Oh dear. Either Lily O is really stupid or has missed the point entirely. The Telegraph article on Monday didn’t imply that the illegal immigrants arriving on small boats are using hard drugs. It simply made the case that drug smugglers are offering illegal immigrants free passage on a dinghy to bring the drugs into the UK to hand over to the criminal drug gangs. They’re using them as mules probably because there is less chance of them being caught than if they were smuggled in via an official border post. Lily O, for some reason, goes off on a tangent about ethnicity of drug users somehow desperate to prove that the majority of hard drug users are white. Why? Nobody is disputing that. It may help Lily to understand that the ‘Black Economy’ doesn’t differentiate between races. These alleged asylum seekers, bringing in drugs in order to gain free passage to the UK, are fuelling the Black Economy when they deliver their packages which they may be carrying internally. “The black economy (or underground economy, shadow economy) refers to all economic activities hidden from the government to avoid taxes and regulations, including both legal work done "off the books" (like cash-in-hand jobs) and illegal activities (like drug trafficking). It involves transactions not reported to authorities like HMRC, meaning these activities don't show up in official GDP figures, potentially making a country seem poorer than it is. Key characteristics are tax evasion, unreported income, and cash payments, existing globally across all economic systems. “
Steve Taylor ● 13h