100,000? Jersey cannot cope now, warns charity
Saturday 14th February 2009, 9:58AM GMT.
JERSEY should not think about increasing its population to 100,000 as the Island cannot cope with the amount of people it already has, a local charity has warned.
Autism Jersey has hit back at Chief Minister Terry Le Sueur’s suggestion that the Island could cope with another 10,000 people.
‘That is only if they do not have a disability,’ said the charity’s chief executive Philip Le Claire, who is urging the States to invest in the Island’s vulnerable and their families.
This month the charity was told that the budget for psychology services was to be slashed by the Health department.
Mr Le Claire (pictured) said: ‘We have been inundated with messages of support and sadly we have been hearing real horror stories since the JEP ran the article on Saturday, many of which are too personal to those affected, or the families are simply too scared to come forward for fear of losing the little help that they already receive.
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Yes-but what you forget is, when all the manual workers, disabled people and pensioners who are not important, have gone there will be loads of room for finance workers and millionaires !!!!!
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How can it possibly be OK in a civilised society for children who are displaying behaviour that suggests they are on the Autistic Spectrum or have other complex needs to:
have to wait 4 – 5 years for a diagnosis to be made
not be allowed to attend school on a full time or regular basis with no alternative provision made
be punished repeatedly for behaviour that indicates they are not coping with an educational setting
be ridiculed in front of other children by a teacher
have their friends told not to play with them because they have a mental illness
not even given school trip letters let alone the chance to join in on them
This is not just discriminative practice it amounts to abuse of vunerable children and yet this is what happens on a regular basis within schools in Jersey.
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When Terry Le Main cuts down the J-cat people, thre will be no nurses or doctors to look after the handicapped or pensioners!
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Jersey will never reach 100000 because TLS keeps putting the cost of living here up so the more he does that the more people will leave, so will prob end up with less people here in 5 years time!
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it makes me sad to read cases like this.
So many times people who live in the thick of Jersey say they are being discriminated against, that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
They then get people who reply saying ‘your so lucky living on that island, i would lvoe to, i remember when etc’
Then you get the ones that say. ‘well if you dont like it there is a boat in the morning’
But don’t you see? For all the pretty beaches, and postcard views, there are real people trying to live and survive here. There are real people trying to feed their families. If everyon got on that boat in the morning and left, who would provide the rich peoples food? Who would clean teh streets or patrol them and make them safer.
Its all very well saying we can increae the population to 100k, but who are these increases going to be? The poor? No. The polish or portugese? No. The rich who don’t actually work just sit and earn interest? Yes.
Why can’t our politicians work for the people they already have living here, making their lives better, rather than trying to get in more of their own gang.
Besides if we all got on the boat in the morning, like the older generation keep saying, whose going to pay the social security for their pensions?
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The analogy that was used of Manhattan having a comparable area to that of Jersey neglects to mention the large amount of high rise buildings in the USA which Jersey does not have.
The UK are moving to a points based immigration policy where people are allowed to migrate strictly on the basis of economic need (regardless of caste or colour).
If we can accept that tighter controls should be put in place so that only essential workers are allowed in, is it too much to ask that they and their families undergo a voluntary medical examination so that they will not be a drain on the health system? They’d be no good to us dead after all.
Such a policy would not be discriminatory on the basis that we would only be refusing entry to those who were able to receive medical treatment in their home country and once they were in the island they would received the same medical care as anyone else.
The justification for only permitting entry to more robust people can also be found in the fact that Jersey has a higher quota already of the elderly and infirm whose needs must come first due to the higher contribution they have made to the island’s economy over the years.
Such a policy would make the island’s population more sustainable as a significant amount of residents are not of childbearing age.
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