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Wait, did your caseworker just announce this eligibility to you without you having asked about it?

Or have I wildly misread the situation?

To the UK they are emigrants.

Expat is a casual term referring to someone whose employer sent them overseas on a posting. Diplomats are the most obvious example, but companies will use the same employment structure.

Different jurisdictions have different official terminology for this type of migrant worker, but their legal status in the host country is typically different to that of other categories of migrant worker in the same country, they are usually paid & taxed in their home country, and employed under the regulations of their home country (though in some instances, a host country may extend protections or impose obligations over them).

The confusion arises because when the UK had an Empire, huge numbers were sent abroad to run it, whether for companies like the East India Company, or as civil servants or on military postings, and so the British now think of "people who live abroad" as "expats" because that's the word the older generations always heard, and then continued to use long after this ceased to be the predominant vehicle for of British to be living outside the UK.

The word is absolutely couched in a colonial past, but those using the term to describe other types of British people overseas are not generally doing so out of some sense of white supremacy or British exceptionalism, but plain old lack of awareness.

Yeah, the way people who've been on it describe how it changes they way it shifts their mental relationship with food reminds me a lot of the way those with ADHD describe the effects of their meds.

Going to come back to this to reflect in more detail to your original post and to this comment, but wanted to quickly float the idea that perhaps these people view you as particularly sound, so when they lay things on you or are just more emotional or intense in front of you, and you seem unphased - neither rushing to condemn them nor scrambling to reassure - they interpret that as disapproval from someone whom they find sound. And that because they value your judgement & integrity, they get sheepish and awkward in the absence of a strong outward reaction, which in turn you interpret as them thinking ill of you.

Only suggesting this because have seen quite a bit of this between people, and experienced mild versions of both ends of that dynamic.

Not that it helps, if it even resonates, or provides guidance.

Getting fees out of clients is like getting blood out of a stone.

Those barristers may not get paid by Tesco for years & not without a fight - they're prohibited from taking retainers and from turning down cases, and though they can refer cases on to other barristers, the circumstances in which they can do this are very limited.

Have you considered putting letters written on paper in the post?

Seems unwise to give your child's early life story to any of these companies, especially when mapped to a network of her relatives and likely including photographs which people may not be as diligent to keep private as you.

Your daughter cannot consent to this, and it is your duty as parents to protect her privacy until she is old enough to decide for herself what to share and where.

Correct.

You qualify through low income, and as the list to get council housing is long, need is taken into account also.

Right to Buy allows council tenants to buy their homes at a substantial discount on market value. This is alright, as it promotes stability and gives tenants equity, but at the same time, council tenants don't get evicted anyhow, even if their income has become very high, and you can pass on a tenancy when you die if a relative was living in the council house with you.

But the money from the sale of council houses to tenants does not get ploughed back into buying or building more council housing, and the people who bought them can in turn sell them on the open market rather than back to the council.

This has made it near impossible for councils to maintain levels of housing stock, let alone increase it to reflect population growth. In central London, many types of essential worker are hard to obtain as too few can afford to live within commuting distance - large & high quality housing estates in the centre and all through the Boroughs having been sold off under the scheme long ago & snaffled up by developers.

Thatcher brought it in as a populist policy, and to weaken state services, but every other PM after permitted the policy to carry on unaltered.

Most of them seem closer to being wrong'uns than weird.

It is only working in the US context as it isn't an insult per se, yet really gets under the skin of their conservatives due to their obsession with conformity, and enables everyone to mock their ludicrous ideas without expending energy explaining why each of them are so awful.

Entirely different groups of people, and they're profoundly opposed to each other.

At the core of this massive protest/strike are groups which have been against the bombardment of Gaza from the outset, and protesting Israel's war against Palestinians for years.

Yer a pterodactyl, Mox. A pterodactyl.

Tell people you vaguely know, too.

Right now, they can't.

Money has gone, opportunity for very cheap borrowing (which is what a sane government would have grasped enthusiastically grasped in the wake of the last crash instead of breaking out to exploit everyone harder) is gone.

Maybe, if Reeves is given scope to do her shit, this country can not merely stall the accelerating decline, but turn stuff around.

Nothing is more vital right now & for some time than keeping faith against the odds that that can happen.

There is nothing to lose by trying to hold our nerve.