FPT, I agree with the suggestion that Vietnamese food in Europe suffers for being "too healthy and fresh" - the most popular Asian foods often fit the same sweet/fried niche as burger places - sushi, sauce with rice, fried noodles in tamarind sauce, and so on.
If you're frying your sushi you're doing something wrong...
Sushi in a Glaswegian chippie? Gets fried like the white pudden, mutton pies, pizzas ...
I've not been to Glasgow for a while. Went to a very nice Sudanese restaurant when I last did. For those further south, deep-fried sushi is available from plenty of places in London, e.g. https://deliveroo.co.uk/menu/London/pimlico/taro-japanese-restaurant It's a real dish.
Tempura? Oh yes, somehow I didn't think of that as sushi, though I've necked plenty of it. At least it's cooked - I still find raw fish unnerving (studied the platyhelminthes and nematodes a bit too closely in my undergraduate days).
Just to distress you further, I while back I saw a hipster cafe doing 'rare' square sausage...
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
No it hasn't, non EU immigration still has the same points system it had before, just so has EU immigration rather than free movement
For non-EU migrants coming to the UK to work, the new proposals represent a considerable liberalisation compared with the current system. There are now lower salary and skill thresholds and no overall cap on numbers.
Try dealing with facts from time to time. Non-EU migration has been considerably liberalised in recent years. I for one completely welcome that, indeed its what I was hoping for when I cast my ballot.
There are still salary and skills thresholds for non EU migrants, for EU migrants there is no longer free movement but the same thresholds.
If you were a genuine liberal you would ideally want free movement for all migrants not one skills based migration criteria for all
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
We have different visa requirements for the US, India and DR Congo, and I don't think that's because of primary legislation. Should equality legislation be used to overturn that? I think you've argued yourself into some bizarre stance.
I expect all visa requirements are based on legislation, so no of course it should not be used to overturn it. But my point was explicitly that its wrong, regardless of whether its lawful or unlawful.
For different visa requirements, do you mean to work, or for tourism? We have different and reciprocal tourist agreements with much of the developed world, not just Europe, and that's entirely reasonable - and tourist visas aren't heavily restricted - easily obtained tourist visas hasn't caused pressure to tighten tourist visas elsewhere to balance the numbers.
For work, I think we should treat almost* everyone equally regardless of country of origin. If we're discriminating in favour of Americans, then I would oppose that too, I'm consistent on that.
* There are some limited exemptions that make sense, like reciprocal free movement in the Common Travel Area with Ireland, but not in the hundreds of thousands margin.
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
You keep pushing this ridiculous argument and you never acknowledge when challenged that the real reason is FoM is one of the pillars of the single market, which is all about regional economic integration.
It's not and never has been about race.
It's just that allowing labour to move freely is a central part of a single market. We have the same thing within the UK. The fact that it's trivial to move from Lincoln to Glasgow yet non-trivial to move from Lesotho to Glasgow, is not racism.
Key to combatting racism is to combat practices of indirect racism, which were not intended to be racist.
It doesn't matter if you didn't intend to be racist, but are because of ignorance or something else, you're still being racist if you are.
EG in America many of their universities have policies of discriminating in favour of "legacy" applications. Given their legacy applicants are disproportionately white, this is a racist policy even if its not its intention. The intention is to support those who have made donations or contributed to the university in the past etc, but its still discriminatory even if you have what you consider to be benign intentions.
You've gone from celebrating an immigration policy that selects for people with high-paying jobs to concerns about indirect racism. Selecting the people with the high-paying jobs is going to select people unequally across ethnic backgrounds in most countries. So, which do you want to do? Have an immigration policy that counters indirect racism or to select people on high-paying jobs?
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
No it hasn't, non EU immigration still has the same points system it had before, just so has EU immigration rather than free movement
For non-EU migrants coming to the UK to work, the new proposals represent a considerable liberalisation compared with the current system. There are now lower salary and skill thresholds and no overall cap on numbers.
Try dealing with facts from time to time. Non-EU migration has been considerably liberalised in recent years. I for one completely welcome that, indeed its what I was hoping for when I cast my ballot.
There are still salary and skills thresholds for non EU migrants, for EU migrants there is no longer free movement but the same thresholds.
If you were a genuine liberal you would ideally want free movement for all migrants not one skills based migration criteria for all
That's just you being bonkers again. You have to take everything to absurd extremes in absurd purity tests as to what a "true Tory" or "genuine liberal" is.
FPT, I agree with the suggestion that Vietnamese food in Europe suffers for being "too healthy and fresh" - the most popular Asian foods often fit the same sweet/fried niche as burger places - sushi, sauce with rice, fried noodles in tamarind sauce, and so on.
If you're frying your sushi you're doing something wrong...
Sushi in a Glaswegian chippie? Gets fried like the white pudden, mutton pies, pizzas ...
I've not been to Glasgow for a while. Went to a very nice Sudanese restaurant when I last did. For those further south, deep-fried sushi is available from plenty of places in London, e.g. https://deliveroo.co.uk/menu/London/pimlico/taro-japanese-restaurant It's a real dish.
Tempura? Oh yes, somehow I didn't think of that as sushi, though I've necked plenty of it. At least it's cooked - I still find raw fish unnerving (studied the platyhelminthes and nematodes a bit too closely in my undergraduate days).
Take a sushi roll and tempura it, yes.
Sushi fish is (usually) flash frozen. That kills off the platyhelminths and nematodes.
So presumably it's not a particularly traditional dish? Presumably the technology for flash freezing is relatively modern?
I think the flash freezing is a more modern innovation.
A form of sushi involving preserving fish in rice and vinegar, a sort of pickling process, goes back many centuries. What we think of as sushi now, your classic nigiri, is late 19th century, IIRC. Salmon in sushi was invented by the Norwegians in the 1970s. Whacky things like California rolls, aburi sushi, tempura'd rolls, they're all very recent.
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
You keep pushing this ridiculous argument and you never acknowledge when challenged that the real reason is FoM is one of the pillars of the single market, which is all about regional economic integration.
It's not and never has been about race.
It's just that allowing labour to move freely is a central part of a single market. We have the same thing within the UK. The fact that it's trivial to move from Lincoln to Glasgow yet non-trivial to move from Lesotho to Glasgow, is not racism.
Key to combatting racism is to combat practices of indirect racism, which were not intended to be racist.
It doesn't matter if you didn't intend to be racist, but are because of ignorance or something else, you're still being racist if you are.
EG in America many of their universities have policies of discriminating in favour of "legacy" applications. Given their legacy applicants are disproportionately white, this is a racist policy even if its not its intention. The intention is to support those who have made donations or contributed to the university in the past etc, but its still discriminatory even if you have what you consider to be benign intentions.
You've gone from celebrating an immigration policy that selects for people with high-paying jobs to concerns about indirect racism. Selecting the people with the high-paying jobs is going to select people unequally across ethnic backgrounds in most countries. So, which do you want to do? Have an immigration policy that counters indirect racism or to select people on high-paying jobs?
Yes.
If an Indian doctor or Filipino nurse or Sri Lankan programmer or Japanese banker wants to come to the UK they should be as welcome as anyone from France or Germany is.
Its not perfect, perfect doesn't happen in the real world, so will never meet a HYUFDian purity test, but judging people based on their skills and job is much less racist than judging them by their country of origin.
It can't do the LDs any real harm to get his endorsements.
The truth is most people under 60 won't have a clue who he is - as to whether Heseltine has any resonance among the older core Conservative vote, we'll see. I suspect very little but any weakening of that core Conservative constituency will be welcomed by those wishing for a change in Government next time.
It is weird to think, that as you say, most people under 60 won't have a clue who he is, considering how important a character he was, but you are probably correct.
A few years ago my daughter was waitressing during her summer break from Uni and was told she was going to be serving someone, who used to be famous, that night. She came home to ask us if we had heard of David Essex. She seems completely surprised we had both heard of this unknown person.
The clue to be fair is the fact that he 'used to be' famous.
I had no idea who he was either when I read the name.
He's the English Tory equivalent of Jim Sillars. Wheeled out when they want someone vaguely Tory to attack the current incumbent.
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
We have different visa requirements for the US, India and DR Congo, and I don't think that's because of primary legislation. Should equality legislation be used to overturn that? I think you've argued yourself into some bizarre stance.
I expect all visa requirements are based on legislation, so no of course it should not be used to overturn it. But my point was explicitly that its wrong, regardless of whether its lawful or unlawful.
For different visa requirements, do you mean to work, or for tourism? We have different and reciprocal tourist agreements with much of the developed world, not just Europe, and that's entirely reasonable - and tourist visas aren't heavily restricted - easily obtained tourist visas hasn't caused pressure to tighten tourist visas elsewhere to balance the numbers.
For work, I think we should treat almost* everyone equally regardless of country of origin. If we're discriminating in favour of Americans, then I would oppose that too, I'm consistent on that.
* There are some limited exemptions that make sense, like reciprocal free movement in the Common Travel Area with Ireland, but not in the hundreds of thousands margin.
There are numerous variations in visa rules by country. These are done, I think, by statutory instrument.
Why is reciprocal free movement in the CTA OK, but in the EU was not?
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
We have different visa requirements for the US, India and DR Congo, and I don't think that's because of primary legislation. Should equality legislation be used to overturn that? I think you've argued yourself into some bizarre stance.
I expect all visa requirements are based on legislation, so no of course it should not be used to overturn it. But my point was explicitly that its wrong, regardless of whether its lawful or unlawful.
For different visa requirements, do you mean to work, or for tourism? We have different and reciprocal tourist agreements with much of the developed world, not just Europe, and that's entirely reasonable - and tourist visas aren't heavily restricted - easily obtained tourist visas hasn't caused pressure to tighten tourist visas elsewhere to balance the numbers.
For work, I think we should treat almost* everyone equally regardless of country of origin. If we're discriminating in favour of Americans, then I would oppose that too, I'm consistent on that.
* There are some limited exemptions that make sense, like reciprocal free movement in the Common Travel Area with Ireland, but not in the hundreds of thousands margin.
There are numerous variations in visa rules by country. These are done, I think, by statutory instrument.
Why is reciprocal free movement in the CTA OK, but in the EU was not?
Because its about balance, migration with Ireland is small scale. Free movement with Ireland does not lead to draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration to counterbalance it.
Same thing applies eg with Australia and New Zealand. They have reciprocal free movement, but that only applies to about 4% of Australia's migrants, not a majority of them as was happening when we were in the EU, so Australia doesn't set draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration.
Indeed for the rest of the world (ie non-NZ, non-EU), it was while we were in the EU proportionately much easier to migrate to Australia than the UK, under Australia's points based immigration system.
Basically Ireland is small enough, and reciprocal enough, to get away with it. Europe is not.
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
No it hasn't, non EU immigration still has the same points system it had before, just so has EU immigration rather than free movement
For non-EU migrants coming to the UK to work, the new proposals represent a considerable liberalisation compared with the current system. There are now lower salary and skill thresholds and no overall cap on numbers.
Try dealing with facts from time to time. Non-EU migration has been considerably liberalised in recent years. I for one completely welcome that, indeed its what I was hoping for when I cast my ballot.
There are still salary and skills thresholds for non EU migrants, for EU migrants there is no longer free movement but the same thresholds.
If you were a genuine liberal you would ideally want free movement for all migrants not one skills based migration criteria for all
Common sense has to come into play here. I would love to see free movement worldwide and free trade, but, as you know, it isn't a perfect world. We aren't all 1st world countries and therefore the flow of people would be unmanageable and uneven with free movement and you can't have free trade if the other side doesn't play ball.
So yes as a liberal I'm in favour of free movement and free trade and would like to see as much progress towards that as possible, but I am also not an idiot and appreciate this is a Utopian desire like world peace.
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
You keep pushing this ridiculous argument and you never acknowledge when challenged that the real reason is FoM is one of the pillars of the single market, which is all about regional economic integration.
It's not and never has been about race.
It's just that allowing labour to move freely is a central part of a single market. We have the same thing within the UK. The fact that it's trivial to move from Lincoln to Glasgow yet non-trivial to move from Lesotho to Glasgow, is not racism.
Key to combatting racism is to combat practices of indirect racism, which were not intended to be racist.
It doesn't matter if you didn't intend to be racist, but are because of ignorance or something else, you're still being racist if you are.
EG in America many of their universities have policies of discriminating in favour of "legacy" applications. Given their legacy applicants are disproportionately white, this is a racist policy even if its not its intention. The intention is to support those who have made donations or contributed to the university in the past etc, but its still discriminatory even if you have what you consider to be benign intentions.
You've gone from celebrating an immigration policy that selects for people with high-paying jobs to concerns about indirect racism. Selecting the people with the high-paying jobs is going to select people unequally across ethnic backgrounds in most countries. So, which do you want to do? Have an immigration policy that counters indirect racism or to select people on high-paying jobs?
Yes.
If an Indian doctor or Filipino nurse or Sri Lankan programmer or Japanese banker wants to come to the UK they should be as welcome as anyone from France or Germany is.
Its not perfect, perfect doesn't happen in the real world, so will never meet a HYUFDian purity test, but judging people based on their skills and job is much less racist than judging them by their country of origin.
You're more likely to be a successful programmer in Sri Lanka if you are Sinhalese rather than Tamil. You're less likely to be a Japanese banker if you're father/grandfather was a Black American GI. You're less likely to be a Filipino nurse if you're an Aeta or a Muslim. You're less likely to be an Indian doctor if you're from north-eastern India.
You apply concerns about indirect racism to one policy but not another.
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
We have different visa requirements for the US, India and DR Congo, and I don't think that's because of primary legislation. Should equality legislation be used to overturn that? I think you've argued yourself into some bizarre stance.
I expect all visa requirements are based on legislation, so no of course it should not be used to overturn it. But my point was explicitly that its wrong, regardless of whether its lawful or unlawful.
For different visa requirements, do you mean to work, or for tourism? We have different and reciprocal tourist agreements with much of the developed world, not just Europe, and that's entirely reasonable - and tourist visas aren't heavily restricted - easily obtained tourist visas hasn't caused pressure to tighten tourist visas elsewhere to balance the numbers.
For work, I think we should treat almost* everyone equally regardless of country of origin. If we're discriminating in favour of Americans, then I would oppose that too, I'm consistent on that.
* There are some limited exemptions that make sense, like reciprocal free movement in the Common Travel Area with Ireland, but not in the hundreds of thousands margin.
There are numerous variations in visa rules by country. These are done, I think, by statutory instrument.
Why is reciprocal free movement in the CTA OK, but in the EU was not?
Because its about balance, migration with Ireland is small scale. Free movement with Ireland does not lead to draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration to counterbalance it.
Same thing applies eg with Australia and New Zealand. They have reciprocal free movement, but that only applies to about 4% of Australia's migrants, not a majority of them as was happening when we were in the EU, so Australia doesn't set draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration.
Indeed for the rest of the world (ie non-NZ, non-EU), it was while we were in the EU proportionately much easier to migrate to Australia than the UK, under Australia's points based immigration system.
Basically Ireland is small enough, and reciprocal enough, to get away with it. Europe is not.
There was no need, while we were in the EU, for "draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration to counterbalance it" given you've said you're happy with higher migration.
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
You keep pushing this ridiculous argument and you never acknowledge when challenged that the real reason is FoM is one of the pillars of the single market, which is all about regional economic integration.
It's not and never has been about race.
It's just that allowing labour to move freely is a central part of a single market. We have the same thing within the UK. The fact that it's trivial to move from Lincoln to Glasgow yet non-trivial to move from Lesotho to Glasgow, is not racism.
Key to combatting racism is to combat practices of indirect racism, which were not intended to be racist.
It doesn't matter if you didn't intend to be racist, but are because of ignorance or something else, you're still being racist if you are.
EG in America many of their universities have policies of discriminating in favour of "legacy" applications. Given their legacy applicants are disproportionately white, this is a racist policy even if its not its intention. The intention is to support those who have made donations or contributed to the university in the past etc, but its still discriminatory even if you have what you consider to be benign intentions.
You've gone from celebrating an immigration policy that selects for people with high-paying jobs to concerns about indirect racism. Selecting the people with the high-paying jobs is going to select people unequally across ethnic backgrounds in most countries. So, which do you want to do? Have an immigration policy that counters indirect racism or to select people on high-paying jobs?
Yes.
If an Indian doctor or Filipino nurse or Sri Lankan programmer or Japanese banker wants to come to the UK they should be as welcome as anyone from France or Germany is.
Its not perfect, perfect doesn't happen in the real world, so will never meet a HYUFDian purity test, but judging people based on their skills and job is much less racist than judging them by their country of origin.
You're more likely to be a successful programmer in Sri Lanka if you are Sinhalese rather than Tamil. You're less likely to be a Japanese banker if you're father/grandfather was a Black American GI. You're less likely to be a Filipino nurse if you're an Aeta or a Muslim. You're less likely to be an Indian doctor if you're from north-eastern India.
You apply concerns about indirect racism to one policy but not another.
As @kjh said above, we live in the real world. In a utopian world I'd love to see zero racism, and if you have a credible way to do that, then I would love to hear it. But in the real world, we have to do what is achievable and continually taking whatever steps seem appropriate to us to combat racism, then reappraising and thinking what can we do now, is a productive way to look at it.
Many here on the right consider me ridiculously "woke" for this opinion, but its one I apply quite consistently. I was strongly in favour of the BLM movement, even if I don't like BLM the organisation's views on economics.
In the real world, moving from discriminating based on country of origin, to by job/salary, is a step in the right direction for being less racist. Its not perfect, not claiming it is, but its progress and isn't that a good thing?
Scotland is more "white" than England. Is free movement of labour between the two a racism on the part of England? Could this be an argument for Sindy for the sake of anti-racism Brexiters in England?
it looks like the government have failed in their half hearted idea of scrapping the habitats regulations to address the problem with nutrient pollution holding up housebuilding. So, until something changes, the veto on housebuilding in large parts of the country prevails.
The legal issue (as I understand it) is that it was an amendment introduced to existing draft legislation in the house of lords, it got voted down by the lords, so the commons cannot reintroduce it. They now need a new bill.
Is there time for a new bill? If the Lords can delay things for a year, that's getting close to the election.
Its over -no chance. The idea was that they would try and turn it in to another Brexit war by making this about removing EU law - but it didn't catch on, because it turns out it isn't that easy to just scrap environmental regulation, a lot of people will defend it irrespective of the fact it originated in the EU. This was all very predictable right from the outset.
They need to try and fix the issue a different way.
I don't understand how this lot can be quite so bad at the basic stuff like this. They correctly identified a massive problem. They possibly identified the correct solution*. They then chose a route to this solution that had about a 1% chance of success, and proceeded to take a hit from all the angry people in the media who didn't like the idea. Now they aren't going to able to do it anyway, because their chosen route has - predictably - been blocked. It's no wonder they are polling so badly. Before they touched this issue, they had one lot of grumpy people. Now they've put their a size 12s in it, everyone is grumpy, and they look incompetent to boot.
Repeat this sort of stupidity all over government, and it's no surprise they are polling so badly.
*As far as I can see, the real issue is the number of people in an area compared to the sewerage treatment capacity, not the number of houses into which they have been crammed. We could build everybody in the country a 12 bed mansion and the total volume of sewerage produced is going to stay pretty much the same, so banning building because of sewerage issues is non-sensical. The real problem is giving qangos like Natural Resources England one-sided remits, which means endless "system says no" issues with just about everything.
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
You keep pushing this ridiculous argument and you never acknowledge when challenged that the real reason is FoM is one of the pillars of the single market, which is all about regional economic integration.
It's not and never has been about race.
It's just that allowing labour to move freely is a central part of a single market. We have the same thing within the UK. The fact that it's trivial to move from Lincoln to Glasgow yet non-trivial to move from Lesotho to Glasgow, is not racism.
Key to combatting racism is to combat practices of indirect racism, which were not intended to be racist.
It doesn't matter if you didn't intend to be racist, but are because of ignorance or something else, you're still being racist if you are.
EG in America many of their universities have policies of discriminating in favour of "legacy" applications. Given their legacy applicants are disproportionately white, this is a racist policy even if its not its intention. The intention is to support those who have made donations or contributed to the university in the past etc, but its still discriminatory even if you have what you consider to be benign intentions.
You've gone from celebrating an immigration policy that selects for people with high-paying jobs to concerns about indirect racism. Selecting the people with the high-paying jobs is going to select people unequally across ethnic backgrounds in most countries. So, which do you want to do? Have an immigration policy that counters indirect racism or to select people on high-paying jobs?
Yes.
If an Indian doctor or Filipino nurse or Sri Lankan programmer or Japanese banker wants to come to the UK they should be as welcome as anyone from France or Germany is.
Its not perfect, perfect doesn't happen in the real world, so will never meet a HYUFDian purity test, but judging people based on their skills and job is much less racist than judging them by their country of origin.
You're more likely to be a successful programmer in Sri Lanka if you are Sinhalese rather than Tamil. You're less likely to be a Japanese banker if you're father/grandfather was a Black American GI. You're less likely to be a Filipino nurse if you're an Aeta or a Muslim. You're less likely to be an Indian doctor if you're from north-eastern India.
You apply concerns about indirect racism to one policy but not another.
As @kjh said above, we live in the real world. In a utopian world I'd love to see zero racism, and if you have a credible way to do that, then I would love to hear it. But in the real world, we have to do what is achievable and continually taking whatever steps seem appropriate to us to combat racism, then reappraising and thinking what can we do now, is a productive way to look at it.
Many here on the right consider me ridiculously "woke" for this opinion, but its one I apply quite consistently. I was strongly in favour of the BLM movement, even if I don't like BLM the organisation's views on economics.
In the real world, moving from discriminating based on country of origin, to by job/salary, is a step in the right direction for being less racist. Its not perfect, not claiming it is, but its progress and isn't that a good thing?
I'm unconvinced by your argument that it is less racist. Both can be seen as forms of indirect racism.
If this is your driving motivation, then argue for something that is less racist and achievable in the real world. We could change visa rules so it's not about your job/salary. For example, we could have a lottery system, like the US uses to a degree. You could perhaps assess people on aptitude.
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
We have different visa requirements for the US, India and DR Congo, and I don't think that's because of primary legislation. Should equality legislation be used to overturn that? I think you've argued yourself into some bizarre stance.
I expect all visa requirements are based on legislation, so no of course it should not be used to overturn it. But my point was explicitly that its wrong, regardless of whether its lawful or unlawful.
For different visa requirements, do you mean to work, or for tourism? We have different and reciprocal tourist agreements with much of the developed world, not just Europe, and that's entirely reasonable - and tourist visas aren't heavily restricted - easily obtained tourist visas hasn't caused pressure to tighten tourist visas elsewhere to balance the numbers.
For work, I think we should treat almost* everyone equally regardless of country of origin. If we're discriminating in favour of Americans, then I would oppose that too, I'm consistent on that.
* There are some limited exemptions that make sense, like reciprocal free movement in the Common Travel Area with Ireland, but not in the hundreds of thousands margin.
There are numerous variations in visa rules by country. These are done, I think, by statutory instrument.
Why is reciprocal free movement in the CTA OK, but in the EU was not?
Because its about balance, migration with Ireland is small scale. Free movement with Ireland does not lead to draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration to counterbalance it.
Same thing applies eg with Australia and New Zealand. They have reciprocal free movement, but that only applies to about 4% of Australia's migrants, not a majority of them as was happening when we were in the EU, so Australia doesn't set draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration.
Indeed for the rest of the world (ie non-NZ, non-EU), it was while we were in the EU proportionately much easier to migrate to Australia than the UK, under Australia's points based immigration system.
Basically Ireland is small enough, and reciprocal enough, to get away with it. Europe is not.
There was no need, while we were in the EU, for "draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration to counterbalance it" given you've said you're happy with higher migration.
How high is appropriately high? The government was theoretically trying to get migration down to the tens of thousands net migration, but the EU migration was over a hundred thousand, so that was mathematically impossible without net emigration from the rest of the world.
As I said, I'm quite comfortable with a quarter a million net arriving (though I want appropriate housing, roads, etc and other services built to match it), but if they are then I'd want that quarter a million being treated equitably. If the majority of that number is 'reserved' for free movement, then you've instantly eliminated half the potential net migration from the rest of the world, which is unreasonable in my eyes. And that's for an extremely high net migration figure relative to what then Cameron's government was proposing.
For Ireland OTOH, there wasn't hundreds of thousands of net migration into the UK reserving half the places happening under free movement. In fact the most recent figure I've seen was that with regards to Ireland we had net emigration of 1,900 people in 2022 and net emigration of 900 people in 2021.
There's no free migration of labour from Africa. So there is no "anti-racist" argument for Brexit. Happy?
Who's saying there should be free migration from Africa?
I'm saying that someone from Nigeria who wants to migrate here should be treated the same as someone from Norway who does. We shouldn't discriminate based on country of origin.
Not that much of a surprise, Heseltine has long been a diehard Remainer and was the candidate of the National Liberals in the 1950s
Would that be the National Liberals who fought six elections as allies of the Conservative Party before merging with them in 1968?
You forget that HYUFD wants Liberal Conservatives like Heseltine and myself out of the Party so it can return to true 1820s Toryism like he and Mogg want.
Trouble with that is the Tories without any Liberals won't win any elections.
Actually, if the Tories are going to be illiberal, there's no trouble with that.
You voted for Brexit and for Farage, you aren't that liberal.
On a forced choice against Labour some liberals may opt for the Conservatives, it doesn't make them ideological conservatives, indeed in LD v Con marginals many would vote LD
I know reading comprehension or understanding others viewpoints isn't your strongpoint, but I have never voted for Farage to be in Parliament and never would. I voted for him to be expelled from Parliament in fact.
Yes I voted for Brexit, after much deliberation, I was initially pro-European and got won around by the arguments of amongst others @Richard_Tyndall and others. Mr Tyndall of course is another liberal right winger on this board who voted for Brexit, there's more than one of us.
Brexit is not a liberal v illiberal divide. Many liberal rightwingers voted Remain yes, like Clarke or Heseltine etc, while other liberal rightwingers voted Leave.
I absolutely would vote LD in an LD v Con marginal currently, so long as the LD candidate is not a NIMBY. I would not have in 2015. That is the problem the Conservatives have, lose us 'Cameroon' liberals and the party is going to struggle to remain in Downing Street.
But being illiberal, the party doesn't deserve to remain in Downing Street, so that's fine.
Almost all LD candidates are NIMBYs.
You happily voted for Boris to leave the EU and leave the single market and end free movement at the last election, you clearly aren't that liberal
Because its not a liberal v illiberal issue.
I am very pro-migration, I simply am not discriminatory towards Europeans and against other ethnicities.
I want to have immigration, but treat migrants fairly whether they be from Austria or Australia, Belgium or Bangladesh, Croatia or Cambodia. We should welcome the best and the brightest from around the entire planet, not just one little corner of it.
You clearly aren't very pro migration, otherwise you wouldn't have wanted to end free movement to and from the EU. You might want to loosen immigration restrictions for other nations too if you are a genuine liberal, you wouldn't want to do the reverse and restrict EU migration.
You could just about be a genuine liberal and have backed Brexit but wanted to have stayed in the single market with free movement, you didn't
This is just nonsense coming from your illiberal perspective.
Its funny how other liberal posters like @kjh can understand this, but you can't. Its because you try to pigeonhole everyone into set boxes of what a "true Tory" or "true liberal" looks like, but life and politics are more fluid than that.
I think its entirely reasonable to say if we're going to have net migration of say 250k a year then those people coming in should be the best and brightest 250k net from around the world, treated evenly and fairly regardless of ethnic background. Rather than saying we accept 150k net from free movement, so we'll only accept 100k net from the rest of the world via stricter migration rules on the rest of the world to compensate for free movement migration.
I'm pleased to see that so far, what I wanted is what's happened and not what Farage wanted. Since free movement ended, we've not seen a collapse in immigration thankfully, instead the draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration have been eased to counter the end of free movement. Personally from my liberal perspective, I find that very welcome. Others, like Faragists or just die hard EUphiles find that a failure.
Do you believe government immigration policy picks the "best and brightest"? I think it picks those who have certain high-paying jobs (or who are willing to do certain low-paying jobs). It picks the upper middle class, and the world is not so meritocratic that the upper middle class are actually the "best and brightest".
Isn't it a bit... well, eugenics-y to talk of the "best and brightest"?
In a liberal free market economy, then its the best proxy we have for the 'best and brightest'.
And its certainly less racist than saying 'white Europeans welcome, anyone else not so fast'.
EU free movement never judged people on their skin colour. You could come as a brown Swede or a black Frenchman, to think of 2 people I know. So, maybe don't say silly things?
If you want to base your immigration policy on what's best for the economy, fair enough, but you were going a step further in claiming that the people thus picked are the "best and brightest". If you really wanted to select the "best and brightest", I'm sure you could come up with some sort of aptitude test that would be better at picking the "best and brightest".
Considering that the EU is even more white than the UK, yes it did absolutely did indirectly judge people by skin colour. Its not at all silly to say that, even if there's exceptions that prove the rule.
You could quite legitimately argue that under the definition of indirect discrimination in the Equality Act, that free movement for the heavily-white EU nations and very restricted migration for the predominantly not-white rest of the world, absolutely would be indirectly discriminating against people via a protected characteristic.
Now of course as it was done via primary legislation, it was not unlawful, despite that, but there's a difference between what's lawful and what's right.
You keep pushing this ridiculous argument and you never acknowledge when challenged that the real reason is FoM is one of the pillars of the single market, which is all about regional economic integration.
It's not and never has been about race.
It's just that allowing labour to move freely is a central part of a single market. We have the same thing within the UK. The fact that it's trivial to move from Lincoln to Glasgow yet non-trivial to move from Lesotho to Glasgow, is not racism.
Key to combatting racism is to combat practices of indirect racism, which were not intended to be racist.
It doesn't matter if you didn't intend to be racist, but are because of ignorance or something else, you're still being racist if you are.
EG in America many of their universities have policies of discriminating in favour of "legacy" applications. Given their legacy applicants are disproportionately white, this is a racist policy even if its not its intention. The intention is to support those who have made donations or contributed to the university in the past etc, but its still discriminatory even if you have what you consider to be benign intentions.
You've gone from celebrating an immigration policy that selects for people with high-paying jobs to concerns about indirect racism. Selecting the people with the high-paying jobs is going to select people unequally across ethnic backgrounds in most countries. So, which do you want to do? Have an immigration policy that counters indirect racism or to select people on high-paying jobs?
Yes.
If an Indian doctor or Filipino nurse or Sri Lankan programmer or Japanese banker wants to come to the UK they should be as welcome as anyone from France or Germany is.
Its not perfect, perfect doesn't happen in the real world, so will never meet a HYUFDian purity test, but judging people based on their skills and job is much less racist than judging them by their country of origin.
You're more likely to be a successful programmer in Sri Lanka if you are Sinhalese rather than Tamil. You're less likely to be a Japanese banker if you're father/grandfather was a Black American GI. You're less likely to be a Filipino nurse if you're an Aeta or a Muslim. You're less likely to be an Indian doctor if you're from north-eastern India.
You apply concerns about indirect racism to one policy but not another.
As @kjh said above, we live in the real world. In a utopian world I'd love to see zero racism, and if you have a credible way to do that, then I would love to hear it. But in the real world, we have to do what is achievable and continually taking whatever steps seem appropriate to us to combat racism, then reappraising and thinking what can we do now, is a productive way to look at it.
Many here on the right consider me ridiculously "woke" for this opinion, but its one I apply quite consistently. I was strongly in favour of the BLM movement, even if I don't like BLM the organisation's views on economics.
In the real world, moving from discriminating based on country of origin, to by job/salary, is a step in the right direction for being less racist. Its not perfect, not claiming it is, but its progress and isn't that a good thing?
I'm unconvinced by your argument that it is less racist. Both can be seen as forms of indirect racism.
If this is your driving motivation, then argue for something that is less racist and achievable in the real world. We could change visa rules so it's not about your job/salary. For example, we could have a lottery system, like the US uses to a degree. You could perhaps assess people on aptitude.
Even by your own argument its less racist.
Yes we may be biased imperfectly in favour of the Sinhalese, the black, Aeta's, Muslims or north-east Indians etc
But that's different to our old system of being biased in favour of White Europeans^26
Life's not perfect, but treating people equitably regardless of country of origin is something that was achievable in the real world.
it looks like the government have failed in their half hearted idea of scrapping the habitats regulations to address the problem with nutrient pollution holding up housebuilding. So, until something changes, the veto on housebuilding in large parts of the country prevails.
The legal issue (as I understand it) is that it was an amendment introduced to existing draft legislation in the house of lords, it got voted down by the lords, so the commons cannot reintroduce it. They now need a new bill.
Is there time for a new bill? If the Lords can delay things for a year, that's getting close to the election.
Its over -no chance. The idea was that they would try and turn it in to another Brexit war by making this about removing EU law - but it didn't catch on, because it turns out it isn't that easy to just scrap environmental regulation, a lot of people will defend it irrespective of the fact it originated in the EU. This was all very predictable right from the outset.
They need to try and fix the issue a different way.
I don't understand how this lot can be quite so bad at the basic stuff like this. They correctly identified a massive problem. They possibly identified the correct solution*. They then chose a route to this solution that had about a 1% chance of success, and proceeded to take a hit from all the angry people in the media who didn't like the idea. Now they aren't going to able to do it anyway, because their chosen route has - predictably - been blocked. It's no wonder they are polling so badly. Before they touched this issue, they had one lot of grumpy people. Now they've put their a size 12s in it, everyone is grumpy, and they look incompetent to boot.
Repeat this sort of stupidity all over government, and it's no surprise they are polling so badly.
*As far as I can see, the real issue is the number of people in an area compared to the sewerage treatment capacity, not the number of houses into which they have been crammed. We could build everybody in the country a 12 bed mansion and the total volume of sewerage produced is going to stay pretty much the same, so banning building because of sewerage issues is non-sensical. The real problem is giving qangos like Natural Resources England one-sided remits, which means endless "system says no" issues with just about everything.
I'm not aware that anyone bar a few idiots on Twitter were against this change in policy, certainly not anyone who understood it.
The issue here is a narrow legal one that has been identified above. The solution is to have a nee hosuing bill and include this within the bill. Add a part to empower councils to levy taxes on land banking developers, and you start to get a powerful housing bill.
FPT for Leon. I actually mentioned this to the French guy. I said “you guys colonised Indochina especially Vietnam, which has one of the best cuisines in the world, why aren’t there Vietnamese restaurants everywhere” and he looked blank, as in:
1. He wasn’t really aware France colonised Vietnam
2. He had no clue about Vietnamese cuisine - good bad or otherwise
Imagine a Brit not comprehending “curry”
It's an interesting question. French Vietnamese constitute a bit over half a percent of the population - so British Indians are about five times as numerous.
Partly cultural assimilation, perhaps? Tends historically to be more complete in France - and the Vietnamese immigrants will have tended to be of the upper rather than working class.
French colonialism in Vietnam was brutal stuff, and their exit a massive national humiliation, so it's not entirely surprising they've forgotten it. Also it's a shortish history - Vietnam only became a colony in 1850.
There's no free migration of labour from Africa. So there is no "anti-racist" argument for Brexit. Happy?
Who's saying there should be free migration from Africa?
I'm saying that someone from Nigeria who wants to migrate here should be treated the same as someone from Norway who does. We shouldn't discriminate based on country of origin.
But you do think you should discriminate, because Scots get to move to London more easily than French or Ghanaian nationals. "Don't discriminate between foreigners, but Brits are always better" is not really a consistent anti-racist principle. It may be pragmatic, but so is negotiating mutually recognised freedoms with your neighbours.
Are Russia and China entitled to no worse treatment than any other country diplomatically, to ensure that British foreign policy is consistently anti-racist?
There's no free migration of labour from Africa. So there is no "anti-racist" argument for Brexit. Happy?
Who's saying there should be free migration from Africa?
I'm saying that someone from Nigeria who wants to migrate here should be treated the same as someone from Norway who does. We shouldn't discriminate based on country of origin.
But you do think you should discriminate, because Scots get to move to London more easily than French or Ghanaian nationals. "Don't discriminate between foreigners, but Brits are always better" is not really a consistent anti-racist principle. It may be pragmatic, but so is negotiating mutually recognised freedoms with your neighbours.
Did I miss Scotland voting Yes in 2014?
Anyone who moves from Glasgow to London is not migrating into the UK, they're already here.
If net migration between your neighbours is approximately 0 so it doesn't lead to restrictions on RoW migration (ie Ireland, Common Travel Area) then yes that may be pragmatic.
If net migration between your neighbours is in six figures per annum, and the government says it wants net migration to be tens of thousands per annum, then that that's not pragmatic anymore.
There's no free migration of labour from Africa. So there is no "anti-racist" argument for Brexit. Happy?
Who's saying there should be free migration from Africa?
I'm saying that someone from Nigeria who wants to migrate here should be treated the same as someone from Norway who does. We shouldn't discriminate based on country of origin.
But you do think you should discriminate, because Scots get to move to London more easily than French or Ghanaian nationals. "Don't discriminate between foreigners, but Brits are always better" is not really a consistent anti-racist principle. It may be pragmatic, but so is negotiating mutually recognised freedoms with your neighbours.
Did I miss Scotland voting Yes in 2014?
Anyone who moves from Glasgow to London is not migrating into the UK, they're already here.
If net migration between your neighbours is approximately 0 so it doesn't lead to restrictions on RoW migration (ie Ireland, Common Travel Area) then yes that may be pragmatic.
If net migration between your neighbours is in six figures per annum, and the government says it wants net migration to be tens of thousands per annum, then that that's not pragmatic anymore.
Your ultimate assertion is that reducing the number of foreigners in the country is praiseworthy for anti-racism reasons?
There's no free migration of labour from Africa. So there is no "anti-racist" argument for Brexit. Happy?
Who's saying there should be free migration from Africa?
I'm saying that someone from Nigeria who wants to migrate here should be treated the same as someone from Norway who does. We shouldn't discriminate based on country of origin.
But you do think you should discriminate, because Scots get to move to London more easily than French or Ghanaian nationals. "Don't discriminate between foreigners, but Brits are always better" is not really a consistent anti-racist principle. It may be pragmatic, but so is negotiating mutually recognised freedoms with your neighbours.
Did I miss Scotland voting Yes in 2014?
Anyone who moves from Glasgow to London is not migrating into the UK, they're already here.
If net migration between your neighbours is approximately 0 so it doesn't lead to restrictions on RoW migration (ie Ireland, Common Travel Area) then yes that may be pragmatic.
If net migration between your neighbours is in six figures per annum, and the government says it wants net migration to be tens of thousands per annum, then that that's not pragmatic anymore.
Your ultimate assertion is that reducing the number of foreigners in the country is praiseworthy for anti-racism reasons?
No.
My ultimate assertion is that by not discriminating anymore, we can [and do] have liberalised rest of the world migration standards while maintaining the same level of migration.
Liberalising rest of world standards is a good thing to be welcomed, is it not?
Are Russia and China entitled to no worse treatment than any other country diplomatically, to ensure that British foreign policy is consistently anti-racist?
No worse than our policy towards 1930s upto 1945 Germany considering that's how Russia especially is behaving.
BOE’s QT Program Likened to Gold Sales at Bottom of the Market
The Bank of England’s unwinding of its multi billion-pound bond portfolio is comparable to former Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown’s infamous decision to “sell gold at the bottom of the market” from 1999 to 2002, the asset manager Columbia Threadneedle said.
...
The UK Treasury missed out on at least £2 billion ($2.5 billion) from the gold sales, according to later estimates, and is facing annual losses of around £3 billion now as the BOE rushes to dump gilts under quantitative tightening with little regard for the price.
...
Rising interest rates have turned what was once a money-spinner for the government, as the bonds were profitable in a time of low interest rates, into a drain on its finances. The bank now expects losses on the program of around £250 billion over the coming years, leaving taxpayers nursing a net loss of more than £100 billion. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/boe-s-qt-program-likened-to-gold-sales-at-bottom-of-the-market-1.1970369
Makes the triple lock seem like small beer.
I've been banging the drum on this for months. As too, to give him credit since we rarely see eye to eye on much, has @Luckyguy1983
Its utterly atrocious mismanagement of our finances.
The Government letting the BOE do this and meekly handing over the cash (as will the next Government) is tantamount to a deliberate destruction of the economy. £250 Billion. And apparently Sunak is a cautious and parsimonious guardian of the nation's finances.
"The father, stepmother and uncle of Sara Sharif, 10, have been arrested on suspicion of murder after returning to the UK from Pakistan.
Urfan Sharif, 41, his wife Beinash Batool, 29, and his brother Faisal Malik, 28, were arrested at Gatwick Airport at around 19:45 BST after disembarking a flight from Dubai."
There's no free migration of labour from Africa. So there is no "anti-racist" argument for Brexit. Happy?
Who's saying there should be free migration from Africa?
I'm saying that someone from Nigeria who wants to migrate here should be treated the same as someone from Norway who does. We shouldn't discriminate based on country of origin.
But you do think you should discriminate, because Scots get to move to London more easily than French or Ghanaian nationals. "Don't discriminate between foreigners, but Brits are always better" is not really a consistent anti-racist principle. It may be pragmatic, but so is negotiating mutually recognised freedoms with your neighbours.
Did I miss Scotland voting Yes in 2014?
Anyone who moves from Glasgow to London is not migrating into the UK, they're already here.
If net migration between your neighbours is approximately 0 so it doesn't lead to restrictions on RoW migration (ie Ireland, Common Travel Area) then yes that may be pragmatic.
If net migration between your neighbours is in six figures per annum, and the government says it wants net migration to be tens of thousands per annum, then that that's not pragmatic anymore.
Your ultimate assertion is that reducing the number of foreigners in the country is praiseworthy for anti-racism reasons?
No.
My ultimate assertion is that by not discriminating anymore, we can [and do] have liberalised rest of the world migration standards while maintaining the same level of migration.
Liberalising rest of world standards is a good thing to be welcomed, is it not?
If it were that simple, there'd be no restrictions from rest-of-world nationalities. So logically speaking it is not simply "a good thing" to liberalise migration rules and the answer is "it depends". But enough of the intellectual parlour game: like an undergraduate debate, it's fine for a while to explore alternatives to our usual ways of thinking, but pointless if we spend too much time bearing away from the way things happen in reality.
FPT, I agree with the suggestion that Vietnamese food in Europe suffers for being "too healthy and fresh" - the most popular Asian foods often fit the same sweet/fried niche as burger places - sushi, sauce with rice, fried noodles in tamarind sauce, and so on.
If you're frying your sushi you're doing something wrong...
Sushi in a Glaswegian chippie? Gets fried like the white pudden, mutton pies, pizzas ...
I've not been to Glasgow for a while. Went to a very nice Sudanese restaurant when I last did. For those further south, deep-fried sushi is available from plenty of places in London, e.g. https://deliveroo.co.uk/menu/London/pimlico/taro-japanese-restaurant It's a real dish.
Tempura? Oh yes, somehow I didn't think of that as sushi, though I've necked plenty of it. At least it's cooked - I still find raw fish unnerving (studied the platyhelminthes and nematodes a bit too closely in my undergraduate days).
FPT, I agree with the suggestion that Vietnamese food in Europe suffers for being "too healthy and fresh" - the most popular Asian foods often fit the same sweet/fried niche as burger places - sushi, sauce with rice, fried noodles in tamarind sauce, and so on.
If you're frying your sushi you're doing something wrong...
Sushi in a Glaswegian chippie? Gets fried like the white pudden, mutton pies, pizzas ...
I've not been to Glasgow for a while. Went to a very nice Sudanese restaurant when I last did. For those further south, deep-fried sushi is available from plenty of places in London, e.g. https://deliveroo.co.uk/menu/London/pimlico/taro-japanese-restaurant It's a real dish.
Tempura? Oh yes, somehow I didn't think of that as sushi, though I've necked plenty of it. At least it's cooked - I still find raw fish unnerving (studied the platyhelminthes and nematodes a bit too closely in my undergraduate days).
it looks like the government have failed in their half hearted idea of scrapping the habitats regulations to address the problem with nutrient pollution holding up housebuilding. So, until something changes, the veto on housebuilding in large parts of the country prevails.
The legal issue (as I understand it) is that it was an amendment introduced to existing draft legislation in the house of lords, it got voted down by the lords, so the commons cannot reintroduce it. They now need a new bill.
Is there time for a new bill? If the Lords can delay things for a year, that's getting close to the election.
Its over -no chance. The idea was that they would try and turn it in to another Brexit war by making this about removing EU law - but it didn't catch on, because it turns out it isn't that easy to just scrap environmental regulation, a lot of people will defend it irrespective of the fact it originated in the EU. This was all very predictable right from the outset.
They need to try and fix the issue a different way.
I don't understand how this lot can be quite so bad at the basic stuff like this. They correctly identified a massive problem. They possibly identified the correct solution*. They then chose a route to this solution that had about a 1% chance of success, and proceeded to take a hit from all the angry people in the media who didn't like the idea. Now they aren't going to able to do it anyway, because their chosen route has - predictably - been blocked. It's no wonder they are polling so badly. Before they touched this issue, they had one lot of grumpy people. Now they've put their a size 12s in it, everyone is grumpy, and they look incompetent to boot.
Repeat this sort of stupidity all over government, and it's no surprise they are polling so badly.
*As far as I can see, the real issue is the number of people in an area compared to the sewerage treatment capacity, not the number of houses into which they have been crammed. We could build everybody in the country a 12 bed mansion and the total volume of sewerage produced is going to stay pretty much the same, so banning building because of sewerage issues is non-sensical. The real problem is giving qangos like Natural Resources England one-sided remits, which means endless "system says no" issues with just about everything.
Leaving aside the politics of it, the issue isn't really that simple. You're right that if they built Buckingham Palace Mark II on the River Wye and it was only used by Charles and Camilla for the odd weekend, the impact on sewage would be negligible. However, in practice developers want to build lots of homes on a riverside site. In exactly the same way as building lots of chicken farms on the Wye (which is an issue so serious that the Welsh government has suspended all new approvals), lots of homes crammed in there will pollute the river. The Bill would have had the developers mitigate that somehow, but the history of housing developers (and indeed of mitigation as a concept) doesn't fill one with confidence.
Britain is not actually so crowded that it's impossible to build new developments without insisting on a major environmental impact. We just need to get used to build denser, taller apartment buildings in cities, like nearly every other developed country, and/or develop new towns and/or not be too fanatical about every inch of the Green Belt.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/mitt-romney-retiring-senate-trump-mcconnell/675306/ ...“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?..
...And yet, to at least some of his fellow Republicans, the case against Trump was compelling—even if they’d never say so in public. During a break in the proceedings, after the impeachment managers finished their presentation, Romney walked by McConnell. “They nailed him,” the Senate majority leader said.
Romney, taken aback by McConnell’s candor, responded carefully: “Well, the defense will say that Trump was just investigating corruption by the Bidens.”
“If you believe that,” McConnell replied, “I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.” (McConnell said he does not recall this conversation and it does not match his thinking at the time.)...
Read the whole thing. The performative hypocrisy of the Hawleys and Cruzes is breathtaking.
it looks like the government have failed in their half hearted idea of scrapping the habitats regulations to address the problem with nutrient pollution holding up housebuilding. So, until something changes, the veto on housebuilding in large parts of the country prevails.
The legal issue (as I understand it) is that it was an amendment introduced to existing draft legislation in the house of lords, it got voted down by the lords, so the commons cannot reintroduce it. They now need a new bill.
Is there time for a new bill? If the Lords can delay things for a year, that's getting close to the election.
Its over -no chance. The idea was that they would try and turn it in to another Brexit war by making this about removing EU law - but it didn't catch on, because it turns out it isn't that easy to just scrap environmental regulation, a lot of people will defend it irrespective of the fact it originated in the EU. This was all very predictable right from the outset.
They need to try and fix the issue a different way.
I don't understand how this lot can be quite so bad at the basic stuff like this. They correctly identified a massive problem. They possibly identified the correct solution*. They then chose a route to this solution that had about a 1% chance of success, and proceeded to take a hit from all the angry people in the media who didn't like the idea. Now they aren't going to able to do it anyway, because their chosen route has - predictably - been blocked. It's no wonder they are polling so badly. Before they touched this issue, they had one lot of grumpy people. Now they've put their a size 12s in it, everyone is grumpy, and they look incompetent to boot.
Repeat this sort of stupidity all over government, and it's no surprise they are polling so badly.
*As far as I can see, the real issue is the number of people in an area compared to the sewerage treatment capacity, not the number of houses into which they have been crammed. We could build everybody in the country a 12 bed mansion and the total volume of sewerage produced is going to stay pretty much the same, so banning building because of sewerage issues is non-sensical. The real problem is giving qangos like Natural Resources England one-sided remits, which means endless "system says no" issues with just about everything.
Leaving aside the politics of it, the issue isn't really that simple. You're right that if they built Buckingham Palace Mark II on the River Wye and it was only used by Charles and Camilla for the odd weekend, the impact on sewage would be negligible. However, in practice developers want to build lots of homes on a riverside site. In exactly the same way as building lots of chicken farms on the Wye (which is an issue so serious that the Welsh government has suspended all new approvals), lots of homes crammed in there will pollute the river. The Bill would have had the developers mitigate that somehow, but the history of housing developers (and indeed of mitigation as a concept) doesn't fill one with confidence.
Britain is not actually so crowded that it's impossible to build new developments without insisting on a major environmental impact. We just need to get used to build denser, taller apartment buildings in cities, like nearly every other developed country, and/or develop new towns and/or not be too fanatical about every inch of the Green Belt.
As I noted yesterday, S Korea has nearly twice our population density - and maintains vast tracts of forest across the country.
Lots of high rise apartments in towns as well as cities.
"The Trussites are plotting their comeback A year after Liz Truss’s chaotic premiership, her inner circle believe their time will come again. By Rachel Cunliffe"
"The Trussites are plotting their comeback A year after Liz Truss’s chaotic premiership, her inner circle believe their time will come again. By Rachel Cunliffe"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/mitt-romney-retiring-senate-trump-mcconnell/675306/ ...“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?..
...And yet, to at least some of his fellow Republicans, the case against Trump was compelling—even if they’d never say so in public. During a break in the proceedings, after the impeachment managers finished their presentation, Romney walked by McConnell. “They nailed him,” the Senate majority leader said.
Romney, taken aback by McConnell’s candor, responded carefully: “Well, the defense will say that Trump was just investigating corruption by the Bidens.”
“If you believe that,” McConnell replied, “I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.” (McConnell said he does not recall this conversation and it does not match his thinking at the time.)...
Read the whole thing. The performative hypocrisy of the Hawleys and Cruzes is breathtaking.
FPT for Leon. I actually mentioned this to the French guy. I said “you guys colonised Indochina especially Vietnam, which has one of the best cuisines in the world, why aren’t there Vietnamese restaurants everywhere” and he looked blank, as in:
1. He wasn’t really aware France colonised Vietnam
2. He had no clue about Vietnamese cuisine - good bad or otherwise
Imagine a Brit not comprehending “curry”
It's an interesting question. French Vietnamese constitute a bit over half a percent of the population - so British Indians are about five times as numerous.
Partly cultural assimilation, perhaps? Tends historically to be more complete in France - and the Vietnamese immigrants will have tended to be of the upper rather than working class.
French colonialism in Vietnam was brutal stuff, and their exit a massive national humiliation, so it's not entirely surprising they've forgotten it. Also it's a shortish history - Vietnam only became a colony in 1850.
Comments
If you were a genuine liberal you would ideally want free movement for all migrants not one skills based migration criteria for all
For different visa requirements, do you mean to work, or for tourism? We have different and reciprocal tourist agreements with much of the developed world, not just Europe, and that's entirely reasonable - and tourist visas aren't heavily restricted - easily obtained tourist visas hasn't caused pressure to tighten tourist visas elsewhere to balance the numbers.
For work, I think we should treat almost* everyone equally regardless of country of origin. If we're discriminating in favour of Americans, then I would oppose that too, I'm consistent on that.
* There are some limited exemptions that make sense, like reciprocal free movement in the Common Travel Area with Ireland, but not in the hundreds of thousands margin.
A form of sushi involving preserving fish in rice and vinegar, a sort of pickling process, goes back many centuries. What we think of as sushi now, your classic nigiri, is late 19th century, IIRC. Salmon in sushi was invented by the Norwegians in the 1970s. Whacky things like California rolls, aburi sushi, tempura'd rolls, they're all very recent.
Did you know ciabatta was only invented in 1982?
If an Indian doctor or Filipino nurse or Sri Lankan programmer or Japanese banker wants to come to the UK they should be as welcome as anyone from France or Germany is.
Its not perfect, perfect doesn't happen in the real world, so will never meet a HYUFDian purity test, but judging people based on their skills and job is much less racist than judging them by their country of origin.
Why is reciprocal free movement in the CTA OK, but in the EU was not?
Same thing applies eg with Australia and New Zealand. They have reciprocal free movement, but that only applies to about 4% of Australia's migrants, not a majority of them as was happening when we were in the EU, so Australia doesn't set draconian restrictions on rest of the world migration.
Indeed for the rest of the world (ie non-NZ, non-EU), it was while we were in the EU proportionately much easier to migrate to Australia than the UK, under Australia's points based immigration system.
Basically Ireland is small enough, and reciprocal enough, to get away with it. Europe is not.
So yes as a liberal I'm in favour of free movement and free trade and would like to see as much progress towards that as possible, but I am also not an idiot and appreciate this is a Utopian desire like world peace.
https://x.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1702051522731778553?s=20
You apply concerns about indirect racism to one policy but not another.
Many here on the right consider me ridiculously "woke" for this opinion, but its one I apply quite consistently. I was strongly in favour of the BLM movement, even if I don't like BLM the organisation's views on economics.
In the real world, moving from discriminating based on country of origin, to by job/salary, is a step in the right direction for being less racist. Its not perfect, not claiming it is, but its progress and isn't that a good thing?
They correctly identified a massive problem. They possibly identified the correct solution*. They then chose a route to this solution that had about a 1% chance of success, and proceeded to take a hit from all the angry people in the media who didn't like the idea. Now they aren't going to able to do it anyway, because their chosen route has - predictably - been blocked.
It's no wonder they are polling so badly. Before they touched this issue, they had one lot of grumpy people. Now they've put their a size 12s in it, everyone is grumpy, and they look incompetent to boot.
Repeat this sort of stupidity all over government, and it's no surprise they are polling so badly.
*As far as I can see, the real issue is the number of people in an area compared to the sewerage treatment capacity, not the number of houses into which they have been crammed. We could build everybody in the country a 12 bed mansion and the total volume of sewerage produced is going to stay pretty much the same, so banning building because of sewerage issues is non-sensical. The real problem is giving qangos like Natural Resources England one-sided remits, which means endless "system says no" issues with just about everything.
If this is your driving motivation, then argue for something that is less racist and achievable in the real world. We could change visa rules so it's not about your job/salary. For example, we could have a lottery system, like the US uses to a degree. You could perhaps assess people on aptitude.
As I said, I'm quite comfortable with a quarter a million net arriving (though I want appropriate housing, roads, etc and other services built to match it), but if they are then I'd want that quarter a million being treated equitably. If the majority of that number is 'reserved' for free movement, then you've instantly eliminated half the potential net migration from the rest of the world, which is unreasonable in my eyes. And that's for an extremely high net migration figure relative to what then Cameron's government was proposing.
For Ireland OTOH, there wasn't hundreds of thousands of net migration into the UK reserving half the places happening under free movement. In fact the most recent figure I've seen was that with regards to Ireland we had net emigration of 1,900 people in 2022 and net emigration of 900 people in 2021.
So yes, with Ireland its a total non-issue.
I'm saying that someone from Nigeria who wants to migrate here should be treated the same as someone from Norway who does. We shouldn't discriminate based on country of origin.
Yes we may be biased imperfectly in favour of the Sinhalese, the black, Aeta's, Muslims or north-east Indians etc
But that's different to our old system of being biased in favour of White Europeans^26
Life's not perfect, but treating people equitably regardless of country of origin is something that was achievable in the real world.
The issue here is a narrow legal one that has been identified above. The solution is to have a nee hosuing bill and include this within the bill. Add a part to empower councils to levy taxes on land banking developers, and you start to get a powerful housing bill.
I actually mentioned this to the French guy. I said “you guys colonised Indochina especially Vietnam, which has one of the best cuisines in the world, why aren’t there Vietnamese restaurants everywhere” and he looked blank, as in:
1. He wasn’t really aware France colonised Vietnam
2. He had no clue about Vietnamese cuisine - good bad or otherwise
Imagine a Brit not comprehending “curry”
It's an interesting question.
French Vietnamese constitute a bit over half a percent of the population - so British Indians are about five times as numerous.
Partly cultural assimilation, perhaps? Tends historically to be more complete in France - and the Vietnamese immigrants will have tended to be of the upper rather than working class.
French colonialism in Vietnam was brutal stuff, and their exit a massive national humiliation, so it's not entirely surprising they've forgotten it.
Also it's a shortish history - Vietnam only became a colony in 1850.
Wikipedia says they are concentrated around Paris and Marseilles.
Get yourself to the 13th arrondissement.
https://vietnamtimes.org.vn/paris-get-lost-in-13th-arrondissement-the-heaven-of-vietnamese-foods-46669.html
Anyone who moves from Glasgow to London is not migrating into the UK, they're already here.
If net migration between your neighbours is approximately 0 so it doesn't lead to restrictions on RoW migration (ie Ireland, Common Travel Area) then yes that may be pragmatic.
If net migration between your neighbours is in six figures per annum, and the government says it wants net migration to be tens of thousands per annum, then that that's not pragmatic anymore.
My ultimate assertion is that by not discriminating anymore, we can [and do] have liberalised rest of the world migration standards while maintaining the same level of migration.
Liberalising rest of world standards is a good thing to be welcomed, is it not?
"The father, stepmother and uncle of Sara Sharif, 10, have been arrested on suspicion of murder after returning to the UK from Pakistan.
Urfan Sharif, 41, his wife Beinash Batool, 29, and his brother Faisal Malik, 28, were arrested at Gatwick Airport at around 19:45 BST after disembarking a flight from Dubai."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66804350
https://youtu.be/jOJj5xh0uG0
Britain is not actually so crowded that it's impossible to build new developments without insisting on a major environmental impact. We just need to get used to build denser, taller apartment buildings in cities, like nearly every other developed country, and/or develop new towns and/or not be too fanatical about every inch of the Green Belt.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/mitt-romney-retiring-senate-trump-mcconnell/675306/
...“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?..
...And yet, to at least some of his fellow Republicans, the case against Trump was compelling—even if they’d never say so in public. During a break in the proceedings, after the impeachment managers finished their presentation, Romney walked by McConnell. “They nailed him,” the Senate majority leader said.
Romney, taken aback by McConnell’s candor, responded carefully: “Well, the defense will say that Trump was just investigating corruption by the Bidens.”
“If you believe that,” McConnell replied, “I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.” (McConnell said he does not recall this conversation and it does not match his thinking at the time.)...
Read the whole thing.
The performative hypocrisy of the Hawleys and Cruzes is breathtaking.
Dan Rosenfield decides to sit as independent after being nominated by former PM in resignation honours list
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/13/boris-johnson-look-like-chump-as-ex-aide-dan-rosenfield-shuns-tories-in-lords
As with much else, no real conclusion yet on the balance of advantage.
Went from Kyiv to just outside Klishchiivka for this deep dive into the current state of the drone war for @KyivIndependent.
Judging the drone war is very much like the war as a whole- balancing a confusing mess of qualitative and quantitative data.
https://twitter.com/francisjfarrell/status/1702090961168269675
Lots of high rise apartments in towns as well as cities.
"The Trussites are plotting their comeback
A year after Liz Truss’s chaotic premiership, her inner circle believe their time will come again.
By Rachel Cunliffe"
https://www.newstatesman.com
and a writer as adept as @mckaycoppins. Read every word, and then order the book.
https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/1702046726503219572
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/14/karin-kneissl-austria-ex-foreign-minister-moves-to-russia