Necrothatcher posted:

Huh, thanks to this chat I just checked my Student Loan balance and it's -£2000.

Last time I looked in January it was £600 owed. How the heck did that happen? Guess I'll get on them for a repayment.

Clyde Radcliffe posted:

Icing on the cake is going to be when it's revealed he was a Rwandan seeking asylum here.

Home Office posted:

You can get help to return to your home country if you do not have permission to remain in the UK. This is known as ‘voluntary return’.

bessantj posted:

I was reading a story about Canada setting up adverts in Wales to entice Welsh nurses over to Canada by saying how poo poo the NHS is. I then made the mistake of reading a comment which said this was due to Wales being a political and economic basket case after 103 years of socialism.

Enough news for today.

Necrothatcher posted:

Huh, thanks to this chat I just checked my Student Loan balance and it's -£2000.

Last time I looked in January it was £600 owed. How the heck did that happen? Guess I'll get on them for a repayment.

Lobster God posted:

He was.

https://www.gov.uk/return-home-voluntarily

FitW Rwanda posted:

The government has a long history of repressing political opponents and members of opposition parties. They face the threat of disappearance, arbitrary arrest and detention, and assassination.

Both voters and candidates face significant intimidation aimed at controlling their political choices. Rwandans living outside the country have been threatened, attacked, forcibly disappeared, or killed, apparently in retaliation for their public or suspected opposition to the regime.

The military was formally separated from the RPF after it won the civil war, but it retains close ties to the ruling party and is considered a key political stakeholder in practice.

Scholars and students are subject to suspension for “divisionism” and engage in self-censorship to avoid such penalties. Public and private universities generally lack any robust political debate.

The constitution affirms freedom of speech within vaguely defined legal constraints. The practical space for free private discussion is limited in part by indications that the government monitors personal communications. Social media are heavily monitored, and the law allows for government hacking of telecommunications networks. Rwandan authorities reportedly use informants to infiltrate civil society, further discouraging citizens from voicing dissent. Individuals have been forcibly disappeared, arrested, detained, and assassinated for expressing their views.

Both ordinary criminal suspects and political detainees are routinely subjected to torture and other ill-treatment in custody. Extrajudicial executions of suspected criminals by security personnel have been reported, as have disappearances, physical assaults, and assassinations targeting journalists, opposition members, and other regime critics.

Regulations governing wage levels and conditions of work in the formal sector are poorly enforced, particularly among private employers. Children are trafficked internally for domestic service under abusive conditions or for commercial sex work. Few internal traffickers are held to account. Many children work informally in the agricultural sector. Young Congolese and Burundian refugees are vulnerable to sexual exploitation and coerced recruitment into armed groups linked to Rwandan security forces.

BBC posted:

Bahabelom Mengesha, a 36-year-old Eritrean man, knows what it's like to be sent to Rwanda by another country. But his stay there as an asylum seeker was brief.

He had left post-war Eritrea in 2010 and moved to Israel to claim asylum. Four years later, his permit was revoked and he was given a choice - be sent home, go to a migrant detention facility, or take $3,500 and a one-way flight to Rwanda.

It felt like no choice at all, he told the BBC, from Switzerland, where he has been living for the past seven years.

"No sane person would voluntarily go to prison," says Bahabelom of detention in Israel. "To go back to Eritrea, where imprisonment is part of the culture, this was [also] no option."

So he chose Rwanda.

But Bahabelom soon found out he wasn't welcome in the east African country. No sooner had he landed in its capital, Kigali, than he was told he must leave again for neighbouring Uganda - and all for a fee.

It is not clear who was orchestrating his expulsion from Rwanda - and that of other migrants we have spoken to - but Bahabelom believes Rwandan officials were involved.

...

Many spoke of being met at the airport in Kigali by a local man called John. This testimony spans several years so it is impossible to verify if "John" was the same person throughout. They described then having their papers taken from them by people who appeared to be Rwandan officials, before being driven to a hotel which was guarded and which they were barred from leaving.

They were then told to pay up to $500 to be driven in groups to the Ugandan border. Cars were waiting on the other side to drive them to the capital, Kampala. Again they were made to pay.

Bobby Deluxe posted:

I guess hell timeline is that they just amend or throw out the FTPA and put it off forever.

Marmaduke! posted:

I thought it was well known that when you get close to paying it all off, you need to call up and pay off the balance, otherwise they will just keep taking your money until the start of the next year. Not that they would explicitly tell anyone that themselves, though...

bessantj posted:

I was reading a story about Canada setting up adverts in Wales to entice Welsh nurses over to Canada by saying how poo poo the NHS is. I then made the mistake of reading a comment which said this was due to Wales being a political and economic basket case after 103 years of socialism.

Enough news for today.

Necrothatcher posted:

Huh, thanks to this chat I just checked my Student Loan balance and it's -£2000.

Last time I looked in January it was £600 owed. How the heck did that happen? Guess I'll get on them for a repayment.

Kin posted:

I don't know if it's because of the passive nature of the loan repayments (tied to income), or the tying interest to inflation makes it a "free" loan or whatever that was said when I was at uni,

Bobby Deluxe posted:

I remember being at college and going to a presentation where one of the things we were off-handedly told was that 'if you don't earn enough you don't make repayments, and if you don't pay it off after a certain number of years it gets written off anyway.'

The second part is something I've never heard since. I was in the first cohort that didn't have grants, think this was the late 90s? Was I lied to, or is this an obscure facet of the early loan system?

Guavanaut posted:

Meanwhile Saskatchewan was actually run by socialists during the era where they created Canadian public health care, which was part of the package that turned them from a wasteland of the Great Depression into at one time the most prosperous province.

notaspy posted:

Your repayments don't stop once you have paid off the debt. You have to phone up and cancel the payments.

So many of my friends got caught out by that

Private Speech posted:

That is really not very good, they might want you to pay some or all of it in a lump sum, possibly with additional interest. If you live abroad you are supposed to send them declarations of your income every year and as you said the payment thresholds depend on the cost of living in a given country, but are generally much lower than in the UK. All in all it's a giant pain to deal with, not the least because you also should have supporting documentation officially translated into English for each year (and/or each job change).

If you're lucky you might get away with it, but it's really not great.

e: Am posting this as someone who went through the process since I moved out of the UK after Brexit for a short while with an outstanding student loan.

From what I heard they sometimes send loan collection agencies after you, plus if you lie to them you might commit fraud.

I've seen some advice online that they might be able to arrange backpayment with you if you get in touch with them, but it's probably best to ask a specialist adviser or a lawyer (which I am not).

a pipe smoking dog posted:

lol so I decided to check just in case this had accidentally happened to me.

I think I might have paid it off before I hit 50 if current trends continue.

Paperhouse posted:

well crikey, that's put the willies up me. Appreciate the post though, will probably get my arse in gear now and hope they don't try to gently caress me too badly

Just did a bit of rough maths, and the amount I should have paid by now doesn't actually seem that bad. A bit of a chunk, but it's an amount I could comfortably pay in one go if necessary. That's without whatever interest there might be though

I think the process of getting it all sorted is going to be more of a hassle than the actual payment to be honest

Failed Imagineer posted:

Just Another Lurker posted:

Is his Loyalty Left or Right side affiliated?

Private Speech posted:

But anyway I sure am glad that Britain now has a law declaring Rwanda to be a safe country regardless of how many human rights conventions they break.

Private Speech posted:

But anyway I sure am glad that Britain now has a law declaring Rwanda to be a safe country regardless of how many human rights conventions they break.

Zephirus posted:

Sad Panda posted:

Better than me. My original loan (uni 2001-2004) was 9k. It's now 9500.

I got a second one of about 20k when I did teacher training 2018/2019. It's now 22k.

Perfectly content to leave it alone. The most annoying thing is that when they pushed up student fees to 3k from 1k, they also made that student loan wipe out much earlier. Mine wipes out at 65. Loans taken out in 2005 wipe after 25 years. My other one wipes after 30 years.

Tijuana Bibliophile posted:

this simple trick gets your country out of its human rights obligations

human rights havers hate it

fuctifino posted:

Zephirus posted: