do the low paid jobs that most of the immigrants do to support their families? Or does it really stick in your throat that some of them set up successful businesses and become very rich?
How exactly is your quality of life being so affected by speed cameras which just force you to obey the law? Do you wish there to be no law? Are speeding drivers to be allowed to mow down and kill people at will? If you've had so many remonstrations with traffic directors why is it so difficult for you to just obey the law and make your own life so confrontation free?
If you want to complain about politicians living off the back of the taxpaper and live in a society where they don't exist I suggest you go and find some remote outpost in the world that won't even have electricity probably and then we won't have to read your ill informed rants and you won't have a car as there'll be no roads or petrol stations so you won't have to remonstrate with traffic directors.
Signed:
Not a plonker but someone who has seen their wealth rise steadily along with standard of living to a degree where it is greddily in excess of human needs like most of the western world.

[CopperLine]

For it is their children that are having to compete with the better-educated, hard-working immigrants like the Poles ... and failing miserably ...

I blame the education system in the UK .....

I am working on a construction in Sheffield at the moment . Once or twice a week I get agency's offering semi skilled Polish labour for £6.00 per hour , are own semi skilled labourers are paid between £9.00 and £11.00 per hour , is this not undercutting the British worker ?

Bigdog

I sympathise with what you are saying but the problem is not British worker against Polish worker, or British job against Polish job. The problem is, and always has been, workers pitched against workers. The rationality between the entire system of capitalism is to force workers to compete and drive costs (in the form of wages) down. (Or, to use the jargon, force up the rate of extraction of surplus value i.e, 'profit'). Immigrant workers wherever they are from and wherever they find work are simply trying to earn money. They're not trying to put someone else out of a job.

In any case there is no such thing as a 'British job'. It is not foreign workers who have to be feared for undercutting wage levels, it is national employers who will, at the drop of a hat, sell your job to China or India (or Poland).

In 1848 it was explained like this [emphasis added]. It still applies today :

"The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune(4): here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

[Oracle]

5. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

Not that I advocate this bit of research, but there is a lot of other more plausible evidence which further backs this up, posted for interest ...

Intelligent people 'less likely to believe in God'

By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
Last Updated: 2:57PM BST 12/06/2008

People with higher IQs are less likely to believe in God, according to a new study.

AP
Professor Lynn said religious belief had declined in the 20th century
Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average.

A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed.

But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics.


Professor Lynn, who has provoked controversy in the past with research linking intelligence to race and sex, said university academics were less likely to believe in God than almost anyone else.

A survey of Royal Society fellows found that only 3.3 per cent believed in God - at a time when 68.5 per cent of the general UK population described themselves as believers.

A separate poll in the 90s found only seven per cent of members of the American National Academy of Sciences believed in God.

Professor Lynn said most primary school children believed in God, but as they entered adolescence - and their intelligence increased - many started to have doubts.

He told Times Higher Education magazine: "Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ. Academics have higher IQs than the general population. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQs tend not to believe in God."

He said religious belief had declined across 137 developed nations in the 20th century at the same time as people became more intelligent.

Is faith linked to intelligence?

[tessintrnc]

both our kids are over school age now, one is still in the uk and the other is here in cyprus and doing very well thanks

I endeavour to be broadminded, but even I can not help but notice by your rantings on various posts just how intolerant, narrow-minded and racist your thinking is.

Frankly I met very few people like you in the UK, so thought you were all a dying subclass ... now I know why you were getting fewer ... because you have all found your natural resting place in the most racially extreme "section" of our continent.

The racist "trnc" is living up to its ideology; a safe haven for racist bigots.

Oh, I wouldn't say that, a walk along Kyrenia harbour shows just how hard some elderly english ladies are trying to improve race-relations by mingling merrily with some of our younger local lads..........

Have you been tempted tess?

No, No, No !!!!! I have a strange aversion to "boys" that are young enough to be my son!!!!!!!!!!! I like my men older (but not wiser) than me!!!!