On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic afoot whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
There doesn't seem to be any good reason for not finding out what's actually there.
as with so many things in this country, upsetting the sensibilities of boomers.
I recall, from about 20 years ago, lounging on a beach in Alderney and watching someone with a JCB or similar trying to demolish a blockhouse left over from the Nazi years. Took him all day and by evening he was by no means finished. As I recall, and it’s over years since I last visited the Isle, there was a marked resistance to discussion of the Occupation. I seem to recall parties in a large one-time gun site though.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
It seems so.
We cannot send asylum seekers to Rwanda because: We can't actually catch everyone coming in "illegally" We don't have anywhere to intern them after we catch them We don't have officials to process asylum claims We don't have a legal system capable of processing claim rejections We can't deport anyone to Rwanda because it's egregiously illegal under domestic and international law We can't send people to Rwanda because Rwanda won't take them
But unless you pledge fealty to "just send them to Rwanda" you are in favour of the entire population of Africa arriving on Monday.
Oh, and the strongest advocate of such cognitive dissonance just complained about the "wilful stupidity" he sees in others.
There doesn't seem to be any good reason for not finding out what's actually there.
as with so many things in this country, upsetting the sensibilities of boomers.
THE BOOMERS ARE UPSET
[PB motto]
And generation x is relentlessly uninformed about geography, history and psychology. Not "in this country." The history and psychology you can research for yourself.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
It’s not exotic. It is indeed logic
As others have pointed out we have three basic choices:
1. Accept them all 2. Deport them somewhere else 3. Imprison them forever
When you boil away all the nonsense about “legal routes” and “processing centres” and “Ascension Island” and “massive barges” that is the choice
The left adopts various versions of 1, but without ever saying so, because it is politically unpopular and in the end calamitous (as some realise)
The Tory government pretends to go for 2 but is too pathetic to follow through so in the end goes for 1 but with its own gestural smokescreens to hide this
No one accepts 3, because it is inhuman - which it is
I personally believe we have to try 2 and in the end we will - because 1 is ultimately catastrophic, but what I personally believe is, of course, irrelevant and meaningless. In 18 months we will have a Labour government. Let’s see how they square this hideous circle
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
There it is. The wilful stupidity. What happens when 2 million people cross the channel with “valid claims to asylum”
By your logic we accept them. And then we have a civil war
There doesn't seem to be any good reason for not finding out what's actually there.
as with so many things in this country, upsetting the sensibilities of boomers.
THE BOOMERS ARE UPSET
[PB motto]
And generation x is relentlessly uninformed about geography, history and psychology. Not "in this country." The history and psychology you can research for yourself.
gen x'ers aren't rich enough to be pandered to by politicians.
There are three things the government can do with asylum seekers:
1. Accept them into British society 2. Send them somewhere else including the country they originally came from 3. Incarcerate them indefinitely
The government doesn't want to do the first; can't do the second; the third doesn't solve anything.
It won't process asylum claims because the vast majority of claims are valid. It can't send people back in part because it hasn't identified who the invalid claims are. No third country including France thinks this is their problem rather than the UK's. So it falls back on incarcerating migrants as they come in, including possibly in Rwanda. This just means the numbers and the problem accumulate in a particularly expensive and toxic way. Eventually those migrants will need to be accepted or some way found to return them home.
Yes and no. There are plenty with invalid claims. We, the country, used to deport many, many more people than we do now. That may be because the Home Secretary and her predecessors are no good at their jobs and the immigration service is underfunded. But I am wondering, along similar lines to your thinking, whether the problem now is that the government is so fearful of accepting anyone that it would rather process no-one. I think the UK public would be much happier if we accepted those with valid claims and deported those without than this bizarre situation where we just indefinitely incarcerate large numbers, costing lots of money.
And where, pray, are you going to deport them?
Bloke on radio the other day was saying as members of the EU we had access to an agreement to deport failed asylum seekers back to 24 (non EU) countries.
On leaving the EU it was decided not to roll that EU benefit forwards, so we started back at zero, with recently having agreed with Albania to take their failed immigrants back we are a long way behind where we were in 2019.
This is one important factor. Whether or not Brexit was worthwhile in its totality, on this matter, we left and the Tories didn’t negotiate a replacement scheme. This Conservative government, however, having been voted in on a manifesto of Get Brexit Done, cannot acknowledge this fact. It’s only going to be a new government that can get to work on the matter.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic afoot whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
I think the argument is if you think Rwanda is performative nonsense, you should also accept shit on our beaches. Anyone opposed to both Rwanda and shit on beaches is cognitively dissonant.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
1) all of them 2) all of them 3) admit them 4) build nothing, change nothing.
This is the policy that some advocate. People who can dress themselves, even.
I am a Neon Fascist Imperialist - so I think we should build a bedroom per migrant, school class places, hospitals, roads etc in proportion. This is apparently an extreme position. But hey, extremism *is* the Nu Kool.
"Lavatory" is a word I haven't heard used since Margot Leadbetter. Do Southerners still use the term? Presumably. Have they any idea how ludicrous Lavatory Tsar sounds up here?
Up until a few years ago pollsters used to quote errors from sample sizes based on the Central Limit Theorem. Then it became obvious that due to panel polling and weighting that no longer applied. There was then an argument between the academics (Curtice et al) and the pollsters (Boon et al) about how to solve this. The academics want everything to be correctly underpinned by theory, the pollsters want a product that's cheap enough to sell (you can't do both). They compromised by agreeing to add a statement to each poll saying how accurate it is based on past performance: not perfect, but you can calculate it and it's informative.
The upshot of this is that when Deltapoll release the tables for that poll, it will contain a statement telling you how reliable they expect (oversimplification) the poll to be. For a previous poll from Deltapoll, we see this sentence
"...All polls are subject to a wide range of potential sources of error. On the basis of the historical record of the polls at recent general elections, there is a 9 in 10 chance that the true value of a party’s support lies within 4 points of the estimates provided by this poll, and a 2 in 3 chance that they lie within 2 points..."
“In 2021, enforced returns from the UK decreased to 2,761, 18% fewer than the previous year and 62% fewer than in 2019. The vast majority of enforced returns in the latest year were of Foreign National Offenders (FNOs) and a majority were EU nationals.
“Enforced returns have been declining since the peak in 2012”
And:
“Asylum related returns accounted for only 3% of total returns in 2021.
“In 2021, there were 806 returns of people who had previously claimed asylum in the UK (see section 3.2 below for the definition of an asylum-related return). This is 49% fewer than in the previous year (1,587) and 76% fewer than prior to the pandemic in 2019 (3,332). This continues a downward trend since 2010, when there were 10,663 asylum-related returns. This sharp fall over the decade differs from non-asylum related returns, which were relatively stable until 2016, declined until 2020 and have risen in 2021.”
We’ve gone from 10663 asylum-related returns in a year to 806.
I rather suspect that if the UK did massively increase deportations to say the equivalent of the Obama era USA there would be an even larger increase in people denouncing those deportations as brutal oppression of vulnerable people.
“It’s not the Conservative government’s fault that it doesn’t do anything, because if they did the Left would criticise them,” is one of the stupidest things Conservative supporters say.
He needs to sack Braverman, and replace her with someone who actually will stop the boats.
Yes but as mentioned below by @El_Capitano it has to be combined with having actual humanity. Otherwise, quite apart from the moral vacuum, you lose both Red and Blue wall.
For example, I have a lifelong Conservative voting friend in Surrey who is utterly appalled by Braverman and has not stopped going on about Robert Jenrick callously painting over the mural in the children's asylum centre.
There are actually a vast swathe of decent people who traditionally vote Conservative. They are being turned off from doing so by the re-emergence of the Nasty Party.
Good morning
I am appalled that Braverman and Jenrick are still in post and Sunak needs to remove them both
He has the opportunity in his reshuffle due in a few weeks and after the barge PR disaster the excuse, but sadly I do not have the confidence he will grasp the nettle and do it
I think the point is that it is not just the swing voters that the Tories are losing, they are also losing their core voters too
As long as Sunak is PM he will not lose my vote, and I expect when an election campaign starts a good number will return but how many will depend on many factors including the cost of living and NHS which will top the list with the boats probably third
But he's responsible for the Home Office, and the boats, too. He selected Ms Braverman and Mr Jenrick.
I agree and he needs to sack Braverman and Jenrick
But he's not looking likely to, is he?
Whether that's out of fear of Suella and her fans, or because he approves of what they're doing, hardly matters.
Trouble is that The Boats may be fundamentally Unstoppable.
And that last bit is what makes the issue unsolvable
We are left with the same question of what are the factors that ensure people spend £1000s to get in a small boat to try and cross the channel.
Is it push lead (being in France is so bad you prefer to go to the UK) or is it equally pull lead (our black market allowing people to disappear, years of delays in assessments making things equally pointless),
We need to identify what the crucial factors are and fix them because the French coastline makes stopping the boats at the starting point is an impossible task..
To fix them we should make it easier for refugees to come here by establishing review and entry points in French ports so they can come by ferry or plane. That will stop the illegal boats.
We should allow/encourage refugees to work. We need them in the NHS, care homes, hospitality, building infrastructure. They are mainly healthy and educated. To keep them unemployed at great public expense with penalties on employers is frankly ridiculous.
We need to totally reverse current Home Office policy, clear out HO seniors, and face down the inevitable backlash from the extreme right wingers.
And what happens if instead of 100k trying to come to this country per year more than a million actually do ?
There's an effectively unlimited number of people living in economically backward / politically authoritarian / religiously oppressive / climate threatened / violently failed states around the world.
What happens if more than a million people try to crush into Trafalgar Square? There will be many dead. We should pass a law preventing people going into Trafalgar Square.
What happens if average temperatures climb by more than 5%? We should ban all cars immediately.
What happens if .... Write your own Daily Mail headline.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
And there’s France, which is a failed state as well.
Perhaps what we should do is conquer the countries in question and impose governments we like. I believe we had a go at this policy previously.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
I see the government is to appoint a “lavatories tsar” to encourage councils to re-open the 10% of public lavatories that remain shut after the pandemic.
Oh great. Cones Hotline, 2023 Edition.
On topic, the one wildcard I could potentially see working for Sunak is to announce ID cards. Compulsory for claiming benefit or entering employment. Do it under the guise of a “national emergency” of a wave of boats etc. etc. If you’re being really cynical, throw in a dog-whistle unattributed rumour about recording birth gender on the card.
Labour couldn’t follow without splitting the party. Which is a problem in itself for Starmer, whose approach has basically been to shadow the Tories on most domestic issues and just fight on competence instead. It would be the clear blue water the Tories need.
To be clear I don’t know if it would work, and I don’t support ID cards myself, but as a last-throw-of-the-dice political strategy it has some gruesome merit.
That's actually a good idea, but the competent execution of such a scheme is so far beyond the capacities of this government that it's laughable. Every card issued would have a photo of Alistair Jack's ringpiece on it instead of the card holder. Or somesuch tragi-comic balls up.
Yep, ID Cards are the impossible dream. Similar applied to Vaxports in the pandemic. You just can't see us pulling this sort of thing off.
So the way that you could do ID cards is incrementally. Basically you say that either a driving licence or a passport serves as an ID card; and you then get DVLA to offer a driving-licence-which-doesn’t-allow-you-to-drive. There you go, ID cards.
You then build incrementally on that by keying other government databases to it, one at a time, as and when the political need arises or a rebuild/refactor opportunity.
But… you’re entirely right in that we wouldn’t pull it off. It would become a massive from-scratch project given to Fujitsu or IBM or another one of the consulting usual suspects, who would build it to a monolith spec which completely ignores real world needs, and it would go the way of every other government IT project.
"Lavatory" is a word I haven't heard used since Margot Leadbetter. Do Southerners still use the term? Presumably. Have they any idea how ludicrous Lavatory Tsar sounds up here?
It's a class indicator and a shibboleth for the Tory core. Votes would be lost for saying toilet
I see the government is to appoint a “lavatories tsar” to encourage councils to re-open the 10% of public lavatories that remain shut after the pandemic.
Oh great. Cones Hotline, 2023 Edition.
On topic, the one wildcard I could potentially see working for Sunak is to announce ID cards. Compulsory for claiming benefit or entering employment. Do it under the guise of a “national emergency” of a wave of boats etc. etc. If you’re being really cynical, throw in a dog-whistle unattributed rumour about recording birth gender on the card.
Labour couldn’t follow without splitting the party. Which is a problem in itself for Starmer, whose approach has basically been to shadow the Tories on most domestic issues and just fight on competence instead. It would be the clear blue water the Tories need.
To be clear I don’t know if it would work, and I don’t support ID cards myself, but as a last-throw-of-the-dice political strategy it has some gruesome merit.
That's actually a good idea, but the competent execution of such a scheme is so far beyond the capacities of this government that it's laughable. Every card issued would have a photo of Alistair Jack's ringpiece on it instead of the card holder. Or somesuch tragi-comic balls up.
Yep, ID Cards are the impossible dream. Similar applied to Vaxports in the pandemic. You just can't see us pulling this sort of thing off.
So the way that you could do ID cards is incrementally. Basically you say that either a driving licence or a passport serves as an ID card; and you then get DVLA to offer a driving-licence-which-doesn’t-allow-you-to-drive. There you go, ID cards.
You then build incrementally on that by keying other government databases to it, one at a time, as and when the political need arises or a rebuild/refactor opportunity.
But… you’re entirely right in that we wouldn’t pull it off. It would become a massive from-scratch project given to Fujitsu or IBM or another one of the consulting usual suspects, who would build it to a monolith spec which completely ignores real world needs, and it would go the way of every other government IT project.
I refer the gentleman to the last time a government ID card was implemented.
The demented IT project you mention was spec’d and the tenders sent out. The problem was trying to turn it into the Minority Report.
The DVLA database is a disaster. The number of fraudulent drivers licenses is the cherry on top.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
It’s not exotic. It is indeed logic
As others have pointed out we have three basic choices:
1. Accept them all 2. Deport them somewhere else 3. Imprison them forever
When you boil away all the nonsense about “legal routes” and “processing centres” and “Ascension Island” and “massive barges” that is the choice
The left adopts various versions of 1, but without ever saying so, because it is politically unpopular and in the end calamitous (as some realise)
The Tory government pretends to go for 2 but is too pathetic to follow through so in the end goes for 1 but with its own gestural smokescreens to hide this
No one accepts 3, because it is inhuman - which it is
I personally believe we have to try 2 and in the end we will - because 1 is ultimately catastrophic, but what I personally believe is, of course, irrelevant and meaningless. In 18 months we will have a Labour government. Let’s see how they square this hideous circle
The solution is a mixture of 1 and 2.
1. Accept some (genuine refugees plus healthy educated migrants who will make a positive contribution to the country). Possibly including Australians, Nigerians and French.
2. Deport the rest. Where to you ask? That is why the reviews need to take place in France. They are not deported. They remain where they are. Some may attempt to get in by other means but it will be a diminished number and they will be returned to Alderney.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
You talk about the entire population of China seeking asylum in the UK, and then you say you want to deal with the reality.
The reality is that the entire population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. I found some 2019 figures. Number of asylum applicants = 35,556. Number of those from China = 1,332. Population of China = 1.408 billion.
So, only 4% of asylum seekers were from China, and they represented 0.00009% of the Chinese population. You want to talk about that whole population of China coming here and the actual figures is 0.00009%. Who is detached from reality?
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
Traditionally defining what was a valid claim is what authorities assess using agreed criteria rather than go along with what some bloke on the internet feels in his water. Of course HMG has become so shit at that the some bloke on the internet test is rapidly becoming the go-to method for HMG.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
You talk about the entire population of China seeking asylum in the UK, and then you say you want to deal with the reality.
The reality is that the entire population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. I found some 2019 figures. Number of asylum applicants = 35,556. Number of those from China = 1,332. Population of China = 1.408 billion.
So, only 4% of asylum seekers were from China, and they represented 0.00009% of the Chinese population. You want to talk about that whole population of China coming here and the actual figures is 0.00009%. Who is detached from reality?
Do you know how to claim asylum if you are Chinese, and can't get out of China?
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
I think it is more than signalling their virtue, it is such people actively want as much immigration as possible, legal or illegal, part to increase diversity (actually it is more because they have self-loathing of being white in many cases but we will put that to one side) and part because of the long-term electoral consequences such a shift would bring i.e. a major boost for left-wing parties
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
Although if the basic premise is we don't like foreigners, any foreigners, we don't really want genuine asylum seekers either. In much the same way we didn't like Eastern Europeans turning up to do those jobs we didn't want to do.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
It’s pointless arguing with the left about immigration/asylum. They refuse to engage with actual numbers and retreat to an imaginary and invisible moral high ground. Like small children who hide behind their hands and think that, thereby, they cannot be seen
The left has been infantile for decades. But it is getting worse
It is a commonplace amongst the etiolated commentariat that a sample size can be diagnosed by eye, and if the poll does not please them it can be dismissed airily with "small sample size" before going off to eat a poor. This is because you are stupid.
A minimum sample size is only necessary if the thing involves a test. A test is a comparison between two things. For polls, the test is between the poll number and its upper/lower range. If that range is large, a lower sample size is permissible but the poll is useless. If that range is small, the poll is useful but the minimum sample size is huge. So it's a compromise.
But that's for polls; a comparison between a number and the range of that number
If the study is a comparison between two different numbers, the minimum sample size can veer dramatically, from very low to very high. So the statement "the sample size is too low...." must be suffixed by "...for the test/accuracy"
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
"Signalling my virtue" = not supporting the "just drown them" rhetoric.
I don't have to answer your questions - your government does. And the answers are very similar to those given by all of our neighbouring countries. You can say "a million a year" but even you aren't dumb enough to think that is possible.
Then again you just suggested the entire population of China wants to claim asylum here...
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
It’s pointless arguing with the left about immigration/asylum. They refuse to engage with actual numbers and retreat to an imaginary and invisible moral high ground. Like small children who hide behind their hands and think that, thereby, they cannot be seen
The left has been infantile for decades. But it is getting worse
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
You talk about the entire population of China seeking asylum in the UK, and then you say you want to deal with the reality.
The reality is that the entire population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. I found some 2019 figures. Number of asylum applicants = 35,556. Number of those from China = 1,332. Population of China = 1.408 billion.
So, only 4% of asylum seekers were from China, and they represented 0.00009% of the Chinese population. You want to talk about that whole population of China coming here and the actual figures is 0.00009%. Who is detached from reality?
Your logic appears to be that the whole population of China would not come here therefore none of them would.
The reality is some would come - now where that would be from 0% to 100% I do not know and nor do you.
Likewise we do not know how many would come from Afghanistan or Iran or Burma or Niger or Mali or Sudan or Somalia and so on.
And having a migration strategy of "people can come but we don't know how many would come" is not going to work in reality.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
You talk about the entire population of China seeking asylum in the UK, and then you say you want to deal with the reality.
The reality is that the entire population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. I found some 2019 figures. Number of asylum applicants = 35,556. Number of those from China = 1,332. Population of China = 1.408 billion.
So, only 4% of asylum seekers were from China, and they represented 0.00009% of the Chinese population. You want to talk about that whole population of China coming here and the actual figures is 0.00009%. Who is detached from reality?
Do you know how to claim asylum if you are Chinese, and can't get out of China?
Hint - it is a bit tricky.
And…? Another_richard was urging us to discuss the reality of the situation. The reality of the situation includes those difficulties you mention. The reality of the situation is that the whole population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. Indeed, I’m going to make the bold claim that it will never be the case that the whole population of China will be seeking to come to the UK, So, can we knock off the nonsense?
There are three things the government can do with asylum seekers:
1. Accept them into British society 2. Send them somewhere else including the country they originally came from 3. Incarcerate them indefinitely
The government doesn't want to do the first; can't do the second; the third doesn't solve anything.
It won't process asylum claims because the vast majority of claims are valid. It can't send people back in part because it hasn't identified who the invalid claims are. No third country including France thinks this is their problem rather than the UK's. So it falls back on incarcerating migrants as they come in, including possibly in Rwanda. This just means the numbers and the problem accumulate in a particularly expensive and toxic way. Eventually those migrants will need to be accepted or some way found to return them home.
Yes and no. There are plenty with invalid claims. We, the country, used to deport many, many more people than we do now. That may be because the Home Secretary and her predecessors are no good at their jobs and the immigration service is underfunded. But I am wondering, along similar lines to your thinking, whether the problem now is that the government is so fearful of accepting anyone that it would rather process no-one. I think the UK public would be much happier if we accepted those with valid claims and deported those without than this bizarre situation where we just indefinitely incarcerate large numbers, costing lots of money.
That would be accepted by most if that was the case. The problem is the public is well aware there is a whole pro-immigration industry that will try to widen the definition of 'valid' as much as possible while also doing everything it can to block and / or reverse those who are not, even if those people are a danger to society and / or have committed crimes.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
Then you should have no problem giving us what a maximum number of migrants would be.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
I think it is more than signalling their virtue, it is such people actively want as much immigration as possible, legal or illegal, part to increase diversity (actually it is more because they have self-loathing of being white in many cases but we will put that to one side) and part because of the long-term electoral consequences such a shift would bring i.e. a major boost for left-wing parties
We have record immigration at present. That is under the Conservative government. Are the Tories doing that because it will be a long-term boost for left-wing parties? Odd strategy for them to choose…
I’m thinking of having a late midlife crisis - but I’m not going to buy a Ferrari or marry a 20 year old (I already did the latter)
I’m going to start a rebellion. The real deal. With codes and wind-up radios and whispering in smoky pubs and caches of dynamite hidden in Primrose Hill. We will meet at night in, er, churches - but in the back so we can’t be seen
We will import Enfield rifles hidden amongst iPhones. Who’s with me?
I’m not sure what we will be rebelling AGAINST but that’s a minor detail. I just think it will be fun
I see the government is to appoint a “lavatories tsar” to encourage councils to re-open the 10% of public lavatories that remain shut after the pandemic.
Oh great. Cones Hotline, 2023 Edition.
On topic, the one wildcard I could potentially see working for Sunak is to announce ID cards. Compulsory for claiming benefit or entering employment. Do it under the guise of a “national emergency” of a wave of boats etc. etc. If you’re being really cynical, throw in a dog-whistle unattributed rumour about recording birth gender on the card.
Labour couldn’t follow without splitting the party. Which is a problem in itself for Starmer, whose approach has basically been to shadow the Tories on most domestic issues and just fight on competence instead. It would be the clear blue water the Tories need.
To be clear I don’t know if it would work, and I don’t support ID cards myself, but as a last-throw-of-the-dice political strategy it has some gruesome merit.
That's actually a good idea, but the competent execution of such a scheme is so far beyond the capacities of this government that it's laughable. Every card issued would have a photo of Alistair Jack's ringpiece on it instead of the card holder. Or somesuch tragi-comic balls up.
Yep, ID Cards are the impossible dream. Similar applied to Vaxports in the pandemic. You just can't see us pulling this sort of thing off.
So the way that you could do ID cards is incrementally. Basically you say that either a driving licence or a passport serves as an ID card; and you then get DVLA to offer a driving-licence-which-doesn’t-allow-you-to-drive. There you go, ID cards.
You then build incrementally on that by keying other government databases to it, one at a time, as and when the political need arises or a rebuild/refactor opportunity.
But… you’re entirely right in that we wouldn’t pull it off. It would become a massive from-scratch project given to Fujitsu or IBM or another one of the consulting usual suspects, who would build it to a monolith spec which completely ignores real world needs, and it would go the way of every other government IT project.
Well you don't start from the DVLA as their dataset isn't appropriate as @Malmesbury pointed out earlier.
You can start from the passport office as they are the only people who know who is a UK citizen but then it comes down to what the point of the ID card is and the feature creep that Governments will continue to try and create because they love to fiddle and love short cuts to save money.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
You talk about the entire population of China seeking asylum in the UK, and then you say you want to deal with the reality.
The reality is that the entire population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. I found some 2019 figures. Number of asylum applicants = 35,556. Number of those from China = 1,332. Population of China = 1.408 billion.
So, only 4% of asylum seekers were from China, and they represented 0.00009% of the Chinese population. You want to talk about that whole population of China coming here and the actual figures is 0.00009%. Who is detached from reality?
Your logic appears to be that the whole population of China would not come here therefore none of them would.
The reality is some would come - now where that would be from 0% to 100% I do not know and nor do you.
Likewise we do not know how many would come from Afghanistan or Iran or Burma or Niger or Mali or Sudan or Somalia and so on.
And having a migration strategy of "people can come but we don't know how many would come" is not going to work in reality.
I know what the 2019 figure was. I gave it earlier. That figure was 0.00009%, which is a bit closer to 0% than 100%. If policy changes, that figure could shift, sure. Suggesting it will go from 0.00009% to closer to 100% is palpable nonsense.
There are three things the government can do with asylum seekers:
1. Accept them into British society 2. Send them somewhere else including the country they originally came from 3. Incarcerate them indefinitely
The government doesn't want to do the first; can't do the second; the third doesn't solve anything.
It won't process asylum claims because the vast majority of claims are valid. It can't send people back in part because it hasn't identified who the invalid claims are. No third country including France thinks this is their problem rather than the UK's. So it falls back on incarcerating migrants as they come in, including possibly in Rwanda. This just means the numbers and the problem accumulate in a particularly expensive and toxic way. Eventually those migrants will need to be accepted or some way found to return them home.
Yes and no. There are plenty with invalid claims. We, the country, used to deport many, many more people than we do now. That may be because the Home Secretary and her predecessors are no good at their jobs and the immigration service is underfunded. But I am wondering, along similar lines to your thinking, whether the problem now is that the government is so fearful of accepting anyone that it would rather process no-one. I think the UK public would be much happier if we accepted those with valid claims and deported those without than this bizarre situation where we just indefinitely incarcerate large numbers, costing lots of money.
And where, pray, are you going to deport them?
Bloke on radio the other day was saying as members of the EU we had access to an agreement to deport failed asylum seekers back to 24 (non EU) countries.
On leaving the EU it was decided not to roll that EU benefit forwards, so we started back at zero, with recently having agreed with Albania to take their failed immigrants back we are a long way behind where we were in 2019.
If this was remotely true or interestingly valid then the EU wouid be rapidly deporting millions of people across the world. It is not. Instead they drown in their thousands in the Med or the EU pays Libya and Tunisia to keep them in slave pens
We are talking about people who originate from the EU - i.e. France can send people back to Italy because that is where they entered France from.
Which is why Italy (as 1 example) now try to shift immigrants into France as quickly as they can without doing any paperwork...
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
I think it is more than signalling their virtue, it is such people actively want as much immigration as possible, legal or illegal, part to increase diversity (actually it is more because they have self-loathing of being white in many cases but we will put that to one side) and part because of the long-term electoral consequences such a shift would bring i.e. a major boost for left-wing parties
We have record immigration at present. That is under the Conservative government. Are the Tories doing that because it will be a long-term boost for left-wing parties? Odd strategy for them to choose…
Irrelevant to what I said. I was referring to the desire of many on the left to have as much immigration as possible. The competence of the Tories on the matter is a different topic. What it is fair to say is that they do not want the floodgates open as much as possible.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
It’s pointless arguing with the left about immigration/asylum. They refuse to engage with actual numbers and retreat to an imaginary and invisible moral high ground. Like small children who hide behind their hands and think that, thereby, they cannot be seen
The left has been infantile for decades. But it is getting worse
Putting the Left aside, what are your actual thoughts on immigration/asylum? Am I right in assuming you think the following:
Political asylum: a rather twee concept and should be ditched altogether. Immigration: the natives should be forced to pick fruit.
There are three things the government can do with asylum seekers:
1. Accept them into British society 2. Send them somewhere else including the country they originally came from 3. Incarcerate them indefinitely
The government doesn't want to do the first; can't do the second; the third doesn't solve anything.
It won't process asylum claims because the vast majority of claims are valid. It can't send people back in part because it hasn't identified who the invalid claims are. No third country including France thinks this is their problem rather than the UK's. So it falls back on incarcerating migrants as they come in, including possibly in Rwanda. This just means the numbers and the problem accumulate in a particularly expensive and toxic way. Eventually those migrants will need to be accepted or some way found to return them home.
Yes and no. There are plenty with invalid claims. We, the country, used to deport many, many more people than we do now. That may be because the Home Secretary and her predecessors are no good at their jobs and the immigration service is underfunded. But I am wondering, along similar lines to your thinking, whether the problem now is that the government is so fearful of accepting anyone that it would rather process no-one. I think the UK public would be much happier if we accepted those with valid claims and deported those without than this bizarre situation where we just indefinitely incarcerate large numbers, costing lots of money.
That would be accepted by most if that was the case. The problem is the public is well aware there is a whole pro-immigration industry that will try to widen the definition of 'valid' as much as possible while also doing everything it can to block and / or reverse those who are not, even if those people are a danger to society and / or have committed crimes.
Aa lot of us just do not trust the left on this.
OK, so you don’t trust the left on this. Can I ask: do you trust the Conservative Party on this?
You talk about a pro-immigration industry. Immigration is at a record high under the current Conservative government. Is the Conservative government part of this pro-immigration industry? Or is the Conservative government, despite being in power for over a decade, completely impotent?
He needs to sack Braverman, and replace her with someone who actually will stop the boats.
Yes but as mentioned below by @El_Capitano it has to be combined with having actual humanity. Otherwise, quite apart from the moral vacuum, you lose both Red and Blue wall.
For example, I have a lifelong Conservative voting friend in Surrey who is utterly appalled by Braverman and has not stopped going on about Robert Jenrick callously painting over the mural in the children's asylum centre.
There are actually a vast swathe of decent people who traditionally vote Conservative. They are being turned off from doing so by the re-emergence of the Nasty Party.
Good morning
I am appalled that Braverman and Jenrick are still in post and Sunak needs to remove them both
He has the opportunity in his reshuffle due in a few weeks and after the barge PR disaster the excuse, but sadly I do not have the confidence he will grasp the nettle and do it
I think the point is that it is not just the swing voters that the Tories are losing, they are also losing their core voters too
As long as Sunak is PM he will not lose my vote, and I expect when an election campaign starts a good number will return but how many will depend on many factors including the cost of living and NHS which will top the list with the boats probably third
Why would you vote for the current Tory party that Sunak leads, just because you like Sunak? That's insane. He's in charge of the whole shitshow.
Objectively, Sunak is a dud. He got the job because he doesn’t carry the glaring downsides of either the discredited Johnson or the discredited Truss. Both of which are considerably to his credit, but they don’t make any more able to do the job, sadly.
The upside he ought to be offering is of being the sensible, reasonable guy in contrast to the dangerous ideologies who went before. But he’s blowing that by being forced to back all this nutty, dog whistle stuff, just as Hague was, and for the similar reason of inexperience coupled with desperation.
Because he doesn’t pull off the marvel villain thing as convincingly as some, when they lose the election the membership will decide it’s because they weren’t nasty and mendacious enough and will elect a new more fulsomely villainous leader, ideally with a cackling laugh and gothic cape.
Just hope Starmer does a good job because this will help guarantee him a second term.
The sad thing is that it really is hard to see Starmer being much better. So we just cling to the thought that he surely won't be any worse.
At least with Blair one could believe things really would get better, and in some ways they did, even if he turned out in the end to be another flawed leader.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
It seems so.
We cannot send asylum seekers to Rwanda because: We can't actually catch everyone coming in "illegally" We don't have anywhere to intern them after we catch them We don't have officials to process asylum claims We don't have a legal system capable of processing claim rejections We can't deport anyone to Rwanda because it's egregiously illegal under domestic and international law We can't send people to Rwanda because Rwanda won't take them
But unless you pledge fealty to "just send them to Rwanda" you are in favour of the entire population of Africa arriving on Monday.
Oh, and the strongest advocate of such cognitive dissonance just complained about the "wilful stupidity" he sees in others.
If I make a fair and serious attempt to understand the hawkish argument it would be as follows. We can't have an efficient humane system because that would be a 'pull factor' which would only draw more and more people from all four corners of the world to our shores. So we need the opposite: an inefficient inhumane system. When the driven and desperate picture the UK in their minds eye they should see not a rose garden but a bed of thorns.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
"Signalling my virtue" = not supporting the "just drown them" rhetoric.
I don't have to answer your questions - your government does. And the answers are very similar to those given by all of our neighbouring countries. You can say "a million a year" but even you aren't dumb enough to think that is possible.
Then again you just suggested the entire population of China wants to claim asylum here...
So you're now making things up rather than deal with the unfortunate reality of numbers.
Why is a million a year impossible ?
There are hundreds of millions, billions even depending upon the definitions, who live in failed states, oppressive states, economically backward states and so on.
And most of these countries are increasing in population year upon year.
So the migrants are going to continue and the numbers are likely to increase.
I don't blame them - they have little to lose and potentially much to gain - but any government in this country ultimately has to answer these questions:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
It’s pointless arguing with the left about immigration/asylum. They refuse to engage with actual numbers and retreat to an imaginary and invisible moral high ground. Like small children who hide behind their hands and think that, thereby, they cannot be seen
The left has been infantile for decades. But it is getting worse
Putting the Left aside, what are your actual thoughts on immigration/asylum? Am I right in assuming you think the following:
Political asylum: a rather twee concept and should be ditched altogether. Immigration: the natives should be forced to pick fruit.
No you’re not right
On asylum, I think the concept needs to be radically updated. It was designed for the world of 1945 not the world of global migration. We simply can’t take everyone who wants asylum who can get here, not any more
We shall have to be tougher: but that doesn’t mean excluding everyone
I generally approve of migration. Especially smart people, genuine students, let them in
NB I voted Leave because sovereignty/democracy - I have no problem with Freedom of Movement. However immigration is now too high and, conceptually, is increasingly and gravely questionable as we enter the era of AI and workers become workless
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
Then you should have no problem giving us what a maximum number of migrants would be.
That’s a complete non sequitur. I don’t know how many onions are in my cupboard right now. Oh, another_richard would argue, therefore the figure must be 1.4 billion.
Just because I can’t give you a maximum number doesn’t mean I can’t see your claim that the entire population of China will seek asylum in the UK is bullshit.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
It’s pointless arguing with the left about immigration/asylum. They refuse to engage with actual numbers and retreat to an imaginary and invisible moral high ground. Like small children who hide behind their hands and think that, thereby, they cannot be seen
The left has been infantile for decades. But it is getting worse
And so our own pillar of intellectual maturity has spoken...
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
Then you should have no problem giving us what a maximum number of migrants would be.
That’s a complete non sequitur. I don’t know how many onions are in my cupboard right now. Oh, another_richard would argue, therefore the figure must be 1.4 billion.
Just because I can’t give you a maximum number doesn’t mean I can’t see your claim that the entire population of China will seek asylum in the UK is bullshit.
Aaaand you can’t give a maximum number. Because it would expose your argument as so much bollocks
What is interesting here is the lefty squirming. Like yours. It tells me Labour is really going to struggle with this issue from day 1 of government. They haven’t done any serious thinking about it, they have no new ideas, they will be worse than the Tories
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
Then you should have no problem giving us what a maximum number of migrants would be.
That’s a complete non sequitur. I don’t know how many onions are in my cupboard right now. Oh, another_richard would argue, therefore the figure must be 1.4 billion.
Just because I can’t give you a maximum number doesn’t mean I can’t see your claim that the entire population of China will seek asylum in the UK is bullshit.
Another one making things up.
Its so much easier than deal with reality.
And the reality is numbers.
If 0.1% of China decided to migrate that would be 1.4m.
Would they ? I don't know and nor do you.
Nor do we know how many would come from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and the whole alphabet in between,
But "they can come but we don't know how many would come" isn't the basis for a viable migration strategy.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
Then you should have no problem giving us what a maximum number of migrants would be.
That’s a complete non sequitur. I don’t know how many onions are in my cupboard right now. Oh, another_richard would argue, therefore the figure must be 1.4 billion.
Just because I can’t give you a maximum number doesn’t mean I can’t see your claim that the entire population of China will seek asylum in the UK is bullshit.
It ought to worry us that at least 11m uyghurs and probably a further 17m Chinese Muslims have a cast iron right to come and live here, and we rely on a combo of efficient oppression by their government, plus geography, to prevent them from exercising it.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
I think it is more than signalling their virtue, it is such people actively want as much immigration as possible, legal or illegal, part to increase diversity (actually it is more because they have self-loathing of being white in many cases but we will put that to one side) and part because of the long-term electoral consequences such a shift would bring i.e. a major boost for left-wing parties
We have record immigration at present. That is under the Conservative government. Are the Tories doing that because it will be a long-term boost for left-wing parties? Odd strategy for them to choose…
Irrelevant to what I said. I was referring to the desire of many on the left to have as much immigration as possible. The competence of the Tories on the matter is a different topic. What it is fair to say is that they do not want the floodgates open as much as possible.
I’m glad we agree that the Conservatives are not competent. That’s what I’ve been saying.
We’re not going to solve these problems in a day, so let’s celebrate that we’ve found some consensus for now.
I see the government is to appoint a “lavatories tsar” to encourage councils to re-open the 10% of public lavatories that remain shut after the pandemic.
Oh great. Cones Hotline, 2023 Edition.
On topic, the one wildcard I could potentially see working for Sunak is to announce ID cards. Compulsory for claiming benefit or entering employment. Do it under the guise of a “national emergency” of a wave of boats etc. etc. If you’re being really cynical, throw in a dog-whistle unattributed rumour about recording birth gender on the card.
Labour couldn’t follow without splitting the party. Which is a problem in itself for Starmer, whose approach has basically been to shadow the Tories on most domestic issues and just fight on competence instead. It would be the clear blue water the Tories need.
To be clear I don’t know if it would work, and I don’t support ID cards myself, but as a last-throw-of-the-dice political strategy it has some gruesome merit.
That's actually a good idea, but the competent execution of such a scheme is so far beyond the capacities of this government that it's laughable. Every card issued would have a photo of Alistair Jack's ringpiece on it instead of the card holder. Or somesuch tragi-comic balls up.
Yep, ID Cards are the impossible dream. Similar applied to Vaxports in the pandemic. You just can't see us pulling this sort of thing off.
So the way that you could do ID cards is incrementally. Basically you say that either a driving licence or a passport serves as an ID card; and you then get DVLA to offer a driving-licence-which-doesn’t-allow-you-to-drive. There you go, ID cards.
You then build incrementally on that by keying other government databases to it, one at a time, as and when the political need arises or a rebuild/refactor opportunity.
But… you’re entirely right in that we wouldn’t pull it off. It would become a massive from-scratch project given to Fujitsu or IBM or another one of the consulting usual suspects, who would build it to a monolith spec which completely ignores real world needs, and it would go the way of every other government IT project.
Yes exactly. Also imo in this country a healthy suspicion of government and data often veers into illogic and preciousness and paranoia. This would be a barrier too. So, no, not anytime soon.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
"Signalling my virtue" = not supporting the "just drown them" rhetoric.
I don't have to answer your questions - your government does. And the answers are very similar to those given by all of our neighbouring countries. You can say "a million a year" but even you aren't dumb enough to think that is possible.
Then again you just suggested the entire population of China wants to claim asylum here...
So you're now making things up rather than deal with the unfortunate reality of numbers.
Why is a million a year impossible ?
There are hundreds of millions, billions even depending upon the definitions, who live in failed states, oppressive states, economically backward states and so on.
And most of these countries are increasing in population year upon year.
So the migrants are going to continue and the numbers are likely to increase.
I don't blame them - they have little to lose and potentially much to gain - but any government in this country ultimately has to answer these questions:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
Your willingness to keep digging is gratifying to those of us you are entertaining.
I see the government is to appoint a “lavatories tsar” to encourage councils to re-open the 10% of public lavatories that remain shut after the pandemic.
Oh great. Cones Hotline, 2023 Edition.
On topic, the one wildcard I could potentially see working for Sunak is to announce ID cards. Compulsory for claiming benefit or entering employment. Do it under the guise of a “national emergency” of a wave of boats etc. etc. If you’re being really cynical, throw in a dog-whistle unattributed rumour about recording birth gender on the card.
Labour couldn’t follow without splitting the party. Which is a problem in itself for Starmer, whose approach has basically been to shadow the Tories on most domestic issues and just fight on competence instead. It would be the clear blue water the Tories need.
To be clear I don’t know if it would work, and I don’t support ID cards myself, but as a last-throw-of-the-dice political strategy it has some gruesome merit.
That's actually a good idea, but the competent execution of such a scheme is so far beyond the capacities of this government that it's laughable. Every card issued would have a photo of Alistair Jack's ringpiece on it instead of the card holder. Or somesuch tragi-comic balls up.
Yep, ID Cards are the impossible dream. Similar applied to Vaxports in the pandemic. You just can't see us pulling this sort of thing off.
So the way that you could do ID cards is incrementally. Basically you say that either a driving licence or a passport serves as an ID card; and you then get DVLA to offer a driving-licence-which-doesn’t-allow-you-to-drive. There you go, ID cards.
You then build incrementally on that by keying other government databases to it, one at a time, as and when the political need arises or a rebuild/refactor opportunity.
But… you’re entirely right in that we wouldn’t pull it off. It would become a massive from-scratch project given to Fujitsu or IBM or another one of the consulting usual suspects, who would build it to a monolith spec which completely ignores real world needs, and it would go the way of every other government IT project.
I refer the gentleman to the last time a government ID card was implemented.
The demented IT project you mention was spec’d and the tenders sent out. The problem was trying to turn it into the Minority Report.
The DVLA database is a disaster. The number of fraudulent drivers licenses is the cherry on top.
Some IT wanker with moobs and a dakimakura obviously fucked something up because when I renewed my license when I moved back from Russia there was no motorcycle category on it even though I passed my bike test in 1984. They would not be moved by pleas or threats of legal action because the records were "lost". I had to take the test again (on an MV F4 lol).
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
You talk about the entire population of China seeking asylum in the UK, and then you say you want to deal with the reality.
The reality is that the entire population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. I found some 2019 figures. Number of asylum applicants = 35,556. Number of those from China = 1,332. Population of China = 1.408 billion.
So, only 4% of asylum seekers were from China, and they represented 0.00009% of the Chinese population. You want to talk about that whole population of China coming here and the actual figures is 0.00009%. Who is detached from reality?
Do you know how to claim asylum if you are Chinese, and can't get out of China?
Hint - it is a bit tricky.
And…? Another_richard was urging us to discuss the reality of the situation. The reality of the situation includes those difficulties you mention. The reality of the situation is that the whole population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. Indeed, I’m going to make the bold claim that it will never be the case that the whole population of China will be seeking to come to the UK, So, can we knock off the nonsense?
1) It has been made something close to impossible for a Chinese person to claim asylum in the U.K. without leaving China.
2) if we put in place an asylum system that isn’t about saying No to start with, the numbers will rise.
3) once again the fact that economic migration and asylum seeking are intertwined is missed. Many who come here via economic routes have reasons that might meet asylum criteria.
For example, a friend from India is Christian. His church gets burnt down every time some locals go all Roderick Spode*. They rebuilt it so that the roof is basically straw on a metal frame. So it burns nicely. And quickly, leaving the shell and roof frame intact. He came to this country as an IT worker.
*I saw a picture of the RSS marching in dark shorts, once. Life imitates art….
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
"Signalling my virtue" = not supporting the "just drown them" rhetoric.
I don't have to answer your questions - your government does. And the answers are very similar to those given by all of our neighbouring countries. You can say "a million a year" but even you aren't dumb enough to think that is possible.
Then again you just suggested the entire population of China wants to claim asylum here...
So you're now making things up rather than deal with the unfortunate reality of numbers.
Why is a million a year impossible ?
There are hundreds of millions, billions even depending upon the definitions, who live in failed states, oppressive states, economically backward states and so on.
And most of these countries are increasing in population year upon year.
So the migrants are going to continue and the numbers are likely to increase.
I don't blame them - they have little to lose and potentially much to gain - but any government in this country ultimately has to answer these questions:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
Your willingness to keep digging is gratifying to those of us you are entertaining.
Accept the reality.
I can understand why you don't want to as it is so difficult.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
Then you should have no problem giving us what a maximum number of migrants would be.
That’s a complete non sequitur. I don’t know how many onions are in my cupboard right now. Oh, another_richard would argue, therefore the figure must be 1.4 billion.
Just because I can’t give you a maximum number doesn’t mean I can’t see your claim that the entire population of China will seek asylum in the UK is bullshit.
Another one making things up.
Its so much easier than deal with reality.
And the reality is numbers.
If 0.1% of China decided to migrate that would be 1.4m.
Would they ? I don't know and nor do you.
Nor do we know how many would come from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and the whole alphabet in between,
But "they can come but we don't know how many would come" isn't the basis for a viable migration strategy.
The basis for a viable migration strategy is to look at the actual numbers at present as a starting point and not just make up wild claims.
The current figure is 0.00009%. Why should anyone even entertain your 0.1% estimate, which would be a 1000 fold increase?
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
Then you should have no problem giving us what a maximum number of migrants would be.
That’s a complete non sequitur. I don’t know how many onions are in my cupboard right now. Oh, another_richard would argue, therefore the figure must be 1.4 billion.
Just because I can’t give you a maximum number doesn’t mean I can’t see your claim that the entire population of China will seek asylum in the UK is bullshit.
Another one making things up.
Its so much easier than deal with reality.
And the reality is numbers.
If 0.1% of China decided to migrate that would be 1.4m.
Would they ? I don't know and nor do you.
Nor do we know how many would come from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and the whole alphabet in between,
But "they can come but we don't know how many would come" isn't the basis for a viable migration strategy.
We do know. Because they aren't. If they were going to do so, they would be doing so.
Our intercontinental flintknapper is very concerned about Aliens! They're likely here and how do we know that they aren't coming here to claim asylum?
How many ETs do we accept? A thousand? A million? 739 quadrillion from the galaxy Andromeda?
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
"Signalling my virtue" = not supporting the "just drown them" rhetoric.
I don't have to answer your questions - your government does. And the answers are very similar to those given by all of our neighbouring countries. You can say "a million a year" but even you aren't dumb enough to think that is possible.
Then again you just suggested the entire population of China wants to claim asylum here...
So you're now making things up rather than deal with the unfortunate reality of numbers.
Why is a million a year impossible ?
There are hundreds of millions, billions even depending upon the definitions, who live in failed states, oppressive states, economically backward states and so on.
And most of these countries are increasing in population year upon year.
So the migrants are going to continue and the numbers are likely to increase.
I don't blame them - they have little to lose and potentially much to gain - but any government in this country ultimately has to answer these questions:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
Your willingness to keep digging is gratifying to those of us you are entertaining.
They are, at face value, reasonable questions.
The fact that they can’t be answered in public is due to the fixity of the debate.
Screaming that there is no issue at the top of your voice leads to Brexit.
My approach is to answer the questions. If we want immigration in this country, we need a joined up plan.
I would say that we should say that a net migration rate above 1% of existing population per annum is undesirable. Due to infrastructure strain, if nothing else.
"Lavatory" is a word I haven't heard used since Margot Leadbetter. Do Southerners still use the term? Presumably. Have they any idea how ludicrous Lavatory Tsar sounds up here?
Sounds pretty ludicrous here in Hampstead too tbf. Although we are well served so I don't think the Tsar will be directing any budget here. Won't need to spend a penny.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
Then you should have no problem giving us what a maximum number of migrants would be.
That’s a complete non sequitur. I don’t know how many onions are in my cupboard right now. Oh, another_richard would argue, therefore the figure must be 1.4 billion.
Just because I can’t give you a maximum number doesn’t mean I can’t see your claim that the entire population of China will seek asylum in the UK is bullshit.
It ought to worry us that at least 11m uyghurs and probably a further 17m Chinese Muslims have a cast iron right to come and live here, and we rely on a combo of efficient oppression by their government, plus geography, to prevent them from exercising it.
An example of the difficulties of the reality we are in.
And you could add other ethnic, religious and political minorities.
Likewise it could be argued that much of the female population of the Islamic world could be entitled to asylum or homosexuals from countries where they are persecuted.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
Then you should have no problem giving us what a maximum number of migrants would be.
That’s a complete non sequitur. I don’t know how many onions are in my cupboard right now. Oh, another_richard would argue, therefore the figure must be 1.4 billion.
Just because I can’t give you a maximum number doesn’t mean I can’t see your claim that the entire population of China will seek asylum in the UK is bullshit.
It ought to worry us that at least 11m uyghurs and probably a further 17m Chinese Muslims have a cast iron right to come and live here, and we rely on a combo of efficient oppression by their government, plus geography, to prevent them from exercising it.
It ought to worry us that people seem to think plucking wild numbers out of the air with no logic counts as any sort of rational debate. There is absolutely no possible situation in which 28 million Muslim Chinese all come here. That is obvious, so why make that suggestion?
There are important questions and discussions around immigration and asylum. I think plenty of people here are up for talking about them. But we can’t have that discussion if we’re swamped with bogeyman stories.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic afoot whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
I think the argument is if you think Rwanda is performative nonsense, you should also accept shit on our beaches. Anyone opposed to both Rwanda and shit on beaches is cognitively dissonant.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
You talk about the entire population of China seeking asylum in the UK, and then you say you want to deal with the reality.
The reality is that the entire population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. I found some 2019 figures. Number of asylum applicants = 35,556. Number of those from China = 1,332. Population of China = 1.408 billion.
So, only 4% of asylum seekers were from China, and they represented 0.00009% of the Chinese population. You want to talk about that whole population of China coming here and the actual figures is 0.00009%. Who is detached from reality?
Do you know how to claim asylum if you are Chinese, and can't get out of China?
Hint - it is a bit tricky.
And…? Another_richard was urging us to discuss the reality of the situation. The reality of the situation includes those difficulties you mention. The reality of the situation is that the whole population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. Indeed, I’m going to make the bold claim that it will never be the case that the whole population of China will be seeking to come to the UK, So, can we knock off the nonsense?
1) It has been made something close to impossible for a Chinese person to claim asylum in the U.K. without leaving China.
2) if we put in place an asylum system that isn’t about saying No to start with, the numbers will rise.
3) once again the fact that economic migration and asylum seeking are intertwined is missed. Many who come here via economic routes have reasons that might meet asylum criteria.
For example, a friend from India is Christian. His church gets burnt down every time some locals go all Roderick Spode*. They rebuilt it so that the roof is basically straw on a metal frame. So it burns nicely. And quickly, leaving the shell and roof frame intact. He came to this country as an IT worker.
*I saw a picture of the RSS marching in dark shorts, once. Life imitates art….
Yes, if we change policy, the numbers could rise. I agree. The numbers aren’t going to rise to the total population of China coming to the UK. Do you agree with me on that? Let’s go further: do you agree that the numbers aren’t going to rise to anything approaching the entire population of China?
If so, then might I suggest you condemn another_richard for injecting so much silliness into this thread.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic afoot whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
I think the argument is if you think Rwanda is performative nonsense, you should also accept shit on our beaches. Anyone opposed to both Rwanda and shit on beaches is cognitively dissonant.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
"Signalling my virtue" = not supporting the "just drown them" rhetoric.
I don't have to answer your questions - your government does. And the answers are very similar to those given by all of our neighbouring countries. You can say "a million a year" but even you aren't dumb enough to think that is possible.
Then again you just suggested the entire population of China wants to claim asylum here...
So you're now making things up rather than deal with the unfortunate reality of numbers.
Why is a million a year impossible ?
There are hundreds of millions, billions even depending upon the definitions, who live in failed states, oppressive states, economically backward states and so on.
And most of these countries are increasing in population year upon year.
So the migrants are going to continue and the numbers are likely to increase.
I don't blame them - they have little to lose and potentially much to gain - but any government in this country ultimately has to answer these questions:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
Your willingness to keep digging is gratifying to those of us you are entertaining.
They are, at face value, reasonable questions.
The fact that they can’t be answered in public is due to the fixity of the debate.
Screaming that there is no issue at the top of your voice leads to Brexit.
My approach is to answer the questions. If we want immigration in this country, we need a joined up plan.
I would say that we should say that a net migration rate above 1% of existing population per annum is undesirable. Due to infrastructure strain, if nothing else.
And for a joined up plan we need honesty from government.
Wanting Y immigration but promising X immigration actually planning for W immigration and getting Z immigration does not lead to success.
"Impossible" is an infinitely high bar. Let's settle for "impracticable"
It is impracticable to build the houses, roads, schools, sewers and hospitals for that number in that time. From memory, England and Wales have about 25-30 million households (from studio rooms up to mansions). We cannot build a million more per year, we just don't have the money to employ that number of workers and buy the resources to do it.
We do not have the money to send a man to Pluto, we do not have the money to invade China, and we do not have the money to accommodate a million people per year in a manner we would accept for themselves. We could create shanty towns and favelas in which children play in rubbish tips and raw sewage, yes, but I think you would not like that.
We really need to stop indulging in fantasy politics.
"Lavatory" is a word I haven't heard used since Margot Leadbetter. Do Southerners still use the term? Presumably. Have they any idea how ludicrous Lavatory Tsar sounds up here?
Sounds pretty ludicrous here in Hampstead too tbf. Although we are well served so I don't think the Tsar will be directing any budget here. Won't need to spend a penny.
Not surprising though from the party that thinks calling food banks ‘community pantries’ is a goer.
Oh, I went away for a couple of hours (to visit a graveyard, as it happens), and this thread descended into the same mess as all of the other threads on asylum. Not helped by ideologues on both extremes.
I’ll just say that issues of immigration in general are very closely elated to housing and services, and the electorate sees the cost of housing as the single biggest issue facing the country at the moment. Anyone advocating for more immigration needs to first sort out the housing problem, which means building a lot more houses.
In the sandpit where I usually reside, the motto is “Build it, and they will come”, and the city where I live has doubled in size in the 15 years I’ve lived there. However, the building needs to happen first, and the immigration needs to be both skilled and not entitled to future state benefits.
No-one would care about 50,000 asylum-seekers, in the grand scheme of things, so long as they had no criminal record and somewhere to live.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
"Signalling my virtue" = not supporting the "just drown them" rhetoric.
I don't have to answer your questions - your government does. And the answers are very similar to those given by all of our neighbouring countries. You can say "a million a year" but even you aren't dumb enough to think that is possible.
Then again you just suggested the entire population of China wants to claim asylum here...
So you're now making things up rather than deal with the unfortunate reality of numbers.
Why is a million a year impossible ?
There are hundreds of millions, billions even depending upon the definitions, who live in failed states, oppressive states, economically backward states and so on.
And most of these countries are increasing in population year upon year.
So the migrants are going to continue and the numbers are likely to increase.
I don't blame them - they have little to lose and potentially much to gain - but any government in this country ultimately has to answer these questions:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
Your willingness to keep digging is gratifying to those of us you are entertaining.
They are, at face value, reasonable questions.
The fact that they can’t be answered in public is due to the fixity of the debate.
Screaming that there is no issue at the top of your voice leads to Brexit.
My approach is to answer the questions. If we want immigration in this country, we need a joined up plan.
I would say that we should say that a net migration rate above 1% of existing population per annum is undesirable. Due to infrastructure strain, if nothing else.
I haven’t seen anyone in this thread “screaming” that there is no issue. There is an issue. Discussion of that issue, I suggest, is not helped by people making wild, exaggerated claims. Anyway, let’s discuss your suggestion.
The UK exceeded your 1% suggested target last year. What I’m curious to know is what your response, as a voter, is to this. Are you going to not vote for the party in charge that has exceeded your suggested target?
"Lavatory" is a word I haven't heard used since Margot Leadbetter. Do Southerners still use the term? Presumably. Have they any idea how ludicrous Lavatory Tsar sounds up here?
The puns just write themselves.
It's a shit idea.
This job is taking the piss.
Appoint Gavin Williamson because he is already a Loo Tsar.
The questions about levels of migration aren't really about migration. They are about jobs and housing and services. More migration = more pressure on all of those.
Our issue is that as a country we have largely given up wanting to support anything that doesn't provide a fat profit for the right people. We could cut asylum and indeed migration to zero - as many want - and all the things mentioned get *worse* not better.
"Where would we house them" is really "where will we house ourselves". Until we actually start to address the fundamental issues in this broken society and economy of ours we aren't going to fix them. Having Braverman start machine-gunning drowning migrants whilst 30p shouts "fuck off back to Dave Jones" won't fix people's issues about housing or jobs or services. Because we have a government with Braverman and Anderson driving policy and execution.
I see the government is to appoint a “lavatories tsar” to encourage councils to re-open the 10% of public lavatories that remain shut after the pandemic.
Oh great. Cones Hotline, 2023 Edition.
On topic, the one wildcard I could potentially see working for Sunak is to announce ID cards. Compulsory for claiming benefit or entering employment. Do it under the guise of a “national emergency” of a wave of boats etc. etc. If you’re being really cynical, throw in a dog-whistle unattributed rumour about recording birth gender on the card.
Labour couldn’t follow without splitting the party. Which is a problem in itself for Starmer, whose approach has basically been to shadow the Tories on most domestic issues and just fight on competence instead. It would be the clear blue water the Tories need.
To be clear I don’t know if it would work, and I don’t support ID cards myself, but as a last-throw-of-the-dice political strategy it has some gruesome merit.
That's actually a good idea, but the competent execution of such a scheme is so far beyond the capacities of this government that it's laughable. Every card issued would have a photo of Alistair Jack's ringpiece on it instead of the card holder. Or somesuch tragi-comic balls up.
Yep, ID Cards are the impossible dream. Similar applied to Vaxports in the pandemic. You just can't see us pulling this sort of thing off.
So the way that you could do ID cards is incrementally. Basically you say that either a driving licence or a passport serves as an ID card; and you then get DVLA to offer a driving-licence-which-doesn’t-allow-you-to-drive. There you go, ID cards.
You then build incrementally on that by keying other government databases to it, one at a time, as and when the political need arises or a rebuild/refactor opportunity.
But… you’re entirely right in that we wouldn’t pull it off. It would become a massive from-scratch project given to Fujitsu or IBM or another one of the consulting usual suspects, who would build it to a monolith spec which completely ignores real world needs, and it would go the way of every other government IT project.
Well you don't start from the DVLA as their dataset isn't appropriate as @Malmesbury pointed out earlier.
You can start from the passport office as they are the only people who know who is a UK citizen but then it comes down to what the point of the ID card is and the feature creep that Governments will continue to try and create because they love to fiddle and love short cuts to save money.
You can't start there, either. Their dataset is full of bad data.
One processing office for the passport office, for example, in South London, started giving out passports to all and sundry. It seems it was laziness, rather than bad actors. The bad actors heard about it quite rapidly, though.
The story goes that the Americans caught some interesting people in Kurdistan who had British passports - when followed up, they were genuine, but they had no right to them.
I cam across this when a relative, who runs a building business, queried some passports he was shown - the stories didn't match the documents. A lawyer told him that it was quite possible they weren't fake, but issued incorrectly.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
1) all of them 2) all of them 3) admit them 4) build nothing, change nothing.
This is the policy that some advocate. People who can dress themselves, even.
I am a Neon Fascist Imperialist - so I think we should build a bedroom per migrant, school class places, hospitals, roads etc in proportion. This is apparently an extreme position. But hey, extremism *is* the Nu Kool.
Fuck The Green Belt.
If you could please introduce us to this wanker you're railing against we could maybe join in. Is he there now?
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
In reality, the actual numbers are nothing remotely approaching your rhetoric. In reality, you are talking nonsense.
Then you should have no problem giving us what a maximum number of migrants would be.
That’s a complete non sequitur. I don’t know how many onions are in my cupboard right now. Oh, another_richard would argue, therefore the figure must be 1.4 billion.
Just because I can’t give you a maximum number doesn’t mean I can’t see your claim that the entire population of China will seek asylum in the UK is bullshit.
It ought to worry us that at least 11m uyghurs and probably a further 17m Chinese Muslims have a cast iron right to come and live here, and we rely on a combo of efficient oppression by their government, plus geography, to prevent them from exercising it.
It ought to worry us that people seem to think plucking wild numbers out of the air with no logic counts as any sort of rational debate. There is absolutely no possible situation in which 28 million Muslim Chinese all come here. That is obvious, so why make that suggestion?
There are important questions and discussions around immigration and asylum. I think plenty of people here are up for talking about them. But we can’t have that discussion if we’re swamped with bogeyman stories.
I wasn't swamping you with bogeyman stories, I expressly said that their right to asylum was being competently stymied by their government. I was pointing out the illogicality of a system which confers huge rights on (at least) hundreds of millions worldwide and just hopes that the very misfortune which confers those rights will in most cases also prevent their exercise
But I was thinking of a plan To dye my whiskers green And always use so large a fan That they could not be seen
"Impossible" is an infinitely high bar. Let's settle for "impracticable"
It is impracticable to build the houses, roads, schools, sewers and hospitals for that number in that time. From memory, England and Wales have about 25-30 million households (from studio rooms up to mansions). We cannot build a million more per year, we just don't have the money to employ that number of workers and buy the resources to do it.
We do not have the money to send a man to Pluto, we do not have the money to invade China, and we do not have the money to accommodate a million people per year in a manner we would accept for themselves. We could create shanty towns and favelas in which children play in rubbish tips and raw sewage, yes, but I think you would not like that.
We really need to stop indulging in fantasy politics.
We accepted 600,000 net migrants last year. On top of about 60,000 illegals?
That's 2/3 of a million. 660,000. Not far from the "million" which you - correctly - describe as completely impracticable
And we then wonder why services are strained, the NHS creaks, the roads are pot-holed, the rivers become sewers, and rents are out of control. This is not quantum thermodynamics. We are accepting too many people into a crowded island, which slowly diminishes the quality of life for everyone on it
Imagine if you lived in a two bed house then eight people came to stay. After a while it would look like a tip, even if everyone did their scrupulous best to keep it tidy
If we ARE going to accept 1m a year or more then we need to get with my plan to level Luton and turn it into a forest of elegant skyscrapers like Hong Kong. We could do the same with Slough, Swindon, Portsmouth, and Coventry
Bless . The DM going on trans drama on the wards . Braverman could blow up a school bus and the DM would still be doing everything to avoid criticizing this cesspit government.
In terms of re-join . I think the lead at this point is probably overstated.
The terms of any re-join are highly unlikely to be as good as what the UK originally had .
The problem for public perception of Brexit is its suffering to some degree with being used as a punchbag for everything that’s going wrong in the country . Similar to the ref where the EU was caught in the crossfire of public anger at austerity .
The only group still in love with Brexit seem to be the over 65s . The majority of this group still seem to be determined to inflict another 5 years of the Tories on the country.
To some extent this polling is correlated to the domestic economic situation in the UK.
If you look at the very early 1980s, when we experienced a strong recession, support for British EEC membership plummeted (this was about 8 years after joining and just after Commonwealth preference had finally been phased out) but by constrast was strongly supportive of EC/EU membership again by the mid-late 1990s. Also, kernel polling on Brexit around 2010-2012 in the aftermath of the GFC and euro crisis also showed strong leads for Leave. It was stabilising again by 2013-2014 and looking more balanced.
If the UK economy was experiencing real growth and low inflation, with the Cost of Living crisis abated, then I'd expect this gap to diminish irrespective of whether we were doing significantly better than EU countries or not.
Quite:
Brexit is the punchbag.
...replacing the EU.
The EU wasn't a punchbag, as much as it was an excuse by politicians.
Oh I'd love to do something about your concern, but unfortunately the EU won't let us ...
One of the main advantages of Brexit is that excuse has been taken away now. Our MPs can do whatever we elect them to do, and there's no excuses anymore.
They still have excuses: the Blob, lefty lawyers, the ECHR, Westminster (for those politicians in Edinburgh, Cardiff etc.).
Would you say that one of the main advantages of Scottish independence would be that an excuse has been taken away from Scottish politicians?
Yes!
That is precisely one of the main advantages of, and reasons why I support, Scottish independence.
Oh, I went away for a couple of hours (to visit a graveyard, as it happens), and this thread descended into the same mess as all of the other threads on asylum. Not helped by ideologues on both extremes.
I’ll just say that issues of immigration in general are very closely elated to housing and services, and the electorate sees the cost of housing as the single biggest issue facing the country at the moment. Anyone advocating for more immigration needs to first sort out the housing problem, which means building a lot more houses.
In the sandpit where I usually reside, the motto is “Build it, and they will come”, and the city where I live has doubled in size in the 15 years I’ve lived there. However, the building needs to happen first, and the immigration needs to be both skilled and not entitled to future state benefits.
No-one would care about 50,000 asylum-seekers, in the grand scheme of things, so long as they had no criminal record and somewhere to live.
They would. We're past the point of people wanting decent people here with skills who would benefit our society. A vocal Tory minority want none, and preferably with some of the non-us fucking off back where they came from as well.
I see the government is to appoint a “lavatories tsar” to encourage councils to re-open the 10% of public lavatories that remain shut after the pandemic.
Oh great. Cones Hotline, 2023 Edition.
On topic, the one wildcard I could potentially see working for Sunak is to announce ID cards. Compulsory for claiming benefit or entering employment. Do it under the guise of a “national emergency” of a wave of boats etc. etc. If you’re being really cynical, throw in a dog-whistle unattributed rumour about recording birth gender on the card.
Labour couldn’t follow without splitting the party. Which is a problem in itself for Starmer, whose approach has basically been to shadow the Tories on most domestic issues and just fight on competence instead. It would be the clear blue water the Tories need.
To be clear I don’t know if it would work, and I don’t support ID cards myself, but as a last-throw-of-the-dice political strategy it has some gruesome merit.
That's actually a good idea, but the competent execution of such a scheme is so far beyond the capacities of this government that it's laughable. Every card issued would have a photo of Alistair Jack's ringpiece on it instead of the card holder. Or somesuch tragi-comic balls up.
Yep, ID Cards are the impossible dream. Similar applied to Vaxports in the pandemic. You just can't see us pulling this sort of thing off.
So the way that you could do ID cards is incrementally. Basically you say that either a driving licence or a passport serves as an ID card; and you then get DVLA to offer a driving-licence-which-doesn’t-allow-you-to-drive. There you go, ID cards.
You then build incrementally on that by keying other government databases to it, one at a time, as and when the political need arises or a rebuild/refactor opportunity.
But… you’re entirely right in that we wouldn’t pull it off. It would become a massive from-scratch project given to Fujitsu or IBM or another one of the consulting usual suspects, who would build it to a monolith spec which completely ignores real world needs, and it would go the way of every other government IT project.
Well you don't start from the DVLA as their dataset isn't appropriate as @Malmesbury pointed out earlier.
You can start from the passport office as they are the only people who know who is a UK citizen but then it comes down to what the point of the ID card is and the feature creep that Governments will continue to try and create because they love to fiddle and love short cuts to save money.
You can't start there, either. Their dataset is full of bad data.
One processing office for the passport office, for example, in South London, started giving out passports to all and sundry. It seems it was laziness, rather than bad actors. The bad actors heard about it quite rapidly, though.
The story goes that the Americans caught some interesting people in Kurdistan who had British passports - when followed up, they were genuine, but they had no right to them.
I cam across this when a relative, who runs a building business, queried some passports he was shown - the stories didn't match the documents. A lawyer told him that it was quite possible they weren't fake, but issued incorrectly.
How the hell does that work, from the employer’s point of view, if someone not entitled to it has a genuine British passport?
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
"Signalling my virtue" = not supporting the "just drown them" rhetoric.
I don't have to answer your questions - your government does. And the answers are very similar to those given by all of our neighbouring countries. You can say "a million a year" but even you aren't dumb enough to think that is possible.
Then again you just suggested the entire population of China wants to claim asylum here...
So you're now making things up rather than deal with the unfortunate reality of numbers.
Why is a million a year impossible ?
There are hundreds of millions, billions even depending upon the definitions, who live in failed states, oppressive states, economically backward states and so on.
And most of these countries are increasing in population year upon year.
So the migrants are going to continue and the numbers are likely to increase.
I don't blame them - they have little to lose and potentially much to gain - but any government in this country ultimately has to answer these questions:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
Your willingness to keep digging is gratifying to those of us you are entertaining.
They are, at face value, reasonable questions.
The fact that they can’t be answered in public is due to the fixity of the debate.
Screaming that there is no issue at the top of your voice leads to Brexit.
My approach is to answer the questions. If we want immigration in this country, we need a joined up plan.
I would say that we should say that a net migration rate above 1% of existing population per annum is undesirable. Due to infrastructure strain, if nothing else.
I haven’t seen anyone in this thread “screaming” that there is no issue. There is an issue. Discussion of that issue, I suggest, is not helped by people making wild, exaggerated claims. Anyway, let’s discuss your suggestion.
The UK exceeded your 1% suggested target last year. What I’m curious to know is what your response, as a voter, is to this. Are you going to not vote for the party in charge that has exceeded your suggested target?
I'm not going to vote for the current government. Made up my mind on that a long time back.
On migration, there is nearly no-one who wants to have a rational discussion on any side.
My smell test for rational - come up with a maximum immigration number with some kind of justification.
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
No, the ultimate question is "why does the right keep trying to put a number on this?" Is there a magic number of people that the UK can cope with? How many makes us "full" and what proportion of the remaining number vs current are expected to be asylum seekers?
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
So what do you define as a valid claim ?
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
So *the entire population of China* want to claim asylum here?
So you're not willing to define what a 'valid claim' might be.
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
"Signalling my virtue" = not supporting the "just drown them" rhetoric.
I don't have to answer your questions - your government does. And the answers are very similar to those given by all of our neighbouring countries. You can say "a million a year" but even you aren't dumb enough to think that is possible.
Then again you just suggested the entire population of China wants to claim asylum here...
So you're now making things up rather than deal with the unfortunate reality of numbers.
Why is a million a year impossible ?
There are hundreds of millions, billions even depending upon the definitions, who live in failed states, oppressive states, economically backward states and so on.
And most of these countries are increasing in population year upon year.
So the migrants are going to continue and the numbers are likely to increase.
I don't blame them - they have little to lose and potentially much to gain - but any government in this country ultimately has to answer these questions:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
Your willingness to keep digging is gratifying to those of us you are entertaining.
They are, at face value, reasonable questions.
The fact that they can’t be answered in public is due to the fixity of the debate.
Screaming that there is no issue at the top of your voice leads to Brexit.
My approach is to answer the questions. If we want immigration in this country, we need a joined up plan.
I would say that we should say that a net migration rate above 1% of existing population per annum is undesirable. Due to infrastructure strain, if nothing else.
I haven’t seen anyone in this thread “screaming” that there is no issue. There is an issue. Discussion of that issue, I suggest, is not helped by people making wild, exaggerated claims. Anyway, let’s discuss your suggestion.
The UK exceeded your 1% suggested target last year. What I’m curious to know is what your response, as a voter, is to this. Are you going to not vote for the party in charge that has exceeded your suggested target?
Don't be silly. If Labour get in we will have an endless tide of these illegals coming in, we'll be spending millions a week putting them in hotels, we'll see idiocy like hiring a barge full of pox and wondering what happens when you try and put 3x the safe number on board, we'll have a huge backlog of claims that aren't being processed etc etc etc.
So we have to keep voting Tory to ensure that doesn't happen
I see the government is to appoint a “lavatories tsar” to encourage councils to re-open the 10% of public lavatories that remain shut after the pandemic.
Oh great. Cones Hotline, 2023 Edition.
On topic, the one wildcard I could potentially see working for Sunak is to announce ID cards. Compulsory for claiming benefit or entering employment. Do it under the guise of a “national emergency” of a wave of boats etc. etc. If you’re being really cynical, throw in a dog-whistle unattributed rumour about recording birth gender on the card.
Labour couldn’t follow without splitting the party. Which is a problem in itself for Starmer, whose approach has basically been to shadow the Tories on most domestic issues and just fight on competence instead. It would be the clear blue water the Tories need.
To be clear I don’t know if it would work, and I don’t support ID cards myself, but as a last-throw-of-the-dice political strategy it has some gruesome merit.
That's actually a good idea, but the competent execution of such a scheme is so far beyond the capacities of this government that it's laughable. Every card issued would have a photo of Alistair Jack's ringpiece on it instead of the card holder. Or somesuch tragi-comic balls up.
Yep, ID Cards are the impossible dream. Similar applied to Vaxports in the pandemic. You just can't see us pulling this sort of thing off.
So the way that you could do ID cards is incrementally. Basically you say that either a driving licence or a passport serves as an ID card; and you then get DVLA to offer a driving-licence-which-doesn’t-allow-you-to-drive. There you go, ID cards.
You then build incrementally on that by keying other government databases to it, one at a time, as and when the political need arises or a rebuild/refactor opportunity.
But… you’re entirely right in that we wouldn’t pull it off. It would become a massive from-scratch project given to Fujitsu or IBM or another one of the consulting usual suspects, who would build it to a monolith spec which completely ignores real world needs, and it would go the way of every other government IT project.
Well you don't start from the DVLA as their dataset isn't appropriate as @Malmesbury pointed out earlier.
You can start from the passport office as they are the only people who know who is a UK citizen but then it comes down to what the point of the ID card is and the feature creep that Governments will continue to try and create because they love to fiddle and love short cuts to save money.
You can't start there, either. Their dataset is full of bad data.
One processing office for the passport office, for example, in South London, started giving out passports to all and sundry. It seems it was laziness, rather than bad actors. The bad actors heard about it quite rapidly, though.
The story goes that the Americans caught some interesting people in Kurdistan who had British passports - when followed up, they were genuine, but they had no right to them.
I cam across this when a relative, who runs a building business, queried some passports he was shown - the stories didn't match the documents. A lawyer told him that it was quite possible they weren't fake, but issued incorrectly.
How the hell does that work, from the employer’s point of view, if someone not entitled to it has a genuine British passport?
The lawyer said that the law was complicated, and not especially rational. It could even be, that you could be convicted of illegally employing people, even if they had a passport issued by the passport office!
Oh, I went away for a couple of hours (to visit a graveyard, as it happens), and this thread descended into the same mess as all of the other threads on asylum. Not helped by ideologues on both extremes.
I’ll just say that issues of immigration in general are very closely elated to housing and services, and the electorate sees the cost of housing as the single biggest issue facing the country at the moment. Anyone advocating for more immigration needs to first sort out the housing problem, which means building a lot more houses.
In the sandpit where I usually reside, the motto is “Build it, and they will come”, and the city where I live has doubled in size in the 15 years I’ve lived there. However, the building needs to happen first, and the immigration needs to be both skilled and not entitled to future state benefits.
No-one would care about 50,000 asylum-seekers, in the grand scheme of things, so long as they had no criminal record and somewhere to live.
They would. We're past the point of people wanting decent people here with skills who would benefit our society. A vocal Tory minority want none, and preferably with some of the non-us fucking off back where they came from as well.
Paradoxically, since Brexit, British people have become strkingly MORE tolerant of immigration
Why? Because many of them honestly feel - or felt - we have taken back control
In the larger scheme the Dinghy People are not - yet - coming in numbers that matter enormously (that could easily change, and I do not think it is fun for people living right next to these beaches). The political threat of the Small Boats is that they reverse this move towards tolerance and make Britain much more hostile, overall
That is just one pressing reason they need to be stopped
Bless . The DM going on trans drama on the wards . Braverman could blow up a school bus and the DM would still be doing everything to avoid criticizing this cesspit government.
In terms of re-join . I think the lead at this point is probably overstated.
The terms of any re-join are highly unlikely to be as good as what the UK originally had .
The problem for public perception of Brexit is its suffering to some degree with being used as a punchbag for everything that’s going wrong in the country . Similar to the ref where the EU was caught in the crossfire of public anger at austerity .
The only group still in love with Brexit seem to be the over 65s . The majority of this group still seem to be determined to inflict another 5 years of the Tories on the country.
To some extent this polling is correlated to the domestic economic situation in the UK.
If you look at the very early 1980s, when we experienced a strong recession, support for British EEC membership plummeted (this was about 8 years after joining and just after Commonwealth preference had finally been phased out) but by constrast was strongly supportive of EC/EU membership again by the mid-late 1990s. Also, kernel polling on Brexit around 2010-2012 in the aftermath of the GFC and euro crisis also showed strong leads for Leave. It was stabilising again by 2013-2014 and looking more balanced.
If the UK economy was experiencing real growth and low inflation, with the Cost of Living crisis abated, then I'd expect this gap to diminish irrespective of whether we were doing significantly better than EU countries or not.
Quite:
Brexit is the punchbag.
...replacing the EU.
The EU wasn't a punchbag, as much as it was an excuse by politicians.
Oh I'd love to do something about your concern, but unfortunately the EU won't let us ...
One of the main advantages of Brexit is that excuse has been taken away now. Our MPs can do whatever we elect them to do, and there's no excuses anymore.
They still have excuses: the Blob, lefty lawyers, the ECHR, Westminster (for those politicians in Edinburgh, Cardiff etc.).
Would you say that one of the main advantages of Scottish independence would be that an excuse has been taken away from Scottish politicians?
Yes!
That is precisely one of the main advantages of, and reasons why I support, Scottish independence.
Consistency can exist you know.
Bart, you are often consistent! I am happy to acknowledge your consistency here. It seems a rather OTT solution to me personally.
"Lavatory" is a word I haven't heard used since Margot Leadbetter. Do Southerners still use the term? Presumably. Have they any idea how ludicrous Lavatory Tsar sounds up here?
The puns just write themselves.
It's a shit idea.
This job is taking the piss.
Appoint Gavin Williamson because he is already a Loo Tsar.
This won't wash.
Etc...
It's not the czar that's the problem, it's his deputy.
"Lavatory" is a word I haven't heard used since Margot Leadbetter. Do Southerners still use the term? Presumably. Have they any idea how ludicrous Lavatory Tsar sounds up here?
Sounds pretty ludicrous here in Hampstead too tbf. Although we are well served so I don't think the Tsar will be directing any budget here. Won't need to spend a penny.
Not surprising though from the party that thinks calling food banks ‘community pantries’ is a goer.
"Lavatory" is a word I haven't heard used since Margot Leadbetter. Do Southerners still use the term? Presumably. Have they any idea how ludicrous Lavatory Tsar sounds up here?
The puns just write themselves.
It's a shit idea.
This job is taking the piss.
Appoint Gavin Williamson because he is already a Loo Tsar.
This won't wash.
Etc...
It's not the czar that's the problem, it's his deputy.
"Impossible" is an infinitely high bar. Let's settle for "impracticable"
It is impracticable to build the houses, roads, schools, sewers and hospitals for that number in that time. From memory, England and Wales have about 25-30 million households (from studio rooms up to mansions). We cannot build a million more per year, we just don't have the money to employ that number of workers and buy the resources to do it.
We do not have the money to send a man to Pluto, we do not have the money to invade China, and we do not have the money to accommodate a million people per year in a manner we would accept for themselves. We could create shanty towns and favelas in which children play in rubbish tips and raw sewage, yes, but I think you would not like that.
We really need to stop indulging in fantasy politics.
We accepted 600,000 net migrants last year. On top of about 60,000 illegals?
That's 2/3 of a million. 660,000. Not far from the "million" which you - correctly - describe as completely impracticable
And we then wonder why services are strained, the NHS creaks, the roads are pot-holed, the rivers become sewers, and rents are out of control. This is not quantum thermodynamics. We are accepting too many people into a crowded island, which slowly diminishes the quality of life for everyone on it
Imagine if you lived in a two bed house then eight people came to stay. After a while it would look like a tip, even if everyone did their scrupulous best to keep it tidy
If we ARE going to accept 1m a year or more then we need to get with my plan to level Luton and turn it into a forest of elegant skyscrapers like Hong Kong. We could do the same with Slough, Swindon, Portsmouth, and Coventry
On the small boats, we could Stop The Boats. Allow the dead afghans to come legally. You know Afghans? We broke their country, abandoned them to the Taliban whilst the Foreign Secretary couldn't be arsed to get off his sun lounger.
When Tories say Stop The Boats what they really mean is stop the migrants. The desired number of asylum seekers and refugees is zero. None. We're full. We're fed up with paying for them when we have so many of our own we don't want to pay for either.
It seems likely that the Tories and RefUKformKIP will be battling to win the ignorant racist vote. I genuinely can see the government saying "no migrants" as a policy. Then when Labour point out that is impossible, illegal, immortal they will scream SEE LABOUR WANT TO LET 14bn IN TO TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY.
What is even more depressing is that some otherwise sensible people - a few of this parish - will still find an excuse what they are voting for *that*.
I'm not seeing that the attitude in your second paragraph is racist. It may be ungenerous but that is a different criticism.
Racist? No. Although all the actual racists bang on about Muslims and non-whites. As we have seen in the past, there is as much anger aimed at white christian Europeans - Romanians as an example - as there is aimed at people with a "funny tinge".
So it's not racism. It's exceptionalism. Jingoism. Basic "we don't want anyone who isn't us" bigotry.
At the low end, wage suppression from migration was, quite definitely used by a range of businesses. Which is why they supported it.
So inflation was low (house prices don’t count, you see), Deliveroo was cheap. All good. For middle class people like me. Awesome that I’ve got the cuisine of 109 countries within a 30 min of my doorstep.
For those whose hobs went down to minimum wage, not so much. When you add in the steady, sustained refusal to build infrastructure to match the increase in population… well, something has got to give.
I advocate high skilled migration and high infrastructure build as well. For those, the other day, whining about barn conversions on the Yorkshire Moors - times have changed. Already.
We need 8 million more properties in the U.K. for the people who are here, right now. And you have two choices - one, go with it, build some nice towns. Or fight until the bulldozers will be coming for the bits of the countryside you like.
Personally, I’m quite taken with idea of a town on piles on Coniston Water. Do you want to wait until people start agreeing with me?
Idiots say "Britain is full". It really isn't. And flying over the southern English midlands on my way down to Luton last week it was visible just how much open and empty land there is .
Milton Keynes was outside my window. Build another three of them. One in Lincolnshire, one in East Yorkshire. One in the south west. Maybe more.
But actually plan the things. Where will people live. Shop. Eat. Go to school. How will they get about. MK works and that's quite old. Improve that and it'll be good.
An amazing opportunity. Not just another 300k homes but all those new businesses. All of the buildings need to be constructed plus utilities and transport links. Don't contract it out to Australians or offshore consortia. Form BritBuild and do it ourselves.
A vast amount of money tipped into the immediate economy as people have jobs building it all. Then the long term economic benefits.
Or, maintain the "we're full" line to provide succour to racists and morons.
Watching the conflict between “immigration is good” and “all the works of humans are evil” - the modern progressive default - is of interest.
You can sometimes see fear. In the realisation that the contradiction must end. Each year the population grows faster than the increase in infrastructure.
Buy shares in JCB.
Because people like me see an empty horizon. And want to put a town and some villages there. Because I *like* the better works of man.
Yes. The cognitive dissonance is palpable in the sewage debate. Our seas and rivers are full of shit (and they are, and it is bad). But some of the people who get most worked up about this are those most pro-immigration and “let them all in”
And it is getting harder and harder to ignore the obvious causal connection between “adding millions of people to our population every year” and “oh god all our services are collapsing under the sheer weight of numbers”
600,000 net migrants last year. 600,000. Plus the boat people
Is there a kind of exotic new logic whereby if you don't approve of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda it means you're happy for the whole world to come and live in the UK?
No but the ultimate questions are:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
Well go then. Don't leave us hanging.
Am I the government ???
Why do you think I have answers ? My insight produces questions not answers.
And even if I did have answers would I be able to get people to agree to them and be able to implement them competently ?
But for starters we need fuller data - what effect does an increase in population have of pay rates, housing requirements, required infrastructure investment.
Plus issues of integration and social cohesion - allowing Hong Kongers to move to Warrington is easier than recreating the Hindu Kush in the Pennines for example.
So much proper planning and with attention to detail.
With enough spare capacity in the system to deal with 'events' as the last few years has shown.
And honesty from the government - decades of lies and broken promises have destroyed trust on this issue.
And luck - Starmer will need to stay lucky, very lucky.
Yet 50% of voters back banning migrants who come to the UK in small boats from ever re‑entering the UK, being able to settle permanently in the UK, and receiving British citizenship and 74% of Conservative voters and 72% of Leave voters back stopping migrants boats from coming here and there getting citizenship.
So the government and Braverman's low ratings on this issue are likely because voters don't think they are being effective enough in controlling the migrant boats
Comments
As I recall, and it’s over years since I last visited the Isle, there was a marked resistance to discussion of the Occupation. I seem to recall parties in a large one-time gun site though.
We cannot send asylum seekers to Rwanda because:
We can't actually catch everyone coming in "illegally"
We don't have anywhere to intern them after we catch them
We don't have officials to process asylum claims
We don't have a legal system capable of processing claim rejections
We can't deport anyone to Rwanda because it's egregiously illegal under domestic and international law
We can't send people to Rwanda because Rwanda won't take them
But unless you pledge fealty to "just send them to Rwanda" you are in favour of the entire population of Africa arriving on Monday.
Oh, and the strongest advocate of such cognitive dissonance just complained about the "wilful stupidity" he sees in others.
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
As others have pointed out we have three basic choices:
1. Accept them all
2. Deport them somewhere else
3. Imprison them forever
When you boil away all the nonsense about “legal routes” and “processing centres” and “Ascension Island” and “massive barges” that is the choice
The left adopts various versions of 1, but without ever saying so, because it is politically unpopular and in the end calamitous (as some realise)
The Tory government pretends to go for 2 but is too pathetic to follow through so in the end goes for 1 but with its own gestural smokescreens to hide this
No one accepts 3, because it is inhuman - which it is
I personally believe we have to try 2 and in the end we will - because 1 is ultimately catastrophic, but what I personally believe is, of course, irrelevant and meaningless. In 18 months we will have a Labour government. Let’s see how they square this hideous circle
Its asylum. We take valid claims. We allow them to work. We remove criminals and invalid claimants. Like basically everywhere else.
By your logic we accept them. And then we have a civil war
2) all of them
3) admit them
4) build nothing, change nothing.
This is the policy that some advocate. People who can dress themselves, even.
I am a Neon Fascist Imperialist - so I think we should build a bedroom per migrant, school class places, hospitals, roads etc in proportion. This is apparently an extreme position. But hey, extremism *is* the Nu Kool.
Fuck The Green Belt.
Do Southerners still use the term?
Presumably.
Have they any idea how ludicrous Lavatory Tsar sounds up here?
SAMPLE SIZE PART 1: ACCURACY
Up until a few years ago pollsters used to quote errors from sample sizes based on the Central Limit Theorem. Then it became obvious that due to panel polling and weighting that no longer applied. There was then an argument between the academics (Curtice et al) and the pollsters (Boon et al) about how to solve this. The academics want everything to be correctly underpinned by theory, the pollsters want a product that's cheap enough to sell (you can't do both). They compromised by agreeing to add a statement to each poll saying how accurate it is based on past performance: not perfect, but you can calculate it and it's informative.
The upshot of this is that when Deltapoll release the tables for that poll, it will contain a statement telling you how reliable they expect (oversimplification) the poll to be. For a previous poll from Deltapoll, we see this sentence
"...All polls are subject to a wide range of potential sources of error. On the basis of the historical record of the polls at recent general elections, there is a 9 in 10 chance that the true value of a party’s support lies within 4 points of the estimates provided by this poll, and a 2 in 3 chance that they lie within 2 points..."
https://deltapoll.co.uk/polls-library
https://deltapoll.co.uk/polls/voteint230807
What happens if average temperatures climb by more than 5%? We should ban all cars immediately.
What happens if .... Write your own Daily Mail headline.
Is it anyone who lives under a nasty authoritarian government perhaps ?
If so then we can include the entire population of China to start off with.
Russia is a horrible country as well - are they all entitled to asylum ?
Burma ? Iran ? Afghanistan ? Pakistan ? Being a minority in India can be pretty unpleasant ? What about the Middle East ? Or Africa ? Or Latin America ?
You need to stop the self-righteousness and deal with the reality.
And that reality includes numbers.
Perhaps what we should do is conquer the countries in question and impose governments we like. I believe we had a go at this policy previously.
You then build incrementally on that by keying other government databases to it, one at a time, as and when the political need arises or a rebuild/refactor opportunity.
But… you’re entirely right in that we wouldn’t pull it off. It would become a massive from-scratch project given to Fujitsu or IBM or another one of the consulting usual suspects, who would build it to a monolith spec which completely ignores real world needs, and it would go the way of every other government IT project.
🚻 unicode is safest
The demented IT project you mention was spec’d and the tenders sent out. The problem was trying to turn it into the Minority Report.
The DVLA database is a disaster. The number of fraudulent drivers licenses is the cherry on top.
1. Accept some (genuine refugees plus healthy educated migrants who will make a positive contribution to the country). Possibly including Australians, Nigerians and French.
2. Deport the rest. Where to you ask? That is why the reviews need to take place in France. They are not deported. They remain where they are. Some may attempt to get in by other means but it will be a diminished number and they will be returned to Alderney.
The reality is that the entire population of China is not seeking to come to the UK. I found some 2019 figures. Number of asylum applicants = 35,556. Number of those from China = 1,332. Population of China = 1.408 billion.
So, only 4% of asylum seekers were from China, and they represented 0.00009% of the Chinese population. You want to talk about that whole population of China coming here and the actual figures is 0.00009%. Who is detached from reality?
Nor do you want to mention the reality of actual numbers.
So it could be 10k per year, or 50k per year or 100k per year or 500k per year or a million per year or more and more.
Who knows and you don't care.
And that's alright because you're just signalling your virtue on an website not managing the system.
But in reality the questions I listed twenty minutes ago are the ones that need to be answered.
Hint - it is a bit tricky.
The left has been infantile for decades. But it is getting worse
SAMPLE SIZE PART 2: RANGE
It is a commonplace amongst the etiolated commentariat that a sample size can be diagnosed by eye, and if the poll does not please them it can be dismissed airily with "small sample size" before going off to eat a poor. This is because you are stupid.
A minimum sample size is only necessary if the thing involves a test. A test is a comparison between two things. For polls, the test is between the poll number and its upper/lower range. If that range is large, a lower sample size is permissible but the poll is useless. If that range is small, the poll is useful but the minimum sample size is huge. So it's a compromise.
But that's for polls; a comparison between a number and the range of that number
If the study is a comparison between two different numbers, the minimum sample size can veer dramatically, from very low to very high. So the statement "the sample size is too low...." must be suffixed by "...for the test/accuracy"
I don't have to answer your questions - your government does. And the answers are very similar to those given by all of our neighbouring countries. You can say "a million a year" but even you aren't dumb enough to think that is possible.
Then again you just suggested the entire population of China wants to claim asylum here...
P.S. Is this the most "on topic" thread ever?
The reality is some would come - now where that would be from 0% to 100% I do not know and nor do you.
Likewise we do not know how many would come from Afghanistan or Iran or Burma or Niger or Mali or Sudan or Somalia and so on.
And having a migration strategy of "people can come but we don't know how many would come" is not going to work in reality.
Aa lot of us just do not trust the left on this.
I’m going to start a rebellion. The real deal. With codes and wind-up radios and whispering in smoky pubs and caches of dynamite hidden in Primrose Hill. We will meet at night in, er, churches - but in the back so we can’t be seen
We will import Enfield rifles hidden amongst iPhones. Who’s with me?
I’m not sure what we will be rebelling AGAINST but that’s a minor detail. I just think it will be fun
We can blow up really small unimportant bridges
You can start from the passport office as they are the only people who know who is a UK citizen but then it comes down to what the point of the ID card is and the feature creep that Governments will continue to try and create because they love to fiddle and love short cuts to save money.
Engage with reality, another_richard!
Which is why Italy (as 1 example) now try to shift immigrants into France as quickly as they can without doing any paperwork...
Political asylum: a rather twee concept and should be ditched altogether.
Immigration: the natives should be forced to pick fruit.
Legionella Suella for example.
You talk about a pro-immigration industry. Immigration is at a record high under the current Conservative government. Is the Conservative government part of this pro-immigration industry? Or is the Conservative government, despite being in power for over a decade, completely impotent?
At least with Blair one could believe things really would get better, and in some ways they did, even if he turned out in the end to be another flawed leader.
Why is a million a year impossible ?
There are hundreds of millions, billions even depending upon the definitions, who live in failed states, oppressive states, economically backward states and so on.
And most of these countries are increasing in population year upon year.
So the migrants are going to continue and the numbers are likely to increase.
I don't blame them - they have little to lose and potentially much to gain - but any government in this country ultimately has to answer these questions:
1) How many migrants should be accepted ?
2) Which migrants should be accepted ?
3) What do you do with any extra migrants ?
4) How should the country be changed to deal with the migrants that are accepted ?
On asylum, I think the concept needs to be radically updated. It was designed for the world of 1945 not the world of global migration. We simply can’t take everyone who wants asylum who can get here, not any more
We shall have to be tougher: but that doesn’t mean excluding everyone
I generally approve of migration. Especially smart people, genuine students, let them in
NB I voted Leave because sovereignty/democracy - I have no problem with Freedom of Movement.
However immigration is now too high and, conceptually, is increasingly and gravely questionable as we enter the era of AI and workers become workless
Just because I can’t give you a maximum number doesn’t mean I can’t see your claim that the entire population of China will seek asylum in the UK is bullshit.
What is interesting here is the lefty squirming. Like yours. It tells me Labour is really going to struggle with this issue from day 1 of government. They haven’t done any serious thinking about it, they have no new ideas, they will be worse than the Tories
And it will hurt them
Its so much easier than deal with reality.
And the reality is numbers.
If 0.1% of China decided to migrate that would be 1.4m.
Would they ? I don't know and nor do you.
Nor do we know how many would come from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and the whole alphabet in between,
But "they can come but we don't know how many would come" isn't the basis for a viable migration strategy.
We’re not going to solve these problems in a day, so let’s celebrate that we’ve found some consensus for now.
2) if we put in place an asylum system that isn’t about saying No to start with, the numbers will rise.
3) once again the fact that economic migration and asylum seeking are intertwined is missed. Many who come here via economic routes have reasons that might meet asylum criteria.
For example, a friend from India is Christian. His church gets burnt down every time some locals go all Roderick Spode*. They rebuilt it so that the roof is basically straw on a metal frame. So it burns nicely. And quickly, leaving the shell and roof frame intact. He came to this country as an IT worker.
*I saw a picture of the RSS marching in dark shorts, once. Life imitates art….
Please make it stop.
I can understand why you don't want to as it is so difficult.
But the reality is those four questions.
The current figure is 0.00009%. Why should anyone even entertain your 0.1% estimate, which would be a 1000 fold increase?
Our intercontinental flintknapper is very concerned about Aliens! They're likely here and how do we know that they aren't coming here to claim asylum?
How many ETs do we accept? A thousand? A million? 739 quadrillion from the galaxy Andromeda?
Would they? I don't know and neither do you.
The fact that they can’t be answered in public is due to the fixity of the debate.
Screaming that there is no issue at the top of your voice leads to Brexit.
My approach is to answer the questions. If we want immigration in this country, we need a joined up plan.
I would say that we should say that a net migration rate above 1% of existing population per annum is undesirable. Due to infrastructure strain, if nothing else.
And you could add other ethnic, religious and political minorities.
Likewise it could be argued that much of the female population of the Islamic world could be entitled to asylum or homosexuals from countries where they are persecuted.
There are important questions and discussions around immigration and asylum. I think plenty of people here are up for talking about them. But we can’t have that discussion if we’re swamped with bogeyman stories.
If so, then might I suggest you condemn another_richard for injecting so much silliness into this thread.
Wanting Y immigration but promising X immigration actually planning for W immigration and getting Z immigration does not lead to success.
W<X<Y<Z
It is impracticable to build the houses, roads, schools, sewers and hospitals for that number in that time. From memory, England and Wales have about 25-30 million households (from studio rooms up to mansions). We cannot build a million more per year, we just don't have the money to employ that number of workers and buy the resources to do it.
We do not have the money to send a man to Pluto, we do not have the money to invade China, and we do not have the money to accommodate a million people per year in a manner we would accept for themselves. We could create shanty towns and favelas in which children play in rubbish tips and raw sewage, yes, but I think you would not like that.
We really need to stop indulging in fantasy politics.
I’ll just say that issues of immigration in general are very closely elated to housing and services, and the electorate sees the cost of housing as the single biggest issue facing the country at the moment. Anyone advocating for more immigration needs to first sort out the housing problem, which means building a lot more houses.
In the sandpit where I usually reside, the motto is “Build it, and they will come”, and the city where I live has doubled in size in the 15 years I’ve lived there. However, the building needs to happen first, and the immigration needs to be both skilled and not entitled to future state benefits.
No-one would care about 50,000 asylum-seekers, in the grand scheme of things, so long as they had no criminal record and somewhere to live.
The UK exceeded your 1% suggested target last year. What I’m curious to know is what your response, as a voter, is to this. Are you going to not vote for the party in charge that has exceeded your suggested target?
It's a shit idea.
This job is taking the piss.
Appoint Gavin Williamson because he is already a Loo Tsar.
This won't wash.
Etc...
Our issue is that as a country we have largely given up wanting to support anything that doesn't provide a fat profit for the right people. We could cut asylum and indeed migration to zero - as many want - and all the things mentioned get *worse* not better.
"Where would we house them" is really "where will we house ourselves". Until we actually start to address the fundamental issues in this broken society and economy of ours we aren't going to fix them. Having Braverman start machine-gunning drowning migrants whilst 30p shouts "fuck off back to Dave Jones" won't fix people's issues about housing or jobs or services. Because we have a government with Braverman and Anderson driving policy and execution.
One processing office for the passport office, for example, in South London, started giving out passports to all and sundry. It seems it was laziness, rather than bad actors. The bad actors heard about it quite rapidly, though.
The story goes that the Americans caught some interesting people in Kurdistan who had British passports - when followed up, they were genuine, but they had no right to them.
I cam across this when a relative, who runs a building business, queried some passports he was shown - the stories didn't match the documents. A lawyer told him that it was quite possible they weren't fake, but issued incorrectly.
But I was thinking of a plan
To dye my whiskers green
And always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen
That's 2/3 of a million. 660,000. Not far from the "million" which you - correctly - describe as completely impracticable
And we then wonder why services are strained, the NHS creaks, the roads are pot-holed, the rivers become sewers, and rents are out of control. This is not quantum thermodynamics. We are accepting too many people into a crowded island, which slowly diminishes the quality of life for everyone on it
Imagine if you lived in a two bed house then eight people came to stay. After a while it would look like a tip, even if everyone did their scrupulous best to keep it tidy
If we ARE going to accept 1m a year or more then we need to get with my plan to level Luton and turn it into a forest of elegant skyscrapers like Hong Kong. We could do the same with Slough, Swindon, Portsmouth, and Coventry
That is precisely one of the main advantages of, and reasons why I support, Scottish independence.
Consistency can exist you know.
On migration, there is nearly no-one who wants to have a rational discussion on any side.
My smell test for rational - come up with a maximum immigration number with some kind of justification.
So we have to keep voting Tory to ensure that doesn't happen
Why? Because many of them honestly feel - or felt - we have taken back control
In the larger scheme the Dinghy People are not - yet - coming in numbers that matter enormously (that could easily change, and I do not think it is fun for people living right next to these beaches). The political threat of the Small Boats is that they reverse this move towards tolerance and make Britain much more hostile, overall
That is just one pressing reason they need to be stopped
His number two man.
'Who does number two work for?!'
Why do you think I have answers ? My insight produces questions not answers.
And even if I did have answers would I be able to get people to agree to them and be able to implement them competently ?
But for starters we need fuller data - what effect does an increase in population have of pay rates, housing requirements, required infrastructure investment.
Plus issues of integration and social cohesion - allowing Hong Kongers to move to Warrington is easier than recreating the Hindu Kush in the Pennines for example.
So much proper planning and with attention to detail.
With enough spare capacity in the system to deal with 'events' as the last few years has shown.
And honesty from the government - decades of lies and broken promises have destroyed trust on this issue.
And luck - Starmer will need to stay lucky, very lucky.
So the government and Braverman's low ratings on this issue are likely because voters don't think they are being effective enough in controlling the migrant boats
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2023/03/06/9e23f/2