Best Of

One has to think like a Labourite.

The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.

So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.

Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.

Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.

It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.

Which is where most Greens now come from.

The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.

Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.

I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.

Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…

Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.

They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.

I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.

Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard.
Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.

Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.

I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.

But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.

Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.

Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.

Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.

I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.

Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.

The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.

I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.

If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.

Wrong

There are multiple ways to achieve growth without importing labour.

Investing in productivity is one way. Another is moving the economy towards higher paid, higher productivity industries that already exist.

Cheap importer labour is the cheap boiled sweets of economics - feels good at first. Terrible as a long term diet.

Anyone else fed up with "scanning a QR-code" and "downloading our app" ?

I'm fed up being obligated to interface with the world around me though my phone.

No, it makes my life so much easier.

It makes my life considerably harder. Particularly if I don't have my phone. Or I do have my phone but it has no battery.

Honestly, the tech of 2007 was entirely fine.

Agreed. Being forced to download apps just to buy something is a complete no-no for me as a basic security issue. (Quite apart from the possibility of the QR code or the website in question being fake, like those put on stickers over car-parking site notice QR codes.)

https://x.com/pippacrerar/status/1997296467195617672

Informal discussions have taken place inside No 10 on rejoining customs union as quickest way to boost growth

We won't rejoin THE Customs Union or THE Single Market... Not yet, anyway. But an arrangement with a Single Customs Area and/or a United Market probably would be good for growth. It will leave the UK people with less control than they had in 2015, but beggars can't be choosers.

And going back to the theme of the header, the next Labour leader won't get the job without showing quite a lot of leg on the matter.

I think it'd add something like 0.2-0.3% GDP to growth, so very marginal in the grand scheme of things.

That's not what this is about nor why he's doing it. He's doing it because VALUES: it'd deftly stimulate the internationalist erogenous zones of left-liberal progressives, and probably give Remoaners a near orgasm.

I'd pledge it, if I were him, in the next GE because there's probably no better way Starmer can harvest their votes.

Better than a kick in the teeth. Using a recent estimate of UK GDP of about 2.56 trillion pounds in 2024, 0.3% of UK GDP is roughly 7.7 billion pounds What could be done with that?

If that were it, we'd probably do it, though we'd have to make contributions of £3 billion or so per year for structural funds, so the net gain would be much less than that.

But we'd have to accept EU regulations, which are often stupid and nonsensical, without any say in how they are determined. I think we'd have essentially no say in about half of our laws and regulations. So it would be a ridiculous situation and I don't think it would even last very long. Either we'd rejoin fully, which I think is unlikely because of the currency, freedom of movement and net contributions issues, or we'd leave again.

We'd also have to abandon our CPTPP membership.

Starmer is desperate for the slightest boost to growth but can't do the one thing that is proven to work - move towards a low tax, low spending, free markets model. Just reducing the tax-spend ratio by 1% of GDP - about a third of what Labour has increased it by since taking office - would increaase GDP by 3-4 times the boost from rejoining the Single Market. So he grasps for small, stupid and probably counterproductive gimmicks like this, rather than admit that his whole party is founded on the economically illiterate lie that is socialism.