Struck by the sheer amount of beggers

ethan said:
... Walking through the streets of Manchester. Has it always been as bad as this here?
Click to expand...

Just these last 5 years..

sQwqbax.png
 
LordSplodge said:
So they come all the way from Romania with associated travel costs, beg and make enough to build a large house back in Romania?
Click to expand...

True. Panorama ran a story on this four years ago:

One little girl we followed, who we called "Alice", looked to be no more than four-years-old, yet she was experienced in begging; by turns, innocent, desperate, persistent, wheedling.

The little girl, wearing a white headscarf, used a telephone box as a toilet and scavenged for food from McDonalds as she begged in all weathers.

One restaurant owner in the area said that some child beggars make £500 a day. For her part, Alice handed every last penny to a minder, a young woman who looked to be in her late teens or early 20s.

Outside the Regent's Park Mosque, we filmed a team of women controlling several children, including a little boy of four, who we called "Lou".

They targeted worshippers from the mosque as they left Friday prayers.

We tracked "Lou" and his handlers as they took the bus home to a rented house in Ilford in Essex where a BMW X5 sat in the drive.

Over the course of almost a year, all of the child-begging teams working the streets of London which were investigated by Panorama turned out to be Gypsies from Romania.

...In the town of Tanderei, which is dotted with luxury villas, some of which police suspect have been paid for with the money begged on the streets of Europe, I met Petrica Dragusin, one of the men arrested on suspicion of child trafficking in the sweep in Romania as part of Operation Golf.

He told me bluntly that his entire town knows how to work Britain's benefit system.

"The blame is with the British state, which gives them a lot of money. They have lots of children, seven, eight or 10 children, and if they have many children they build a villa."

The sums he cites are staggering.

"Some collect £10,000, £12,000, £13,000 a month - they have three or four of five sets of benefits."

At the house in Ilford where we tracked "Lou" from his days spent begging near the Regent's Park Mosque, we filmed a series of children and adults coming and going, among them Ioan Rostas, his wife Stela and their daughter, Vandana, who we have been told has been investigated for benefit fraud.

We then tracked the Rostas family back to Huedin in the north of Romania, where local land registry documents show that Ioan Rostas owns two houses, a luxury villa on the main road and a smaller house on a sidestreet.

It was outside the smaller home that we encountered the same BMW X5 that has been parked outside the family's rented home in Ilford.

We also spotted little "Lou" at home in Romania.
Click to expand...

(Source).
 
Last edited:



I see them on tubes at least once a week, looking all haggard and rickety, asking for a pound in their McDonalds coffee cup. They usually operate in groups too, and will hound and pester you until you give them something. As with many illegal immigrants, many of them are roped in to this world with promises of riches and a great lifestyle over in Britain, only to have their passports withheld from them by gangsters who threaten them and force them to work.

It's not as simple as many think. They don't choose this lifestyle, but then again I have absolutely zero sympathy for someone wanting to move to a foreign country knowingly illegally.

They often have kids which steal anything which isn't bolted down too, as kids can quite often escape prosecution due to their age.



//These aren't sad people just looking for a few squids for a dinner, these people are victims of huge crime organizations, often forced to earn money like this.
 
There's a service road for a supermarket that has 5-10 coaches arrive from Romania every weekend, always unloading people and big bags of their possessions, always leave empty.

It's a big problem in my area, sleeping rough or breaking into people's garages to sleep, it proliferates the problem if illegal housing with landlords building 'garages' with beds for them to sleep in. They also have a partial liking to dumping. The dumping problem in the area has worsened tenfold when the local population of Romanians increased.

Sure it's easy to play the race card, but some of us have to live with the problem.
 
LordSplodge said:
Yes but what you posted was not what Thompson_NCL said. He implied they come here to build themselves a big house back home.

Criminals gonna be criminals from Western to Eastern Europe.
Click to expand...

Yes but only because of this ridiculous EU law that says that their criminals have to be our problem /farage.

LordSplodge said:
No point asking a Pole what they think of Romanians anyway, same as everybody else in the EU - nobody likes them it seems. :D
Click to expand...

Ah, I didn't say Romanian, I said Roma - there's a difference.
 
LordSplodge said:
That's the criminal gangmasters, who are in Romania, making the money to build large houses. That's not what was posted.
Click to expand...

Read the article again. The guy with the BMW and the large house in Romania is the father of the child who was begging. That is what was posted, and the article provides more than one example.
 
I've started being more selective with regards to who I give money to recently, as I don't believe a lot of these homeless looking people are homeless. Most that I encounter are clearly English, though. This idea that they're all Romanian is simply unfounded and dumb, you are just looking for foreign scapegoats as far as I'm concerned.
 
dirtychinchilla said:
I've started being more selective with regards to who I give money to recently, as I don't believe a lot of these homeless looking people are homeless. Most that I encounter are clearly English, though. This idea that they're all Romanian is simply unfounded and dumb, you are just looking for foreign scapegoats as far as I'm concerned.
Click to expand...

I don't think anyone is disputing that or blaming anything on anyone, it just happened to be the way the conversation ended up going (which seems to be the soup of the day on OcUK).

I see more British beggars here in London than I do Roma. Caribbeans are also quite high on the list in the Lambeth area.
 
LordSplodge said:
So they come all the way from Romania with associated travel costs, beg and make enough to build a large house back in Romania? Pull the other one as it has bells on it.
Click to expand...

Even before the Romanians came several beggers were found to be making £4-500 per week and where living in decent houses at night
 
dirtychinchilla said:
I've started being more selective with regards to who I give money to recently, as I don't believe a lot of these homeless looking people are homeless. Most that I encounter are clearly English, though. This idea that they're all Romanian is simply unfounded and dumb, you are just looking for foreign scapegoats as far as I'm concerned.
Click to expand...

We have pretty muched stopped giving to anyone who comes knocking on door or beggars in street, just give online to selected charities.
 
My favourite British beggars are the ones that sit there with £500 worth of visible tattoos and £100 worth of facial jewellery.
 
doofer said:
My favourite British beggars are the ones that sit there with £500 worth of visible tattoos and £100 worth of facial jewellery.
Click to expand...

There's a homeless woman local to us who doesn't beg, she just sits in the doorway of a boarded up shop, every day. I've seen her counting a roll of twenties thicker than my thigh.

She ****es me off though because whenever she's not there, there's a circle of rubbish and crap surrounding her spot. I might pee there one day.
 
Almost all of the homeless people I see are old, very dirty - usually clearly handicapped in one way or another English men. When you've seen a guy eating food out of a bin it's fair to assume they are genuine.

I donate monthly to Shelter & have a fair bit of fund raising work for them, which is better than giving money to people on the street. Saying that from time to time I'll offer to get them a coffee/cake/sandwich & so far they've all been accepting & genuinely appreciative (not asked for money instead).

While there clearly are a number (can't really give exact figures) we can't assume it's a majority - or use the abuse of criminal gangs & people taking advantage as an excuse to do nothing for those less fortunate.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom