Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
A remarkably stupid take on your part. The problem is really quite simple, where do the 600,000 people who moved here last year live? We aren't building anything like enough stuff to merely replace existing buildings and infrastructure. No government in living memory has done so. So the UK will become proportionally more crowded, more expensive, more dilapidated, and it gets worse year after year, with no end in sight.
Not one political party in the UK is serious about either limiting immigration, or building enough stuff to make immigration sustainable.
Frankly people like you who reach for the "racism" nonsense when people voice their concerns about immigration are as much a part of the problem as the NIMBYest curtain-twitcher in the Home Counties.
That ship seems to have sailed with Brexit. We're a high immigration economy now, for better or worse.
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
Why are the "Domestic economic migrants" useless?
Is this a version of Oriental Lassitude? the well known phenomenon of everyone in the Far East being too lazy to do a days work...
I work as a consultant in the Waste and Recycling industry. My clients tell me a picking line to sort kerbside waste streams manned by locals is significantly less efficient than one that was manned by Eastern Europeans. There is frustration when motivated staff have to be replaced by those who might or might not turn up for work. It is a vile job and I wouldn't volunteer to do it, but someone has to.
Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
A remarkably stupid take on your part. The problem is really quite simple, where do the 600,000 people who moved here last year live? We aren't building anything like enough stuff to merely replace existing buildings and infrastructure. No government in living memory has done so. So the UK will become proportionally more crowded, more expensive, more dilapidated, and it gets worse year after year, with no end in sight.
Not one political party in the UK is serious about either limiting immigration, or building enough stuff to make immigration sustainable.
Frankly people like you who reach for the "racism" nonsense when people voice their concerns about immigration are as much a part of the problem as the NIMBYest curtain-twitcher in the Home Counties.
That ship seems to have sailed with Brexit. We're a high immigration economy now, for better or worse.
I have zero problems with a high immigration economy but we need to build houses / flats so everyone has somewhere to live.
Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
What a load of wank
We live in what has been regularly one of the least racist countries on the planet and still is. You simply slander the good people of this nation with your own bile.
People worry about immigration because they can see with their own eyes the impact on housing, infrastructure, wages and public services.
Sure. And to fix the services we seem incapable of funding, they have been told that the outsiders need to Go Home. From Theresa May having vans drive round literally telling people that, to all of the "breaking point" rhetoric, and now the furore that their demanded points-based system is doing its job, its very clear what the opinion is.
You and a few others don't like me holding the mirror up to the right. And that's fine. But I'm still going to do it. You defended Braverman's attack on Pakistanis as not being racist because she is "asian" - as if her Indian heritage and Pakistani heritage are interchangeable. It is this blind ignorance which so many of your fellow right wing voters demonstrate on a daily basis. Don't know, don't care, they're all the same.
The only mirror youre holdng up is one to yourself and it's not doing you any favours.
"They're all asians" not liking me calling it out is hardly something that is going to make me think I am wrong.
Shall we discuss the actual issue? I entirely agree with your statement about us being one of the "least racist" countries. 100%. Because this isn't racism. So many of the foreigners that native want to go home are as white and European as we are. Poles. Romanians. People who look like us and worship like us. And we still don't want them.
That isn't racism. They are our race. Its jingoism. Petty bigotry. Dislike of the other.
I go back to my original statement, the immigration issues have to do with economic affordability. People can see the strains on housing, infrastructure and wages. As @DavidL states people on the right worry more on why this country ( under a centre right government ) refuses to stand up to the mark and sort out these issues while ignoring an immigration influx which makes the problem worse.
Good - debate without petty insults.
We can debate how and why we have the strains you mentioned, or what we could do about them. But the immigration influx. That is something that the "Australian-style points-based migration system" has allowed. The same system that the right spent years demanding we have.
It is not open door migration. People now have to apply, be scored, pay us money, and then we choose whether to let them in or not. And we choose to. We have replaced anyone coming in, with the people we want and need coming in.
So why are the right up in arms? You described this as "wank" despite heavy reporting in all media over the last day or two, and more today with the latest figures. The right very much are up in arms about their system. Why?
I pointed out a while back that the new Migration and Borders 2023 Redux bill allowed ministers to set a cap for refugee numbers, and that many want the number to be zero. The same is true with legal migration. Close the open door, we want to choose. Then we choose, no not that many. We need them. No we don't.
So how many is the target of many on your side of the spectrum?
To my mind this could be one of the great successes of Brexit. If (and it is a big if at the moment as I don't know how effectively it is being run) the points system is working to bring us the people we want and need then the numbers let in become a simple political/economic question for the Government. They have the power to change them as they see fit and can be held responsible/congratulated/condemned for whatever those net migration figures are. If you don't like it then change the Government.
The immigration issue has always depended on who are the immigrants and what parts of the UK they are migrating to.
So a successful immigration strategy involved the right people migrating to the right places.
Whereas previously government did not control and did not care who was going where.
Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
A remarkably stupid take on your part. The problem is really quite simple, where do the 600,000 people who moved here last year live? We aren't building anything like enough stuff to merely replace existing buildings and infrastructure. No government in living memory has done so. So the UK will become proportionally more crowded, more expensive, more dilapidated, and it gets worse year after year, with no end in sight.
Not one political party in the UK is serious about either limiting immigration, or building enough stuff to make immigration sustainable.
Frankly people like you who reach for the "racism" nonsense when people voice their concerns about immigration are as much a part of the problem as the NIMBYest curtain-twitcher in the Home Counties.
That ship seems to have sailed with Brexit. We're a high immigration economy now, for better or worse.
I have zero problems with a high immigration economy but we need to build houses / flats so everyone has somewhere to live.
Indeed. Immigrants.will eventually also.build those houses I suspect
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
It is 17 degrees here. The sky is blue. There is only the hint of a breeze. The birds are singing, especially the nest of fledgling blackbirds above my living room window. The roses, clematis and peonies are flowering and I am sitting on my terrace enjoying it all. This is where I intend being all day.
2.3C at my vineyard last night. The latest of a string of near misses on the late frost front. I'm eagerly waiting the final end of the frost risk season.
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
More from Sir John Bigot: "We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures."
So two problems: 1. How do you compensate these "workers" who are compelled to move to another part of the country. And for the locals about to be flooded by the chronically sick and disabled, will NHS facilities be beefed up to cope with this new demand? 2. How do you compensate the employers who have these "workers" imposed upon them? Productivity and absence will be major issues if the "workers" are too ill.
This is the typical crayon politics from a right wing who insist they have the "common sense" solutions and nobody else has any ideas. What he proposes will not work, at a very basic level and even more so when you consider the details.
Yet they keep saying this stupid, and have moron media repeat it, and there is now a client vote so dulled by this avalanche of "news" that they don't ask how. But we can't then talk about the actual issue or actual ideas to resolve, because Crayons.
I attended a seminar on the above yesterday, as someone who had covid back in July of 2022 and is still not back to how I was before physically or psychologically, and the amount of resources we will need to deal with the impact of long covid is going to be immense. We either need to invest in helping thousands of people recover from the impacts, or we'll need to find other workers to do their work (and have a social safety net that will support those who can't work as much as they did / at all). Either way, it will cost money and need new workers.
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
More from Sir John Bigot: "We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures."
So two problems: 1. How do you compensate these "workers" who are compelled to move to another part of the country. And for the locals about to be flooded by the chronically sick and disabled, will NHS facilities be beefed up to cope with this new demand? 2. How do you compensate the employers who have these "workers" imposed upon them? Productivity and absence will be major issues if the "workers" are too ill.
This is the typical crayon politics from a right wing who insist they have the "common sense" solutions and nobody else has any ideas. What he proposes will not work, at a very basic level and even more so when you consider the details.
Yet they keep saying this stupid, and have moron media repeat it, and there is now a client vote so dulled by this avalanche of "news" that they don't ask how. But we can't then talk about the actual issue or actual ideas to resolve, because Crayons.
I would take issue with you on one point. It has always been the case that workers had to move to where the work was. This applied to whole villages moving hundreds of miles for coal mining or, in more recent times, peple moving to new factories, new industries or just because that was what their current job demanded. For many people this is the norm not the exception. So the idea that these people should be compensated for moving to where the work is is ridiculous. No one was compensating EU workers having to travel to the UK to get work. Why should we compensate Britons having to move around within their own country. That is life.
On my LinkedIn feed this morning, an email from the recruitment consultants inviting applications to become members of the newly announced London Policing Board.
You have to fill in a form and send in a 2 minute video. Well that will be easy: here you go 11 articles on what is wrong with the police and what needs to be done. Read those. Call me when you've read them.
On iPlayer there is a reading of a book called "Into the Night" - an account of a primary school teacher's year as a special Constable in London. It is well worth hearing because it describes well the reality of the daily job for policemen and how hard it can be and what good policing tries to do.
In the first episode he describes being in a van with colleagues and the men describing openly their views of the women they see - their thoughts on their arses and whether they fit with their faces or vice versa and whether they'd do them and so on.
He's shocked but mainly at his own reaction. He doesn't raise this with his superiors unlike, say, racist language because he concludes that if this happens with no-one checking themselves it must be so widespread that the superiors must know it is happening. So no point telling them what they already know. That is your bad culture right there. That kind of thinking about women is deeply embedded and it is not hard to find in groups which are largely male, almost without anyone realising it is happening or why it might be sub-optimal or why it might not lead to good outcomes.
This kind of "banter" is common in all-male settings, unfortunately, but hopefully becoming less so. People say things like it's just harmless or it's natural because (straight) men will always be attracted to women and you can't stop them expressing that. In my opinion seeing an attractive woman and sharing opinions on her appearance with a group of other men are two entirely seperate things. The first you can't do much about, no doubt the lizard part of the male brain is hard wired to seek out a mate from puberty. The second is I think nothing to do with the first, rather it is all about male group dynamics - they could be talking about cars or football, it is all about strengthening the in-group and the individual's place in it. But in the process you create an out-group - in this case women. This is why it is not harmless, especially in the context of where the group in question has power over women (like the police, or the CBI). As a man it can be quite hard to push back against this stuff as men who get called out for it can respond pretty agressively in my experience and it is frequently older, higher status men who do it and they might be eg your boss. But it is important that men do push back against it because by definition this kind of behaviour in all male spaces is hard for women to challenge, and in any case they shouldn't have to shoulder the whole burden of reducing toxic male behaviour on their own.
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
That ship seems to have sailed with Brexit. We're a high immigration economy now, for better or worse.
I agree, but how long will it be until politicians twig that we need to build the equivalent of a new Birmingham every two years, and that that is on top of replacing exisiting infrastructure, and making up for decades of deficit?
The scale of the problem is huge and growing rapidly, but nobody in Parliament seems to get it. We must be well over 68 million people in the UK, with 70 million likely around 2025. I recall that when the ONS first projected 70 million by 2030, that that was considered quite unlikely, they were in fact quite conservative in their projections. 80 million by 2050 might turn out to be conservative too.
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
More from Sir John Bigot: "We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures."
So two problems: 1. How do you compensate these "workers" who are compelled to move to another part of the country. And for the locals about to be flooded by the chronically sick and disabled, will NHS facilities be beefed up to cope with this new demand? 2. How do you compensate the employers who have these "workers" imposed upon them? Productivity and absence will be major issues if the "workers" are too ill.
This is the typical crayon politics from a right wing who insist they have the "common sense" solutions and nobody else has any ideas. What he proposes will not work, at a very basic level and even more so when you consider the details.
Yet they keep saying this stupid, and have moron media repeat it, and there is now a client vote so dulled by this avalanche of "news" that they don't ask how. But we can't then talk about the actual issue or actual ideas to resolve, because Crayons.
I would take issue with you on one point. It has always been the case that workers had to move to where the work was. This applied to whole villages moving hundreds of miles for coal mining or, in more recent times, peple moving to new factories, new industries or just because that was what their current job demanded. For many people this is the norm not the exception. So the idea that these people should be compensated for moving to where the work is is ridiculous. No one was compensating EU workers having to travel to the UK to get work. Why should we compensate Britons having to move around within their own country. That is life.
My compensation point isn't for the pain of moving round the country for work. I've done it repeatedly so I agree with your basic argument.
By "compensation" I meant who would pay for it? A while back Widnes to Wisbech to work in food factories was the example. The differential in housing costs makes it an absolute non-starter. People simply don't have the ability to pay £large for wages £low.
Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
What a load of wank
We live in what has been regularly one of the least racist countries on the planet and still is. You simply slander the good people of this nation with your own bile.
People worry about immigration because they can see with their own eyes the impact on housing, infrastructure, wages and public services.
Sure. And to fix the services we seem incapable of funding, they have been told that the outsiders need to Go Home. From Theresa May having vans drive round literally telling people that, to all of the "breaking point" rhetoric, and now the furore that their demanded points-based system is doing its job, its very clear what the opinion is.
You and a few others don't like me holding the mirror up to the right. And that's fine. But I'm still going to do it. You defended Braverman's attack on Pakistanis as not being racist because she is "asian" - as if her Indian heritage and Pakistani heritage are interchangeable. It is this blind ignorance which so many of your fellow right wing voters demonstrate on a daily basis. Don't know, don't care, they're all the same.
The only mirror youre holdng up is one to yourself and it's not doing you any favours.
"They're all asians" not liking me calling it out is hardly something that is going to make me think I am wrong.
Shall we discuss the actual issue? I entirely agree with your statement about us being one of the "least racist" countries. 100%. Because this isn't racism. So many of the foreigners that native want to go home are as white and European as we are. Poles. Romanians. People who look like us and worship like us. And we still don't want them.
That isn't racism. They are our race. Its jingoism. Petty bigotry. Dislike of the other.
I go back to my original statement, the immigration issues have to do with economic affordability. People can see the strains on housing, infrastructure and wages. As @DavidL states people on the right worry more on why this country ( under a centre right government ) refuses to stand up to the mark and sort out these issues while ignoring an immigration influx which makes the problem worse.
Good - debate without petty insults.
We can debate how and why we have the strains you mentioned, or what we could do about them. But the immigration influx. That is something that the "Australian-style points-based migration system" has allowed. The same system that the right spent years demanding we have.
It is not open door migration. People now have to apply, be scored, pay us money, and then we choose whether to let them in or not. And we choose to. We have replaced anyone coming in, with the people we want and need coming in.
So why are the right up in arms? You described this as "wank" despite heavy reporting in all media over the last day or two, and more today with the latest figures. The right very much are up in arms about their system. Why?
I pointed out a while back that the new Migration and Borders 2023 Redux bill allowed ministers to set a cap for refugee numbers, and that many want the number to be zero. The same is true with legal migration. Close the open door, we want to choose. Then we choose, no not that many. We need them. No we don't.
So how many is the target of many on your side of the spectrum?
To my mind this could be one of the great successes of Brexit. If (and it is a big if at the moment as I don't know how effectively it is being run) the points system is working to bring us the people we want and need then the numbers let in become a simple political/economic question for the Government. They have the power to change them as they see fit and can be held responsible/congratulated/condemned for whatever those net migration figures are. If you don't like it then change the Government.
The immigration issue has always depended on who are the immigrants and what parts of the UK they are migrating to.
So a successful immigration strategy involved the right people migrating to the right places.
Whereas previously government did not control and did not care who was going where.
If the fig leaf of government "control" is necessary to calm the nerves of Middle England so be it. In reality, immigrants will continue to go to the places and jobs that market forces dictate, like they did before but with an additional and costly layer of bureaucracy.
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
Or for some old Tory frother to condemn the government for 'picking winners' and subsiding production ?
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
More from Sir John Bigot: "We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures."
So two problems: 1. How do you compensate these "workers" who are compelled to move to another part of the country. And for the locals about to be flooded by the chronically sick and disabled, will NHS facilities be beefed up to cope with this new demand? 2. How do you compensate the employers who have these "workers" imposed upon them? Productivity and absence will be major issues if the "workers" are too ill.
This is the typical crayon politics from a right wing who insist they have the "common sense" solutions and nobody else has any ideas. What he proposes will not work, at a very basic level and even more so when you consider the details.
Yet they keep saying this stupid, and have moron media repeat it, and there is now a client vote so dulled by this avalanche of "news" that they don't ask how. But we can't then talk about the actual issue or actual ideas to resolve, because Crayons.
I would take issue with you on one point. It has always been the case that workers had to move to where the work was. This applied to whole villages moving hundreds of miles for coal mining or, in more recent times, peple moving to new factories, new industries or just because that was what their current job demanded. For many people this is the norm not the exception. So the idea that these people should be compensated for moving to where the work is is ridiculous. No one was compensating EU workers having to travel to the UK to get work. Why should we compensate Britons having to move around within their own country. That is life.
My compensation point isn't for the pain of moving round the country for work. I've done it repeatedly so I agree with your basic argument.
By "compensation" I meant who would pay for it? A while back Widnes to Wisbech to work in food factories was the example. The differential in housing costs makes it an absolute non-starter. People simply don't have the ability to pay £large for wages £low.
Yep - want me to move location and I need a wage that compensates me for the difference in house prices between where I am and where you want me to be.
Which means like everything else - the solution that allows people to move where the jobs are is to build enough houses in that area that people can really afford to live there.
And lets take Richard's coal mining village as an example - the owner of the mine built houses and rented them out to the workers at a price they could afford to pay based on the wages of the mine / factory.
Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
A remarkably stupid take on your part. The problem is really quite simple, where do the 600,000 people who moved here last year live? We aren't building anything like enough stuff to merely replace existing buildings and infrastructure. No government in living memory has done so. So the UK will become proportionally more crowded, more expensive, more dilapidated, and it gets worse year after year, with no end in sight.
Not one political party in the UK is serious about either limiting immigration, or building enough stuff to make immigration sustainable.
Frankly people like you who reach for the "racism" nonsense when people voice their concerns about immigration are as much a part of the problem as the NIMBYest curtain-twitcher in the Home Counties.
That ship seems to have sailed with Brexit. We're a high immigration economy now, for better or worse.
I have zero problems with a high immigration economy but we need to build houses / flats so everyone has somewhere to live.
It would be interesting to know the net migration number that would be commensurate with zero population growth, and how that is expected to change over time. Not because we should be targeting zero population growth, given that combined with ageing that would mean a worsening dependency ratio over time, but it would be useful to have as a baseline.
I assume with current fertility rates that we would have organic population decline without migration. Not as rapid as in some countries as our birth rate isn't the lowest, but some sort of decline given life expectancy seems to have stopped rising.
So is the equilibrium net migration rate say 50,000 a year, or 100,000, or 500,000? I really don't know.
Then we have the equilibrium in terms of zero increase in number of households, because that's the metric that affects property demand. Does migration contribute to or reduce average household size? I assume it depends on the nature of migration: families moving here probably = increase in household size therefore reduced number of households. Individual students immigrating would reduce household size. Retired individuals or couples emigrating to sunny places presumably increases average size and frees up more property than say young families emigrating. And so on.
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
More from Sir John Bigot: "We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures."
So two problems: 1. How do you compensate these "workers" who are compelled to move to another part of the country. And for the locals about to be flooded by the chronically sick and disabled, will NHS facilities be beefed up to cope with this new demand? 2. How do you compensate the employers who have these "workers" imposed upon them? Productivity and absence will be major issues if the "workers" are too ill.
This is the typical crayon politics from a right wing who insist they have the "common sense" solutions and nobody else has any ideas. What he proposes will not work, at a very basic level and even more so when you consider the details.
Yet they keep saying this stupid, and have moron media repeat it, and there is now a client vote so dulled by this avalanche of "news" that they don't ask how. But we can't then talk about the actual issue or actual ideas to resolve, because Crayons.
I would take issue with you on one point. It has always been the case that workers had to move to where the work was. This applied to whole villages moving hundreds of miles for coal mining or, in more recent times, peple moving to new factories, new industries or just because that was what their current job demanded. For many people this is the norm not the exception. So the idea that these people should be compensated for moving to where the work is is ridiculous. No one was compensating EU workers having to travel to the UK to get work. Why should we compensate Britons having to move around within their own country. That is life.
My compensation point isn't for the pain of moving round the country for work. I've done it repeatedly so I agree with your basic argument.
By "compensation" I meant who would pay for it? A while back Widnes to Wisbech to work in food factories was the example. The differential in housing costs makes it an absolute non-starter. People simply don't have the ability to pay £large for wages £low.
The question of striking the right balance between labour and capital is normally quite fundamental to left-wing politics.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
£800m is a lot of money for 9000 or so jobs (it's £90,000 or so per job)
Equally will there actually be 9000 jobs (who knows)?
The only upside is that without the factory a lot of other jobs will be disappearing over the next few years.
Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
A remarkably stupid take on your part. The problem is really quite simple, where do the 600,000 people who moved here last year live? We aren't building anything like enough stuff to merely replace existing buildings and infrastructure. No government in living memory has done so. So the UK will become proportionally more crowded, more expensive, more dilapidated, and it gets worse year after year, with no end in sight.
Not one political party in the UK is serious about either limiting immigration, or building enough stuff to make immigration sustainable.
Frankly people like you who reach for the "racism" nonsense when people voice their concerns about immigration are as much a part of the problem as the NIMBYest curtain-twitcher in the Home Counties.
That ship seems to have sailed with Brexit. We're a high immigration economy now, for better or worse.
I have zero problems with a high immigration economy but we need to build houses / flats so everyone has somewhere to live.
About 10% to 15% of voters share your view on immigration.
I see the Musk Presidential campaign launch went about as well as the Starship launch...
They got numbers that were in six figures. It's not as good as they would have hoped and I think @rcs1000 was right: YouTube has a better reach than Twitter when it comes to these matters.
More importantly, Youtube has both video and proven scaleable infrastructure. They’d have got several times more viewers on Youtube, than they got on Twitter. If you tell YouTube you’re expecting a couple of million live watchers for your event, they’ll make sure there’s bandwidth available for it.
Twitter Spaces is many-to-many, rather than one-to-many, and couldn’t take the load. I’ve not looked into their infrastructure in detail, but from the screenshots it looked like the feed metadata was custom for each user, so Twitter’s servers were trying to compute half a million different feeds simultaneously.
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
These things have a price and.as the government is desperate in this case the price will be eye watering.high.and a lot more than the suggested headline amount of £500 million
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
More from Sir John Bigot: "We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures."
So two problems: 1. How do you compensate these "workers" who are compelled to move to another part of the country. And for the locals about to be flooded by the chronically sick and disabled, will NHS facilities be beefed up to cope with this new demand? 2. How do you compensate the employers who have these "workers" imposed upon them? Productivity and absence will be major issues if the "workers" are too ill.
This is the typical crayon politics from a right wing who insist they have the "common sense" solutions and nobody else has any ideas. What he proposes will not work, at a very basic level and even more so when you consider the details.
Yet they keep saying this stupid, and have moron media repeat it, and there is now a client vote so dulled by this avalanche of "news" that they don't ask how. But we can't then talk about the actual issue or actual ideas to resolve, because Crayons.
I would take issue with you on one point. It has always been the case that workers had to move to where the work was. This applied to whole villages moving hundreds of miles for coal mining or, in more recent times, peple moving to new factories, new industries or just because that was what their current job demanded. For many people this is the norm not the exception. So the idea that these people should be compensated for moving to where the work is is ridiculous. No one was compensating EU workers having to travel to the UK to get work. Why should we compensate Britons having to move around within their own country. That is life.
My compensation point isn't for the pain of moving round the country for work. I've done it repeatedly so I agree with your basic argument.
By "compensation" I meant who would pay for it? A while back Widnes to Wisbech to work in food factories was the example. The differential in housing costs makes it an absolute non-starter. People simply don't have the ability to pay £large for wages £low.
Yep - want me to move location and I need a wage that compensates me for the difference in house prices between where I am and where you want me to be.
Which means like everything else - the solution that allows people to move where the jobs are is to build enough houses in that area that people can really afford to live there.
And lets take Richard's coal mining village as an example - the owner of the mine built houses and rented them out to the workers at a price they could afford to pay based on the wages of the mine / factory.
And they didn't just build houses but also schools, hospitals, churches and recreational facilities for their new workforce.
On my LinkedIn feed this morning, an email from the recruitment consultants inviting applications to become members of the newly announced London Policing Board.
You have to fill in a form and send in a 2 minute video. Well that will be easy: here you go 11 articles on what is wrong with the police and what needs to be done. Read those. Call me when you've read them.
Go on. You know you want to…
(And, from your writings here and what we know of you, would have an awful lot to contribute to the Board)
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
These things have a price and.as the government is desperate in this case the price will be eye watering.high.and a lot more than the suggested headline amount of £500 million
The government spends, or rather borrows and spends, tens of billions every year to subsidise consumption.
Compared to that the JLR subsidy (and I know nothing about the details) is trivially immaterial.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
So the top 10 are: Students (mostly temporary) Ukranians (mostly temporary) Hong Kongers (British) Nurses Care workers Doctors Software Developers Other IT Consultants Management Consultants Accountants
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
These things have a price and.as the government is desperate in this case the price will be eye watering.high.and a lot more than the suggested headline amount of £500 million
The government spends, or rather borrows and spends, tens of billions every year to subsidise consumption.
Compared to that the JLR subsidy (and I know nothing about the details) is trivially immaterial.
I'm not saying the subsidy isn't worth it. The UK vehicle manufacturing industry is in last chance saloon. The EU has 35 battery plants in build or planned. This is almost our only chance of getting a major plant.
I'm saying it's going to be a lot of money partly because the stakes are so high.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
The number of computer programmers and software developers required is an indictment of the younger generation given how much time they spend on social media and playing games.
Basic spreadsheet ability is seriously lacking in many young office workers.
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
More from Sir John Bigot: "We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures."
So two problems: 1. How do you compensate these "workers" who are compelled to move to another part of the country. And for the locals about to be flooded by the chronically sick and disabled, will NHS facilities be beefed up to cope with this new demand? 2. How do you compensate the employers who have these "workers" imposed upon them? Productivity and absence will be major issues if the "workers" are too ill.
This is the typical crayon politics from a right wing who insist they have the "common sense" solutions and nobody else has any ideas. What he proposes will not work, at a very basic level and even more so when you consider the details.
Yet they keep saying this stupid, and have moron media repeat it, and there is now a client vote so dulled by this avalanche of "news" that they don't ask how. But we can't then talk about the actual issue or act
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
Why are the "Domestic economic migrants" useless?
Is this a version of Oriental Lassitude? the well known phenomenon of everyone in the Far East being too lazy to do a days work...
How -practically - do we make this work? IDS went up the valleys and told the unemployed there were loads of jobs in Cardiff. He was right. Bar jobs. Hospitality. Late shifts. Proposed as a solution for people with kids and no child support and of course no public transport to get them all the way home.
Great as a Crayon solution, useless in the real world. Inner city single mums are not available to work in a bar in Devon tourist spots for the summer. Or Wisbech food factories. However much Crayons get deployed.
Probably only a matter of time before we are told there are plenty of jobs in Rwanda.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
So the top 10 are: Students (mostly temporary) Ukranians (mostly temporary) Hong Kongers (British) Nurses Care workers Doctors Software Developers Other IT Consultants Management Consultants Accountants
That sounds like a total win-win for Brexit.
Loss of reciprocal rights for UK citizens and additional bureaucratic burden of the visa regime suggest not.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
The number of computer programmers and software developers required is an indictment of the younger generation given how much time they spend on social media and playing games.
Basic spreadsheet ability is seriously lacking in many young office workers.
We should teach IT in schools, especially word processing and spreadsheets. Trouble is the computer nerds want to teach programming, and the national curriculum wants to waste kids' time on French and geography. Properly redesigning the curriculum for the modern world means killing too many sacred cows, so it will not happen.
So, net migration for last year has come in at 606,000. In advance, most outlets were forecasting at least 700,000. Clever spinning, or just poor forecasts?
Either way, Sunak and Braverman can spin it as a huge success - 100,000 less than predictions, so migration is firmly under control and coming down rapidly.
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
£800m is a lot of money for 9000 or so jobs (it's £90,000 or so per job)
Equally will there actually be 9000 jobs (who knows)?
The only upside is that without the factory a lot of other jobs will be disappearing over the next few years.
And the total subsidy will be way more than £800 million. It's a payment to keep the British car industry going for a bit longer.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
So the top 10 are: Students (mostly temporary) Ukranians (mostly temporary) Hong Kongers (British) Nurses Care workers Doctors Software Developers Other IT Consultants Management Consultants Accountants
That sounds like a total win-win for Brexit.
I think we should stop issuing visas to Hong Kongers and give them full freedom of movement instead, with citizenship after a year of residence, not five years. There's no suggestion that they are economic migrants, since the standard of living in our former colony is similar to ours, and Chinese are our most successful immigrant group, out-earning whites by 30% and Indians by 20%.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
The probable Rutherglen by-election is almost becoming a free hit for the SNP. The apparent certainty of a Labour gain here means that such a result will be met with a shrug of the shoulders by most.
A Labour win has been over hyped already by the overwhelmingly Brit Nat unionist media in Scotland (including BBC Scotland and to a lesser extent STV). If the SNP were to hold a seat, which was one of the six that Labour held between 2017-2019, that would be a disaster for Labour in Scotland.
I await with interest who the SNP candidate turns out to be, as that may be critical. The Labour candidate Michael Shanks seems to think attacking Ferrier is going to get the job done for him, but he will be attacked for his party's "make Brexit work" and other stances not approved by a majority in Scotland (he can't go heavily on GRR, for example, as Labour MSPs were more in favour than SNP MSPs).
That ship seems to have sailed with Brexit. We're a high immigration economy now, for better or worse.
I agree, but how long will it be until politicians twig that we need to build the equivalent of a new Birmingham every two years, and that that is on top of replacing exisiting infrastructure, and making up for decades of deficit?
The scale of the problem is huge and growing rapidly, but nobody in Parliament seems to get it. We must be well over 68 million people in the UK, with 70 million likely around 2025. I recall that when the ONS first projected 70 million by 2030, that that was considered quite unlikely, they were in fact quite conservative in their projections. 80 million by 2050 might turn out to be conservative too.
Presumably that means 100 million in 2080 or 2090, which would be quite a milestone, albeit one I probably won't live to see.
“ Business owners like cash because it helps them avoid the sky-high card processing fees charged by banks and machine provider”
This is provably wrong. Cash handling is more expensive - as some basic desk research would quickly tell him.
Cash is inconvenient, dirty, wasteful, risky and pointless. The idea that we are still going to be carrying around silly scraps of paper and shards of worthless metal in our pockets in any great volume in the next decade is for the birds.
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
More from Sir John Bigot: "We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures."
So two problems: 1. How do you compensate these "workers" who are compelled to move to another part of the country. And for the locals about to be flooded by the chronically sick and disabled, will NHS facilities be beefed up to cope with this new demand? 2. How do you compensate the employers who have these "workers" imposed upon them? Productivity and absence will be major issues if the "workers" are too ill.
This is the typical crayon politics from a right wing who insist they have the "common sense" solutions and nobody else has any ideas. What he proposes will not work, at a very basic level and even more so when you consider the details.
Yet they keep saying this stupid, and have moron media repeat it, and there is now a client vote so dulled by this avalanche of "news" that they don't ask how. But we can't then talk about the actual issue or act
So, net migration for last year has come in at 606,000. In advance, most outlets were forecasting at least 700,000. Clever spinning, or just poor forecasts?
Either way, Sunak and Braverman can spin it as a huge success - 100,000 less than predictions, so migration is firmly under control and coming down rapidly.
Indeed. Year on year it has come down by growing +24%.
Matt Goodwin on the migration issue. At some point more of his critics will need to drill down to detail, and play the ball a bit more and the man a bit less.
And at some point the Tory party policy of wanting both substantially less and substantially more inward migration at the same time may be found to have a small flaw in its reasoning.
That ship seems to have sailed with Brexit. We're a high immigration economy now, for better or worse.
I agree, but how long will it be until politicians twig that we need to build the equivalent of a new Birmingham every two years, and that that is on top of replacing exisiting infrastructure, and making up for decades of deficit?
The scale of the problem is huge and growing rapidly, but nobody in Parliament seems to get it. We must be well over 68 million people in the UK, with 70 million likely around 2025. I recall that when the ONS first projected 70 million by 2030, that that was considered quite unlikely, they were in fact quite conservative in their projections. 80 million by 2050 might turn out to be conservative too.
Presumably that means 100 million in 2080 or 2090, which would be quite a milestone, albeit one I probably won't live to see.
Well if you can believe some of the scenarios about migration due to climate change the UK, and the whole of Europe, has a huge problem heading its way.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
So the top 10 are: Students (mostly temporary) Ukranians (mostly temporary) Hong Kongers (British) Nurses Care workers Doctors Software Developers Other IT Consultants Management Consultants Accountants
That sounds like a total win-win for Brexit.
But won't somebody think of the Romanian Big Issue sellers?
“ Business owners like cash because it helps them avoid the sky-high card processing fees charged by banks and machine provider”
This is provably wrong. Cash handling is more expensive - as some basic desk research would quickly tell him.
Cash is inconvenient, dirty, wasteful, risky and pointless. The idea that we are still going to be carrying around silly scraps of paper and shards of worthless metal in our pockets in any great volume in the next decade is for the birds.
Complaining about high card fees is not "provably wrong" so much as outdated. It's not that long since Amazon barred Visa because they charged too much, and the newer, cheaper payment processors have only been around a couple of years.
“ Business owners like cash because it helps them avoid the sky-high card processing fees charged by banks and machine provider”
This is provably wrong. Cash handling is more expensive - as some basic desk research would quickly tell him.
Cash is inconvenient, dirty, wasteful, risky and pointless. The idea that we are still going to be carrying around silly scraps of paper and shards of worthless metal in our pockets in any great volume in the next decade is for the birds.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
What the hell does the country need more 'management consultants' for ?
Why does the country need any management consultants (quickly amends CV)
We are quite helpful when it comes to wading through (in my case) environmental red tape. I suspect there is a burgeoning market to service businesses bamboozled by post- Brexit hoop jumping requirements.
Comedy from Jenrick. A 24% YonY increase in migration shows the government is reducing migration, and you can't trust Labour as they don't want to reduce migration like the government are doing.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
What the hell does the country need more 'management consultants' for ?
Why does the country need any management consultants (quickly amends CV)
We are quite helpful when it comes to wading through (in my case) environmental red tape. I suspect there is a burgeoning market to service businesses bamboozled by post- Brexit hoop jumping requirements.
Maybe companies might start investing in capital and training, now that employing immigrant labour comes with a substantial cost in time and money?
An interesting link between two big stories today is that Tata is the recipient of huge government subsidies for a battery plant and Tata Consultancy Services is the instrument behind much of the growth in immigration.
On my LinkedIn feed this morning, an email from the recruitment consultants inviting applications to become members of the newly announced London Policing Board.
You have to fill in a form and send in a 2 minute video. Well that will be easy: here you go 11 articles on what is wrong with the police and what needs to be done. Read those. Call me when you've read them.
On iPlayer there is a reading of a book called "Into the Night" - an account of a primary school teacher's year as a special Constable in London. It is well worth hearing because it describes well the reality of the daily job for policemen and how hard it can be and what good policing tries to do.
In the first episode he describes being in a van with colleagues and the men describing openly their views of the women they see - their thoughts on their arses and whether they fit with their faces or vice versa and whether they'd do them and so on.
He's shocked but mainly at his own reaction. He doesn't raise this with his superiors unlike, say, racist language because he concludes that if this happens with no-one checking themselves it must be so widespread that the superiors must know it is happening. So no point telling them what they already know. That is your bad culture right there. That kind of thinking about women is deeply embedded and it is not hard to find in groups which are largely male, almost without anyone realising it is happening or why it might be sub-optimal or why it might not lead to good outcomes.
This kind of "banter" is common in all-male settings, unfortunately, but hopefully becoming less so. People say things like it's just harmless or it's natural because (straight) men will always be attracted to women and you can't stop them expressing that. In my opinion seeing an attractive woman and sharing opinions on her appearance with a group of other men are two entirely seperate things. The first you can't do much about, no doubt the lizard part of the male brain is hard wired to seek out a mate from puberty. The second is I think nothing to do with the first, rather it is all about male group dynamics - they could be talking about cars or football, it is all about strengthening the in-group and the individual's place in it. But in the process you create an out-group - in this case women. This is why it is not harmless, especially in the context of where the group in question has power over women (like the police, or the CBI). As a man it can be quite hard to push back against this stuff as men who get called out for it can respond pretty agressively in my experience and it is frequently older, higher status men who do it and they might be eg your boss. But it is important that men do push back against it because by definition this kind of behaviour in all male spaces is hard for women to challenge, and in any case they shouldn't have to shoulder the whole burden of reducing toxic male behaviour on their own.
Neither the male mind nor sex are entirely rational matters. This is not going to change. My modest suggestion is that the focus in bringing a degree of civilization to male action should be to focus on the most essential: how do men behave when women and children are present; and how should men behave towards women in terms of approach and consent when in potentially sexualised environments - which with most men from puberty onwards until a certain age is reached (!?) is almost never entirely absent.
“ Business owners like cash because it helps them avoid the sky-high card processing fees charged by banks and machine provider”
This is provably wrong. Cash handling is more expensive - as some basic desk research would quickly tell him.
Cash is inconvenient, dirty, wasteful, risky and pointless. The idea that we are still going to be carrying around silly scraps of paper and shards of worthless metal in our pockets in any great volume in the next decade is for the birds.
Complaining about high card fees is not "provably wrong" so much as outdated. It's not that long since Amazon barred Visa because they charged too much, and the newer, cheaper payment processors have only been around a couple of years.
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
These things have a price and.as the government is desperate in this case the price will be eye watering.high.and a lot more than the suggested headline amount of £500 million
The government spends, or rather borrows and spends, tens of billions every year to subsidise consumption.
Compared to that the JLR subsidy (and I know nothing about the details) is trivially immaterial.
I'm not saying the subsidy isn't worth it. The UK vehicle manufacturing industry is in last chance saloon. The EU has 35 battery plants in build or planned. This is almost our only chance of getting a major plant.
I'm saying it's going to be a lot of money partly because the stakes are so high.
Hang on. You are one of those who spent all that time telling us that we should not regard the EU as a single country. That the idea of a state called Europe was a Leaver myth.
And yet when it suits your argument you choose to refer to the EU as a single state for the purposes of making it seem like we are far behind. 35 battery plants planned or being built is just over one per country so if this plant is approved then the UK is no different in that respect to the EU average.
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
Who's criticising ? I don't think the deal has yet been done, but it seems eminently sensible to me. My complaint is that we didn't start this process several years ago. And I'd like to know who will be providing the technology.
So, net migration for last year has come in at 606,000. In advance, most outlets were forecasting at least 700,000. Clever spinning, or just poor forecasts?
Either way, Sunak and Braverman can spin it as a huge success - 100,000 less than predictions, so migration is firmly under control and coming down rapidly.
I did have that same thought when I saw the numbers this morning. But too obvious to be clever on their part.
On my LinkedIn feed this morning, an email from the recruitment consultants inviting applications to become members of the newly announced London Policing Board.
You have to fill in a form and send in a 2 minute video. Well that will be easy: here you go 11 articles on what is wrong with the police and what needs to be done. Read those. Call me when you've read them.
On iPlayer there is a reading of a book called "Into the Night" - an account of a primary school teacher's year as a special Constable in London. It is well worth hearing because it describes well the reality of the daily job for policemen and how hard it can be and what good policing tries to do.
In the first episode he describes being in a van with colleagues and the men describing openly their views of the women they see - their thoughts on their arses and whether they fit with their faces or vice versa and whether they'd do them and so on.
He's shocked but mainly at his own reaction. He doesn't raise this with his superiors unlike, say, racist language because he concludes that if this happens with no-one checking themselves it must be so widespread that the superiors must know it is happening. So no point telling them what they already know. That is your bad culture right there. That kind of thinking about women is deeply embedded and it is not hard to find in groups which are largely male, almost without anyone realising it is happening or why it might be sub-optimal or why it might not lead to good outcomes.
If you've not heard groups of women talking about men, I've got bad news for you about why your teenage daughter taped that picture of Justin Bieber to her bedroom wall.
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
The number of computer programmers and software developers required is an indictment of the younger generation given how much time they spend on social media and playing games.
Basic spreadsheet ability is seriously lacking in many young office workers.
Basic anything ability is seriously lacking in many older office workers.
(We need to make training/education in your 40s and 50s culturally acceptable. I'll be working into my 70s).
So, net migration for last year has come in at 606,000. In advance, most outlets were forecasting at least 700,000. Clever spinning, or just poor forecasts?
Either way, Sunak and Braverman can spin it as a huge success - 100,000 less than predictions, so migration is firmly under control and coming down rapidly.
I did have that same thought when I saw the numbers this morning. But too obvious to be clever on their part.
The BBC were reporting "expectations management" before the numbers were released.
"You can’t grow your population at 700,000 a year – where on earth are you going to house these people? We build about 180,000 new homes a year.
Of course more than a million have come because this is a net figure, if it does turn out to be 700,000.
You just can’t grow the population at that pace. The pressure it places on public services and housing … The whole government needs to work together to deal with unprecedented population growth, which just is not sustainable."
He has been a full-throated supporter of the very points-based system which has allowed these people in. So if it wasn't the system itself that was the prize, what was it? To stop people coming.
The government needs to face into a difficult challenge. If we are not going to allow people in using points to fill critical vacancies, then we will need to compel people already here to take these jobs and in many cases likely move.
That could be fascinating to watch. "If you want to keep claiming benefits, you need to move to Wisbech and work in a food factory".
I may be deluded, but wasn't this the rationale from the start. Justification to cut the welfare system to as close to zero as is politically possible. Sunak has made no secret of his distaste for the "something for nothing" society. If claimants are not prepared to move to a Fenland caravan of multiple occupancy their benefits will be curtailed, even though the Fenland farmer doesn't want useless domestic (home grown) economic migrants failing to pick, or pack enough fruit on time.
More from Sir John Bigot: "We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures."
So two problems: 1. How do you compensate these "workers" who are compelled to move to another part of the country. And for the locals about to be flooded by the chronically sick and disabled, will NHS facilities be beefed up to cope with this new demand? 2. How do you compensate the employers who have these "workers" imposed upon them? Productivity and absence will be major issues if the "workers" are too ill.
This is the typical crayon politics from a right wing who insist they have the "common sense" solutions and nobody else has any ideas. What he proposes will not work, at a very basic level and even more so when you consider the details.
Yet they keep saying this stupid, and have moron media repeat it, and there is now a client vote so dulled by this avalanche of "news" that they don't ask how. But we can't then talk about the actual issue or actual ideas to resolve, because Crayons.
I would take issue with you on one point. It has always been the case that workers had to move to where the work was. This applied to whole villages moving hundreds of miles for coal mining or, in more recent times, peple moving to new factories, new industries or just because that was what their current job demanded. For many people this is the norm not the exception. So the idea that these people should be compensated for moving to where the work is is ridiculous. No one was compensating EU workers having to travel to the UK to get work. Why should we compensate Britons having to move around within their own country. That is life.
My compensation point isn't for the pain of moving round the country for work. I've done it repeatedly so I agree with your basic argument.
By "compensation" I meant who would pay for it? A while back Widnes to Wisbech to work in food factories was the example. The differential in housing costs makes it an absolute non-starter. People simply don't have the ability to pay £large for wages £low.
But that is an issue whether those workers are coming from Widnes, Wraclaw or Windhoek.
Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
A remarkably stupid take on your part. The problem is really quite simple, where do the 600,000 people who moved here last year live? We aren't building anything like enough stuff to merely replace existing buildings and infrastructure. No government in living memory has done so. So the UK will become proportionally more crowded, more expensive, more dilapidated, and it gets worse year after year, with no end in sight.
Not one political party in the UK is serious about either limiting immigration, or building enough stuff to make immigration sustainable.
Frankly people like you who reach for the "racism" nonsense when people voice their concerns about immigration are as much a part of the problem as the NIMBYest curtain-twitcher in the Home Counties.
That ship seems to have sailed with Brexit. We're a high immigration economy now, for better or worse.
I have zero problems with a high immigration economy but we need to build houses / flats so everyone has somewhere to live.
About 10% to 15% of voters share your view on immigration.
People may not choose it, but its a coherent and sensible plan unlike what most voters and all political parties are choosing.
Given our demographics the choices are broadly:
1. Plan for immigration and invest in building more property and services around it. 2. Don't plan for or allow immigration and see industry and competitiveness decline along with big struggles in resourcing key services including health and social care. 3. Don't plan for immigration but allow it anyway resulting in ongoing tensions and struggles for those without housing wealth
The Tories are offering 2 (without being honest about the economic impact) but consistently delivering 3 (and then trying to shift the blame onto the blob). Labour will do similarish but with softer language.
So, net migration for last year has come in at 606,000. In advance, most outlets were forecasting at least 700,000. Clever spinning, or just poor forecasts?
Either way, Sunak and Braverman can spin it as a huge success - 100,000 less than predictions, so migration is firmly under control and coming down rapidly.
How MailOnline covering the migration figures - tucked away down here, a long way below the big top story of Devil Baby eating Percy Pigs in the nude. 🥹
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
These things have a price and.as the government is desperate in this case the price will be eye watering.high.and a lot more than the suggested headline amount of £500 million
The government spends, or rather borrows and spends, tens of billions every year to subsidise consumption.
Compared to that the JLR subsidy (and I know nothing about the details) is trivially immaterial.
I'm not saying the subsidy isn't worth it. The UK vehicle manufacturing industry is in last chance saloon. The EU has 35 battery plants in build or planned. This is almost our only chance of getting a major plant.
I'm saying it's going to be a lot of money partly because the stakes are so high.
Hang on. You are one of those who spent all that time telling us that we should not regard the EU as a single country. That the idea of a state called Europe was a Leaver myth.
And yet when it suits your argument you choose to refer to the EU as a single state for the purposes of making it seem like we are far behind. 35 battery plants planned or being built is just over one per country so if this plant is approved then the UK is no different in that respect to the EU average.
For the purposes of the industry, it is a single market. And you should be comparing the respective size of the markets, not the numbers of countries. If you were doing the latter, you might equally count Scotland, Wales and Ireland as separate entities.
Comedy from Jenrick. A 24% YonY increase in migration shows the government is reducing migration, and you can't trust Labour as they don't want to reduce migration like the government are doing.
The whole narrative, and by both main parties is nonsensical playground politics. Labour should ease up on the condemnation of the number, or do they plan on returning Ukrainians and Hong Kongers from whence they came? And is it Labour Party policy to remove a key funding requirement for Universities? No, well they are best advised to stfu.
I am more nervous of Suella's inevitable conflation of plus 606k justifiable migrants with boat people which comes later today.
I don't know about this. We know quite a few Ukrainians and some do want to go back but I'd estimate it at much less than 50%. The ones with kids in particular seem most intent on staying.
Also, the first wave of refugees were from Donetsk, Zaporizhzhiya, Dnipropetrovsk, etc. because the places in the East got the most fucked up at the start. Lots of these people are culturally, ethnically and linguistically Russian so they are somewhat unsure about what their status will be in whatever post-SMO Ukraine looks like. This fear also fuels return hesitancy.
There's an upbeat article in the New Yorker this morning about conditions and combat on the "Zero Line". Well worth a read. It's basically Passchendaele but with smartphones.
Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
A remarkably stupid take on your part. The problem is really quite simple, where do the 600,000 people who moved here last year live? We aren't building anything like enough stuff to merely replace existing buildings and infrastructure. No government in living memory has done so. So the UK will become proportionally more crowded, more expensive, more dilapidated, and it gets worse year after year, with no end in sight.
Not one political party in the UK is serious about either limiting immigration, or building enough stuff to make immigration sustainable.
Frankly people like you who reach for the "racism" nonsense when people voice their concerns about immigration are as much a part of the problem as the NIMBYest curtain-twitcher in the Home Counties.
That ship seems to have sailed with Brexit. We're a high immigration economy now, for better or worse.
I have zero problems with a high immigration economy but we need to build houses / flats so everyone has somewhere to live.
About 10% to 15% of voters share your view on immigration.
People may not choose it, but its a coherent and sensible plan unlike what most voters and all political parties are choosing.
Given our demographics the choices are broadly:
1. Plan for immigration and invest in building more property and services around it. 2. Don't plan for or allow immigration and see industry and competitiveness decline along with big struggles in resourcing key services including health and social care. 3. Don't plan for immigration but allow it anyway resulting in ongoing tensions and struggles for those without housing wealth
The Tories are offering 2 (without being honest about the economic impact) but consistently delivering 3 (and then trying to shift the blame onto the blob). Labour will do similarish but with softer language.
What we need is 1.
Agreed. We're never going to have a 'fortress UK'. We're going to have immigration. It's the governments responsbility to manage it.
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
These things have a price and.as the government is desperate in this case the price will be eye watering.high.and a lot more than the suggested headline amount of £500 million
The government spends, or rather borrows and spends, tens of billions every year to subsidise consumption.
Compared to that the JLR subsidy (and I know nothing about the details) is trivially immaterial.
I'm not saying the subsidy isn't worth it. The UK vehicle manufacturing industry is in last chance saloon. The EU has 35 battery plants in build or planned. This is almost our only chance of getting a major plant.
I'm saying it's going to be a lot of money partly because the stakes are so high.
Hang on. You are one of those who spent all that time telling us that we should not regard the EU as a single country. That the idea of a state called Europe was a Leaver myth.
And yet when it suits your argument you choose to refer to the EU as a single state for the purposes of making it seem like we are far behind. 35 battery plants planned or being built is just over one per country so if this plant is approved then the UK is no different in that respect to the EU average.
I'm guessing Luxembourg doesn't have many battery plants. There are maybe six or eight major producing countries. Five or so plants per country is rather different from zero or one.
Not massively keen on the "When it suits your.argument" put down when you are being so tendentious yourself.
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
These things have a price and.as the government is desperate in this case the price will be eye watering.high.and a lot more than the suggested headline amount of £500 million
The government spends, or rather borrows and spends, tens of billions every year to subsidise consumption.
Compared to that the JLR subsidy (and I know nothing about the details) is trivially immaterial.
I'm not saying the subsidy isn't worth it. The UK vehicle manufacturing industry is in last chance saloon. The EU has 35 battery plants in build or planned. This is almost our only chance of getting a major plant.
I'm saying it's going to be a lot of money partly because the stakes are so high.
Without the upheavals of the last three years I doubt government would have cared if all the electric cars were imported.
The focus has always been on the consumption side ie what types of care people should be allowed to buy rather than where they were produced.
I would take issue with you on one point. It has always been the case that workers had to move to where the work was. This applied to whole villages moving hundreds of miles for coal mining or, in more recent times, peple moving to new factories, new industries or just because that was what their current job demanded. For many people this is the norm not the exception. So the idea that these people should be compensated for moving to where the work is is ridiculous. No one was compensating EU workers having to travel to the UK to get work. Why should we compensate Britons having to move around within their own country. That is life.
My compensation point isn't for the pain of moving round the country for work. I've done it repeatedly so I agree with your basic argument.
By "compensation" I meant who would pay for it? A while back Widnes to Wisbech to work in food factories was the example. The differential in housing costs makes it an absolute non-starter. People simply don't have the ability to pay £large for wages £low.
Put another way, how is it expected to happen, when it hasn't happened already? Actual direction of people to move home from X to Y to sort out job imbalances would strike Stalin as a bit OTT. Making them want move voluntarily is the challenge.
How good are Job Centres these days at identifying job opportunities in other areas? During my brief period on benefits I remember the computer system in the Centre did turn up potential jobs elsewhere, but in very summary form. Say you're in Aberdeen and have been off on maternity leave but now thinking of coming back into the workforce. You see there's a vacancy in Hull - you've never been there and know nothing about it, good or bad. What might make you think that moving there would be a realistic option to consider?
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
Just Stop Oil protesters have now targeted another key oil-consuming demographic the Chelsea Flower Show. Apparently the only good garden is one that grows food.
Just Stop Oil protesters have now targeted another key oil-consuming demographic the Chelsea Flower Show. Apparently the only good garden is one that grows food.
“The hitch for Moscow is Beijing — a crucial economic partner since the invasion of Ukraine — appears in no rush to engage. It shows how weak wartime Moscow’s bargaining power has become” https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1661611759197626370
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
Who's criticising ? I don't think the deal has yet been done, but it seems eminently sensible to me. My complaint is that we didn't start this process several years ago. And I'd like to know who will be providing the technology.
So how long did it take for people to switch from demanding more government investment and praising Biden for doing so to condemning government investment in the predicted Somerset battery plant ?
Who's criticising ? I don't think the deal has yet been done, but it seems eminently sensible to me. My complaint is that we didn't start this process several years ago. And I'd like to know who will be providing the technology.
Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
You really didn’t need to repeat that bile.
Many of us on the centre-right are proud of what the UK has done for Ukraine and Hong Kong over the past year, and believe that a skills-based system is better than a free-for-all based on nationality, that had the effect of driving down wages for the very poorest in society.
The very poorest in society are either on minimum wage or more likely not working. Its the low end of the squeezed middle that could be said to have benefitted from recent wage inflation.
Many were working jobs like hospitality which were nailed down hard to whatever minimum wage was, now many of those people for the first time are finding that there wages have risen above minimum wage. Are there still those on min wage yes sure there is. That however does not mean some workers have seen their wages rise above minimum
I still think he will make a small majority with the help of a serious dod of seats from Scotland.
We may have a test of that shortly:
This evening MPs are expected to approve a 30 day ban from the Commons for Margaret Ferrier, who broke Covid rules. A recall petition will be triggered in Rutherglen and Hamilton West and a by-election could be looming…..
If there is a by-election, Scottish Labour has high hopes of winning this seat from the SNP. Sir Keir Starmer is in Scotland today and I’ve heard he’s expected to visit Rutherglen tomorrow.
Pity help us if the creep that London Labour are putting up in Rutherglen is the typical loser they will be punting. Lucky there are so many numpties in Scotland.
Asylum backlog now upto 172,000. So more lies from Braverman !
Welcome to the Asylum UK hotline. Your call is impotent to us. Currently we are dealing with a high volume of calls. You are number ONE SEVEN ONE NINE NINE SIX in the queue. Please hold the line. The call handler will be with you as soon as possible. [Rod Stewart Sailing plays]
Is this bit about food regulation ? “You need major, major overhaul of the whole enchilada with respect to public health in this country.”
Given US portion sizes perhaps there should be a ban on serving the whole enchilada and it should be split into thirds for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Asylum backlog now upto 172,000. So more lies from Braverman !
Welcome to the Asylum UK hotline. Your call is important to us. Currently we are dealing with a high volume of calls. You are number ONE SEVEN ONE NINE NINE SIX in the queue. Please hold the line. The call handler will be with you as soon as possible. [Rod Stewart Sailing plays]
On Topic. To back up what you are saying Mike, Opinion tracker also has Starmer satisfaction going in wrong direction for a long time. During the period of good Labour polls, Starmer satisfaction has been going the wrong way quite distinctly.
I know it’s become a PB meme to say it, but to be serious, we should try to explain how and why the contrast of party holding high, leader going down simultaneously. The best answer I can give, how a leaders satisfaction is linked on an invisible up down scale with opponent. But they can both go down or both go up at same time, so it’s not a great answer.
“Starmer is not doing as well as Cameron which should be worrying for Labour. He is also behind Neil Kinnock who never won a general election.” Makes me think, from psephological perspective not media headline, we should read these leader satisfaction ratings side by side with their opponents, also the political parties current satisfaction ratings, before writing up the headlines?
Additionally, Maybe satisfaction is not the right psephological word to use. I think simple happy/unhappy might be a better word when asking the question of voters, for what we are trying to capture. Just trying to sound more scientific can harm the quality of data returned?
Just Stop Oil protesters have now targeted another key oil-consuming demographic the Chelsea Flower Show. Apparently the only good garden is one that grows food.
An interesting link between two big stories today is that Tata is the recipient of huge government subsidies for a battery plant and Tata Consultancy Services is the instrument behind much of the growth in immigration.
Clearly they are a vital part of our economy doing much good for the country. We should be praising and celebrating them.
Is this bit about food regulation ? “You need major, major overhaul of the whole enchilada with respect to public health in this country.”
Given US portion sizes perhaps there should be a ban on serving the whole enchilada and it should be split into thirds for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Not sure if you're joking, but "the whole enchilada" is a common phrase in the US like "the whole shooting match" or "the whole kit and caboodle" here.
So, if correct, Michael Smithson's view is if anything understated. A useful exercise is to think, even incompletely, of this: if Labour need to hold all their seats and win 125 extra to obtain a majority of 1, which are the 125 seats they will win? And which is the 125th most difficult of those they will win. And do you still think they will?
If the SNP do well, and Labour miss some targets, they may need to get down to seats Rugby, Rochford, Banbury (155th place) to win a majority. Don't bet the farm.
Anyway, Lab needing LD support is the best result available!
Work visas have increased from 162,588 to 345,451 in the year ending March 2023. Other visas including humanitarian schemes for Ukrainians, Afghans and Syrians have also soared from 51,031 to 265,270 in the same period.
The number of computer programmers and software developers required is an indictment of the younger generation given how much time they spend on social media and playing games.
Basic spreadsheet ability is seriously lacking in many young office workers.
Basic anything ability is seriously lacking in many older office workers.
(We need to make training/education in your 40s and 50s culturally acceptable. I'll be working into my 70s).
Is this bit about food regulation ? “You need major, major overhaul of the whole enchilada with respect to public health in this country.”
Given US portion sizes perhaps there should be a ban on serving the whole enchilada and it should be split into thirds for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Not sure if you're joking, but "the whole enchilada" is a common phrase in the US like "the whole shooting match" or "the whole kit and caboodle" here.
I might also suggest that if they split the whole shooting match into two, with each side playing in separate empty fields, they might be able to reduce their firearms death rate very slightly.
Asylum backlog now upto 172,000. So more lies from Braverman !
Welcome to the Asylum UK hotline. Your call is important to us. Currently we are dealing with a high volume of calls. You are number ONE SEVEN ONE NINE NINE SIX in the queue. Please hold the line. The call handler will be with you as soon as possible. [Rod Stewart Sailing plays]
Or Hotel California plays.
This is where I am just sharper than you Farooq. Though you do give it a damn good try, I must admit.
Comedy from Jenrick. A 24% YonY increase in migration shows the government is reducing migration, and you can't trust Labour as they don't want to reduce migration like the government are doing.
It’s the old falling inflation trick.
Everything you need to live is only going up by 8.7% rather than 10.1%, vastly expensive trebles all round! I wouldn’t order any food btw.
Is this bit about food regulation ? “You need major, major overhaul of the whole enchilada with respect to public health in this country.”
Good to see presidential candidates picking ideas from the fascist playbook the rejection of modernism (page 14) subjecting opposing ideologies to violence (page 88)
And what's this "war room" shit about? Why not just call it a bunker, you dead-eyed psycho?
I think what many people are missing about the really low end jobs is the conveyor belt effect.
People would come from abroad to do these jobs, seeing only the rates of pay. When they got squeezed by the higher than expected living costs, they would either move on, or adjust to extremely poor living standards relative to UK expectations.
I knew a chap whose small factory ran on this principle - he would import workers from the country he was connected with (family). The workers left in a steady stream - once they realised how badly they were paid and treated. The rest lived in pretty squalid conditions.
If you are living in the UK, on benefits, taking such a job doesn't make you financially better off (benefits withdrawal). So you are doing an unpleasant (probably) job, in the hope of finding a better job.
Asylum backlog now upto 172,000. So more lies from Braverman !
Welcome to the Asylum UK hotline. Your call is important to us. Currently we are dealing with a high volume of calls. You are number ONE SEVEN ONE NINE NINE SIX in the queue. Please hold the line. The call handler will be with you as soon as possible. [Rod Stewart Sailing plays]
Or Hotel California plays.
This is where I am just sharper than you Farooq. Though you do give it a damn good try, I must admit.
Morning all! Lets all enjoy the spectacle of today's *legal* migration numbers and the mouth-foaming from a right wing. "We're not racists" they insist, they just want all foreigners to go away. Which isn't racism, its jingoism, bigotry, false patriotism where the Empire still dominates the world, all that bollocks.
Starmer's attack on this yesterday was clever, because it calls out the hypocrisy. What may be less clever is that it doesn't face into the reality that much of the WWC red wall vote is as I describe - jingoist and bigoted. They don't want anyone who isn't them living there, never mind people who speak funny.
You really didn’t need to repeat that bile.
Many of us on the centre-right are proud of what the UK has done for Ukraine and Hong Kong over the past year, and believe that a skills-based system is better than a free-for-all based on nationality, that had the effect of driving down wages for the very poorest in society.
The very poorest in society are either on minimum wage or more likely not working. Its the low end of the squeezed middle that could be said to have benefitted from recent wage inflation.
Many were working jobs like hospitality which were nailed down hard to whatever minimum wage was, now many of those people for the first time are finding that there wages have risen above minimum wage. Are there still those on min wage yes sure there is. That however does not mean some workers have seen their wages rise above minimum
It's worth noting that for people prepared to work a lot of hours/have multiple jobs the minimum wage yields modestly decent cash in comparative terms.
£10.42x42hoursx50weeks is £21882. While (eg) nurses can be paid £100k (not many), they can also be paid £22-25k (probably more than are paid £100k).
The gap between min wage and this is not great.
I wonder whether this is part of what is feeding the massive range of strike/industrial action. The minimum wage is great; but the more radical the union, the keener they are on unsocialist differentials.
Comments
So a successful immigration strategy involved the right people migrating to the right places.
Whereas previously government did not control and did not care who was going where.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/25/uk-net-migration-record-high-despite-tory-promises-cut-arrivals
21-22 figures on work visas:
I attended a seminar on the above yesterday, as someone who had covid back in July of 2022 and is still not back to how I was before physically or psychologically, and the amount of resources we will need to deal with the impact of long covid is going to be immense. We either need to invest in helping thousands of people recover from the impacts, or we'll need to find other workers to do their work (and have a social safety net that will support those who can't work as much as they did / at all). Either way, it will cost money and need new workers.
As a man it can be quite hard to push back against this stuff as men who get called out for it can respond pretty agressively in my experience and it is frequently older, higher status men who do it and they might be eg your boss. But it is important that men do push back against it because by definition this kind of behaviour in all male spaces is hard for women to challenge, and in any case they shouldn't have to shoulder the whole burden of reducing toxic male behaviour on their own.
The scale of the problem is huge and growing rapidly, but nobody in Parliament seems to get it. We must be well over 68 million people in the UK, with 70 million likely around 2025. I recall that when the ONS first projected 70 million by 2030, that that was considered quite unlikely, they were in fact quite conservative in their projections. 80 million by 2050 might turn out to be conservative too.
By "compensation" I meant who would pay for it? A while back Widnes to Wisbech to work in food factories was the example. The differential in housing costs makes it an absolute non-starter. People simply don't have the ability to pay £large for wages £low.
Which means like everything else - the solution that allows people to move where the jobs are is to build enough houses in that area that people can really afford to live there.
And lets take Richard's coal mining village as an example - the owner of the mine built houses and rented them out to the workers at a price they could afford to pay based on the wages of the mine / factory.
I assume with current fertility rates that we would have organic population decline without migration. Not as rapid as in some countries as our birth rate isn't the lowest, but some sort of decline given life expectancy seems to have stopped rising.
So is the equilibrium net migration rate say 50,000 a year, or 100,000, or 500,000? I really don't know.
Then we have the equilibrium in terms of zero increase in number of households, because that's the metric that affects property demand. Does migration contribute to or reduce average household size? I assume it depends on the nature of migration: families moving here probably = increase in household size therefore reduced number of households. Individual students immigrating would reduce household size. Retired individuals or couples emigrating to sunny places presumably increases average size and frees up more property than say young families emigrating. And so on.
Increasing population at a faster rate than you increase housing leads to higher property values.
Which so many of the people in charge are all for.
Relentless march towards digital payments doesn’t benefit the average consumer
Adam Williams"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/cashless-britain-disaster-waiting-happen/
Law and order in disarray
Immigration at highest rate ever
Can somebody please remind me what the Tories are actually for?
Equally will there actually be 9000 jobs (who knows)?
The only upside is that without the factory a lot of other jobs will be disappearing over the next few years.
Twitter Spaces is many-to-many, rather than one-to-many, and couldn’t take the load. I’ve not looked into their infrastructure in detail, but from the screenshots it looked like the feed metadata was custom for each user, so Twitter’s servers were trying to compute half a million different feeds simultaneously.
(And, from your writings here and what we know of you, would have an awful lot to contribute to the Board)
Compared to that the JLR subsidy (and I know nothing about the details) is trivially immaterial.
Students (mostly temporary)
Ukranians (mostly temporary)
Hong Kongers (British)
Nurses
Care workers
Doctors
Software Developers
Other IT Consultants
Management Consultants
Accountants
That sounds like a total win-win for Brexit.
I'm saying it's going to be a lot of money partly because the stakes are so high.
Basic spreadsheet ability is seriously lacking in many young office workers.
Either way, Sunak and Braverman can spin it as a huge success - 100,000 less than predictions, so migration is firmly under control and coming down rapidly.
Then Labour fcuks up enough to give the Cons a chance.
Rinse and repeat,
A Labour win has been over hyped already by the overwhelmingly Brit Nat unionist media in Scotland (including BBC Scotland and to a lesser extent STV). If the SNP were to hold a seat, which was one of the six that Labour held between 2017-2019, that would be a disaster for Labour in Scotland.
I await with interest who the SNP candidate turns out to be, as that may be critical. The Labour candidate Michael Shanks seems to think attacking Ferrier is going to get the job done for him, but he will be attacked for his party's "make Brexit work" and other stances not approved by a majority in Scotland (he can't go heavily on GRR, for example, as Labour MSPs were more in favour than SNP MSPs).
“ Business owners like cash because it helps them avoid the sky-high card processing fees charged by banks and machine provider”
This is provably wrong. Cash handling is more expensive - as some basic desk research would quickly tell him.
Cash is inconvenient, dirty, wasteful, risky and pointless. The idea that we are still going to be carrying around silly scraps of paper and shards of worthless metal in our pockets in any great volume in the next decade is for the birds.
"We’ve got 2.5 million people on long-term sick leave. We’ve got very many disabled people who said they want to work and can’t get jobs. We’ve got a lot of people who left the workforce during Covid, older people typically, who we need to get back into the workforce. So the argument there are no Britons for these jobs does not really stand up to the test of those figures."
So two problems:
1. How do you compensate these "workers" who are compelled to move to another part of the country. And for the locals about to be flooded by the chronically sick and disabled, will NHS facilities be beefed up to cope with this new demand?
2. How do you compensate the employers who have these "workers" imposed upon them? Productivity and absence will be major issues if the "workers" are too ill.
This is the typical crayon politics from a right wing who insist they have the "common sense" solutions and nobody else has any ideas. What he proposes will not work, at a very basic level and even more so when you consider the details.
Yet they keep saying this stupid, and have moron media repeat it, and there is now a client vote so dulled by this avalanche of "news" that they don't ask how. But we can't then talk about the actual issue or act Indeed. Year on year it has come down by growing +24%.
And at some point the Tory party policy of wanting both substantially less and substantially more inward migration at the same time may be found to have a small flaw in its reasoning.
https://mattgoodwin.substack.com/p/the-ticking-time-bomb?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=858965&post_id=123551977&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
KENTUCKY: Man shoots roommate in the butt for eating the last Hot Pocket. 🇺🇸
We defy anyone to find us a more American story than this.
https://twitter.com/TheTNHoller/status/1661459284352282625
And yet when it suits your argument you choose to refer to the EU as a single state for the purposes of making it seem like we are far behind. 35 battery plants planned or being built is just over one per country so if this plant is approved then the UK is no different in that respect to the EU average.
I don't think the deal has yet been done, but it seems eminently sensible to me. My complaint is that we didn't start this process several years ago. And I'd like to know who will be providing the technology.
The Guardian, which is no friend of the government, reports it quite neutrally.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/24/jlr-owner-uk-electric-car-battery-factory-tata-somerset
(We need to make training/education in your 40s and 50s culturally acceptable. I'll be working into my 70s).
Given our demographics the choices are broadly:
1. Plan for immigration and invest in building more property and services around it.
2. Don't plan for or allow immigration and see industry and competitiveness decline along with big struggles in resourcing key services including health and social care.
3. Don't plan for immigration but allow it anyway resulting in ongoing tensions and struggles for those without housing wealth
The Tories are offering 2 (without being honest about the economic impact) but consistently delivering 3 (and then trying to shift the blame onto the blob). Labour will do similarish but with softer language.
What we need is 1.
And you should be comparing the respective size of the markets, not the numbers of countries. If you were doing the latter, you might equally count Scotland, Wales and Ireland as separate entities.
I am more nervous of Suella's inevitable conflation of plus 606k justifiable migrants with boat people which comes later today.
Also, the first wave of refugees were from Donetsk, Zaporizhzhiya, Dnipropetrovsk, etc. because the places in the East got the most fucked up at the start. Lots of these people are culturally, ethnically and linguistically Russian so they are somewhat unsure about what their status will be in whatever post-SMO Ukraine looks like. This fear also fuels return hesitancy.
There's an upbeat article in the New Yorker this morning about conditions and combat on the "Zero Line". Well worth a read. It's basically Passchendaele but with smartphones.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/29/two-weeks-at-the-front-in-ukraine
Not massively keen on the "When it suits your.argument" put down when you are being so tendentious yourself.
The focus has always been on the consumption side ie what types of care people should be allowed to buy rather than where they were produced.
How good are Job Centres these days at identifying job opportunities in other areas? During my brief period on benefits I remember the computer system in the Centre did turn up potential jobs elsewhere, but in very summary form. Say you're in Aberdeen and have been off on maternity leave but now thinking of coming back into the workforce. You see there's a vacancy in Hull - you've never been there and know nothing about it, good or bad. What might make you think that moving there would be a realistic option to consider?
another key oil-consuming demographicthe Chelsea Flower Show. Apparently the only good garden is one that grows food.https://www.gbnews.com/just-stop-oil-chelsea-flower-show-orange-paint
Plough your gardens everyone and plant food or else Just Stop Oil will come and throw paint at you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_paint
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1661611759197626370
DESANTIS: "The woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural marxism.”
“It's an attack on the truth — and because it’s a war on truth, I think we have no choice but to wage a war on woke.”
https://twitter.com/DeSantisWarRoom/status/1661525909034213376
Is this bit about food regulation ?
“You need major, major overhaul of the whole enchilada with respect to public health in this country.”
Please hold the line. The call handler will be with you as soon as possible.
[Rod Stewart Sailing plays]
I know it’s become a PB meme to say it, but to be serious, we should try to explain how and why the contrast of party holding high, leader going down simultaneously. The best answer I can give, how a leaders satisfaction is linked on an invisible up down scale with opponent. But they can both go down or both go up at same time, so it’s not a great answer.
“Starmer is not doing as well as Cameron which should be worrying for Labour. He is also behind Neil Kinnock who never won a general election.” Makes me think, from psephological perspective not media headline, we should read these leader satisfaction ratings side by side with their opponents, also the political parties current satisfaction ratings, before writing up the headlines?
Additionally, Maybe satisfaction is not the right psephological word to use. I think simple happy/unhappy might be a better word when asking the question of voters, for what we are trying to capture. Just trying to sound more scientific can harm the quality of data returned?
here it is:
https://kellnerpolitics.com/2023/01/27/801/
So, if correct, Michael Smithson's view is if anything understated.
A useful exercise is to think, even incompletely, of this: if Labour need to hold all their seats and win 125 extra to obtain a majority of 1, which are the 125 seats they will win? And which is the 125th most difficult of those they will win. And do you still think they will?
If the SNP do well, and Labour miss some targets, they may need to get down to seats Rugby, Rochford, Banbury (155th place) to win a majority. Don't bet the farm.
Anyway, Lab needing LD support is the best result available!
Everything you need to live is only going up by 8.7% rather than 10.1%, vastly expensive trebles all round!
I wouldn’t order any food btw.
the rejection of modernism (page 14)
subjecting opposing ideologies to violence (page 88)
And what's this "war room" shit about? Why not just call it a bunker, you dead-eyed psycho?
People would come from abroad to do these jobs, seeing only the rates of pay. When they got squeezed by the higher than expected living costs, they would either move on, or adjust to extremely poor living standards relative to UK expectations.
I knew a chap whose small factory ran on this principle - he would import workers from the country he was connected with (family). The workers left in a steady stream - once they realised how badly they were paid and treated. The rest lived in pretty squalid conditions.
If you are living in the UK, on benefits, taking such a job doesn't make you financially better off (benefits withdrawal). So you are doing an unpleasant (probably) job, in the hope of finding a better job.
£10.42x42hoursx50weeks is £21882. While (eg) nurses can be paid £100k (not many), they can also be paid £22-25k (probably more than are paid £100k).
The gap between min wage and this is not great.
I wonder whether this is part of what is feeding the massive range of strike/industrial action. The minimum wage is great; but the more radical the union, the keener they are on unsocialist differentials.