While Wales is rightly trying to reduce number of second homes and empty homes - it got things very wrong with fire sprinklers. It adds £500-1000 to cost of new builds and I believe there is not a single example of them being used succesfully - because house fires usually occur in old homes.... This is a stupid piece of legislation that should be scrapped.
I can understand in flats but surely they're not required in houses ?
Yes they are. All new builds in Wales must have them. I don't have an exact figure for the cost of the installation at my parent's new house, but I think it was a lot more than £1k, probably more like £3-4k if you actually costed it out separately (there's quite a lot of physical kit installed).
Why is there this sudden focus on fire safety? We've had the same thing with interconnected alarms in Scotland. Grenfell? Charging of electric vehicles?
I'm generally in favour living in a flat with some dodgy STLs below me, but it's expensive.
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
He regularly insults quite a few of those who say they'll vote for him, if they are insufficiently subservient. 'Little Marco'; 'Birdbrain' etc.
It's part of Trump's brand - it annoys some voters, and it works for others. "He tells it like it is" "he stands up to the elite" bla bla bla. Clinton saying half of Trump's supporters are a basket of deplorables supports the branding of her as part of the elite, someone who looks down her nose at ordinary people, and I can't see any positive side to it for her.
I said on here that it was daft the day she said it. Looking at the company he's kept since, it's not a lie, though.
Yes, just speculating on why Clinton calling half of Trump's supporters deplorables might be terrible politics, while Trump insulting all kinds of people doesn't seem to lose him much support (net). There's also an element of sexism probably.
None of you begin to understand what is going on. Have you been to America? Talked to Trump voters? They aren't all shit-eating rednecks with three teeth and a banjo
Trump voters are, in general, desperate. They think they are losing America, the America they know: largely white, powerful, peaceful (in its own way), largely Christian, tolerant of diversity, but not shoving it down your throat
You can deplore those opinions but they aren't necessarily insane. So, as they are desperate, Trump voters have nowhere else to go. Therefore they are willing to vote for a lunatic like Trump. as they sense he might, just might, reverse a tide which has been flowing the other way for decades, BECAUSE he is an offensive and aggressive oaf, whereas everyone else is spineless
Meanwhile, the left has many options. They sense they are winning the culture wars (and they are right). Wokeness prevails. DEI is everywhere. They can loftily abstain and talk about Bernie Sanders. 3m immigrants are illegally crossing into America, annually, they are potential future Democrat voters. And so on
So your argument is they're not deplorable, they're just white supremacists?
I can see why you think those two things are different.
Ethnocentric, rather than supremacist. They don't want to lord it over anyone, but, yeah, they prefer a white majority America
Most humans - of any race - are ethnocentric, they prefer their own kind. Denying this is futile
Ethnocentric is a cute way of saying "racist".
If you're not an ignorant racist shiteater then "their own kind" has nothing to do with race.
Many rightwing white Tories will find Patel, Badenoch and Sunak more "their own kind" than Corbyn, Raynor and Long-Bailey.
When watching The Ashes I find Moeen Ali to be more "my own kind" than Steve Smith.
Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."
Though note Paul entirely ignored his "neither make nor female" bit, the old misogynist.
I seem to remember the early church was driven forward with a high level of female input.
A key part of Rishi Sunak’s effort to stop the boats has collapsed after Home Office officials declared that Turkey was not a safe country to send migrants back to because of human rights concerns.
Ministers hoped to set up a migrant returns deal with Ankara after a surge in the number of Turkish people arriving illegally in Britain by small boat.
Three thousand Turkish nationals arrived that way last year, making them the third largest nationality to do so and representing a 162 per cent increase from the year before.
The deal would have mirrored an accord with Albania which has significantly cut the number of its citizens entering the UK in this way.
An internal Home Office review described Turkey as “a state that does not meet the criteria of being ‘generally safe’”.
It said that previous analysis of Turkish cases and anecdotal evidence had found 99 per cent of Turkish asylum cases in the UK were based on a fear of the state.
The majority were “political” opponents of the regime due to their actual or perceived involvement in opposition movements, including the Peoples’ Democratic Party, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the Gulen movement.
The assessment criticised Turkey’s “over-zealous” application of anti-terrorism laws and raised concerns over the independence of the judiciary and the provision of fair trials, particularly in “political” cases.
There are allegations of torture and ill-treatment in police custody and prison.
Notably, the assessment also raises concerns over Turkey’s compliance with adverse rulings from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which the Home Office assessment said “raised questions about adherence to the rule of law”.
This is significant given Sunak’s plans not to comply with interim injunctions from the same court.
His Rwanda bill will give ministers the power to ignore these so-called Rule 39 orders despite the president of the ECHR saying last month that this would be a breach of international law.
The Turkish example is a good example of why our current asylum system is simply unsustainable. There are dozens of absolute shit holes in the world with appalling views on gays, women, Christians, minorities along with huge propensities towards violence to assert their control. More than a billion people live in such places, a lot more if you look too carefully at China.
The idea that all of them have the right to seek asylum in this country is well meaning, compassionate and nuts. It is simply unsustainable. We need to move from a rights based system to a compassionate one that allows us the right to choose. So, we might choose Ukrainians or Hong Kong Chinese, for example. But we are unlikely to choose those from religions whose central tenants we find incompatible with our own beliefs. And we must reclaim the right to say no. I believe that this is inevitable and I would rather we did not elect a quasi fascist government to achieve it.
Withdrawing from the UN Convention on Refugees would be required, but seems not to have any real sanction. Indeed it seems no country has had any enforcement action for not following the rules while in membership.
It seems taking any refugees is voluntary.
It is not "voluntary" for us because we are a country that takes the rule of law very seriously, and that is of course something to be proud of. The price of withdrawing the UNCR would be so high I would not commend this country doing it unilaterally. We need to build an international consensus about it. As this century progresses and the numbers from Africa explode I do not think that will be too hard.
Yes but the law can be changed, and rule of law maintained.
What would the actual sanction be for withdrawing from the UNCR?
There are a number of countries in the world who are not members, the largest being India and Indonesia, but also Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand. It doesn't seem to inhibit their trade. Though neither has it solved their refugee problems.
It's incompatible with EU membership, but that isn't an issue at present.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
The shortage of housing drives up the cost - pay what we demand or live in a B&B! It drives up the cost of living to the point where the type of wage the industry can support isn't enough to live on. So govt has to tax those who can afford it to subsidise wages and housing. But they won't allow building because it will lose them votes, so we pay tax to subsidise a failed market so they can stay in office and keep the housing market broken.
I sense that the immigration/asylum issue is going to destroy Starmer in his first term
Every fibre in his Woke body - and all his acolytes, MPs and activists - will want to let in more asylum seekers and more immigrants in general. All of Britain will want the opposite
It will be the most tremendous clash
Contrast that with Sunak's success with the Rwanda scheme.
The Tories are dismally pathetic. They deserve the electoral drubbing coming their way
But then we will all move on, and it will be Labour trying to deal with this enormously corrosive and explosive issue. I see absolutely no ideas from the, on how to do it, indeed I see the opposite, a desire to hide away from it, bollocks about "being nicer to France", like that will solve it. Simply ludicrous
This will get found out very soon and then it will be Labour's turn to face the voters' wrath, and it could come really quickly, as Labour are even MORE pathetic, at their core
Dear old Sir Wibble hasnt actually done anything to engage with the electorate. Having serially failed to set out his stall, he'll end up disappointing everyone.
Being boring and over timid has transformed the Labour polling lead from -20% to +20% in 4 years.
It would be idiotic to change such a winning formula that is on course to deliver him the biggest Labour majority in our history.
His support is like a soup dish, wide but shallow. He may well get in but has nothing to back it. His massive change in the polls is not because of him ( compare to Blair ) but because HMG has decided to regularly shoot themselves in the foot with a pair of AK47s.
I think people’s memory of Blair’s popularity pre 1997 is a bit rosy. Turnout in 97 was very low and I distinctly remember loads of people claiming to be unexcited by either party and just keen to get the Tories out.
Labour have also spent much of the last month setting out very clear policy positions on business, taxation and regulation. Much clearer than any on the mush coming out of Sunak’s government. At work we have a live table tracking fiscal policies of the 3 main parties. The Labour tab is twice as long as the government one. The “they don’t have any policies” thing is a brand issue rather than based on an objective assessment of policies.
UK election turnout was 71%. The low turnout election was 2001 at 59%.
Labour currently have set out positions on business along the lines of we'll do what Sunak is doing. And since Sunak and Hunt are currently in government there isnt quite the need to say what they will do as they are doing it. Unfortunately. The only thing I can give Starmer credit for is his statement on housing - which I support. But I doubt he'll do anything about it.
Plus ca change.
The turnout of 71% in 1997 was a post-war record low, and followed 77% in 1992. It was much remarked on at the time.
The Labour business and fiscal programme is significantly more detailed than “we’ll do what Sunak is doing”. That’s why we’re keeping the table updated. The headlines you’re seeing in the papers are we’ll do what Sunak is doing.
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
He regularly insults quite a few of those who say they'll vote for him, if they are insufficiently subservient. 'Little Marco'; 'Birdbrain' etc.
It's part of Trump's brand - it annoys some voters, and it works for others. "He tells it like it is" "he stands up to the elite" bla bla bla. Clinton saying half of Trump's supporters are a basket of deplorables supports the branding of her as part of the elite, someone who looks down her nose at ordinary people, and I can't see any positive side to it for her.
I said on here that it was daft the day she said it. Looking at the company he's kept since, it's not a lie, though.
Yes, just speculating on why Clinton calling half of Trump's supporters deplorables might be terrible politics, while Trump insulting all kinds of people doesn't seem to lose him much support (net). There's also an element of sexism probably.
None of you begin to understand what is going on. Have you been to America? Talked to Trump voters? They aren't all shit-eating rednecks with three teeth and a banjo
Trump voters are, in general, desperate. They think they are losing America, the America they know: largely white, powerful, peaceful (in its own way), largely Christian, tolerant of diversity, but not shoving it down your throat
You can deplore those opinions but they aren't necessarily insane. So, as they are desperate, Trump voters have nowhere else to go. Therefore they are willing to vote for a lunatic like Trump. as they sense he might, just might, reverse a tide which has been flowing the other way for decades, BECAUSE he is an offensive and aggressive oaf, whereas everyone else is spineless
Meanwhile, the left has many options. They sense they are winning the culture wars (and they are right). Wokeness prevails. DEI is everywhere. They can loftily abstain and talk about Bernie Sanders. 3m immigrants are illegally crossing into America, annually, they are potential future Democrat voters. And so on
Sweet how you agree with me in your unique childlike way, without even realising it!
But to answer your questions, yes I have been to America, and yes I have talked to Trump voters. None of the ones I know are rednecks or white supremacists, but some of them might be a bit insane on some issues. The ones I know are broadly 2 types: 1. Friends who afaik wouldn't have voted Republican in the past (probably wouldn't have voted at all), but believe things like the Democrats (and the establishment generally) are all running paedophile rings. Correlated with a belief in chemtrails, and crop circles being messages from aliens. 2. People who probably did vote Republican before Trump, are generally conservative, and also like paying less tax.
I know that this is a very unrepresentative group, and there must be a few Trump supporters who are, as you say, banjo players without any teeth - I'm just not in contact with them.
A key part of Rishi Sunak’s effort to stop the boats has collapsed after Home Office officials declared that Turkey was not a safe country to send migrants back to because of human rights concerns.
Ministers hoped to set up a migrant returns deal with Ankara after a surge in the number of Turkish people arriving illegally in Britain by small boat.
Three thousand Turkish nationals arrived that way last year, making them the third largest nationality to do so and representing a 162 per cent increase from the year before.
The deal would have mirrored an accord with Albania which has significantly cut the number of its citizens entering the UK in this way.
An internal Home Office review described Turkey as “a state that does not meet the criteria of being ‘generally safe’”.
It said that previous analysis of Turkish cases and anecdotal evidence had found 99 per cent of Turkish asylum cases in the UK were based on a fear of the state.
The majority were “political” opponents of the regime due to their actual or perceived involvement in opposition movements, including the Peoples’ Democratic Party, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the Gulen movement.
The assessment criticised Turkey’s “over-zealous” application of anti-terrorism laws and raised concerns over the independence of the judiciary and the provision of fair trials, particularly in “political” cases.
There are allegations of torture and ill-treatment in police custody and prison.
Notably, the assessment also raises concerns over Turkey’s compliance with adverse rulings from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which the Home Office assessment said “raised questions about adherence to the rule of law”.
This is significant given Sunak’s plans not to comply with interim injunctions from the same court.
His Rwanda bill will give ministers the power to ignore these so-called Rule 39 orders despite the president of the ECHR saying last month that this would be a breach of international law.
The Turkish example is a good example of why our current asylum system is simply unsustainable. There are dozens of absolute shit holes in the world with appalling views on gays, women, Christians, minorities along with huge propensities towards violence to assert their control. More than a billion people live in such places, a lot more if you look too carefully at China.
The idea that all of them have the right to seek asylum in this country is well meaning, compassionate and nuts. It is simply unsustainable. We need to move from a rights based system to a compassionate one that allows us the right to choose. So, we might choose Ukrainians or Hong Kong Chinese, for example. But we are unlikely to choose those from religions whose central tenants we find incompatible with our own beliefs. And we must reclaim the right to say no. I believe that this is inevitable and I would rather we did not elect a quasi fascist government to achieve it.
All of them aren’t seeking asylum in this country, so this is a ridiculous strawman argument.
Had Starmer had his way, we would probably have lower immigration now.
We lost many thousands in critical services and service sectors back to the EU after Brexit, and the tories have incompetently had to make up the numbers. That has been a key driver of the much higher figures this year.
The maths likely means that total net migration will drop in the next couple of years, because this year was boosted by there being fewer new overseas students in 2020 who would have been due to leave in 2023. Plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong arrivals.
Labour may well be presiding over net numbers around half of 2023 without actually doing anything.
It doesn't matter. The public thinks that net migration is around 100,000 or fewer
When they realise it is four or seven times that, as is slowly beginning to happen, and will probably kick in next year under Labour, watch out
And Labour saying "well, we've got it just under half a million a year" isn't going to cut it
The problem is that the economy, in current form, requires immigration (indeed, I'm of the opinion that immigration brings many benefits, though they may require some work to realise them). People might well want immigration cut to the bone but they don't want the economic pain of doing so and will ultimately punish the Government that delivers it.
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
He regularly insults quite a few of those who say they'll vote for him, if they are insufficiently subservient. 'Little Marco'; 'Birdbrain' etc.
It's part of Trump's brand - it annoys some voters, and it works for others. "He tells it like it is" "he stands up to the elite" bla bla bla. Clinton saying half of Trump's supporters are a basket of deplorables supports the branding of her as part of the elite, someone who looks down her nose at ordinary people, and I can't see any positive side to it for her.
I said on here that it was daft the day she said it. Looking at the company he's kept since, it's not a lie, though.
Yes, just speculating on why Clinton calling half of Trump's supporters deplorables might be terrible politics, while Trump insulting all kinds of people doesn't seem to lose him much support (net). There's also an element of sexism probably.
None of you begin to understand what is going on. Have you been to America? Talked to Trump voters? They aren't all shit-eating rednecks with three teeth and a banjo
Trump voters are, in general, desperate. They think they are losing America, the America they know: largely white, powerful, peaceful (in its own way), largely Christian, tolerant of diversity, but not shoving it down your throat
You can deplore those opinions but they aren't necessarily insane. So, as they are desperate, Trump voters have nowhere else to go. Therefore they are willing to vote for a lunatic like Trump. as they sense he might, just might, reverse a tide which has been flowing the other way for decades, BECAUSE he is an offensive and aggressive oaf, whereas everyone else is spineless
Meanwhile, the left has many options. They sense they are winning the culture wars (and they are right). Wokeness prevails. DEI is everywhere. They can loftily abstain and talk about Bernie Sanders. 3m immigrants are illegally crossing into America, annually, they are potential future Democrat voters. And so on
So your argument is they're not deplorable, they're just white supremacists?
I can see why you think those two things are different.
Ethnocentric, rather than supremacist. They don't want to lord it over anyone, but, yeah, they prefer a white majority America
Most humans - of any race - are ethnocentric, they prefer their own kind. Denying this is futile
Ethnocentric is a cute way of saying "racist".
If you're not an ignorant racist shiteater then "their own kind" has nothing to do with race.
Many rightwing white Tories will find Patel, Badenoch and Sunak more "their own kind" than Corbyn, Raynor and Long-Bailey.
When watching The Ashes I find Moeen Ali to be more "my own kind" than Steve Smith.
Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."
Though note Paul entirely ignored his "neither make nor female" bit, the old misogynist.
I seem to remember the early church was driven forward with a high level of female input.
There is a case to be made that Paul was a progressive in his day.
Instructing women how to behave in church was progressive because it accepted that women should be there, and was instruction in decorum. Many previous religions banned women from places of worship entirely.
A key part of Rishi Sunak’s effort to stop the boats has collapsed after Home Office officials declared that Turkey was not a safe country to send migrants back to because of human rights concerns.
Ministers hoped to set up a migrant returns deal with Ankara after a surge in the number of Turkish people arriving illegally in Britain by small boat.
Three thousand Turkish nationals arrived that way last year, making them the third largest nationality to do so and representing a 162 per cent increase from the year before.
The deal would have mirrored an accord with Albania which has significantly cut the number of its citizens entering the UK in this way.
An internal Home Office review described Turkey as “a state that does not meet the criteria of being ‘generally safe’”.
It said that previous analysis of Turkish cases and anecdotal evidence had found 99 per cent of Turkish asylum cases in the UK were based on a fear of the state.
The majority were “political” opponents of the regime due to their actual or perceived involvement in opposition movements, including the Peoples’ Democratic Party, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the Gulen movement.
The assessment criticised Turkey’s “over-zealous” application of anti-terrorism laws and raised concerns over the independence of the judiciary and the provision of fair trials, particularly in “political” cases.
There are allegations of torture and ill-treatment in police custody and prison.
Notably, the assessment also raises concerns over Turkey’s compliance with adverse rulings from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which the Home Office assessment said “raised questions about adherence to the rule of law”.
This is significant given Sunak’s plans not to comply with interim injunctions from the same court.
His Rwanda bill will give ministers the power to ignore these so-called Rule 39 orders despite the president of the ECHR saying last month that this would be a breach of international law.
The Turkish example is a good example of why our current asylum system is simply unsustainable. There are dozens of absolute shit holes in the world with appalling views on gays, women, Christians, minorities along with huge propensities towards violence to assert their control. More than a billion people live in such places, a lot more if you look too carefully at China.
The idea that all of them have the right to seek asylum in this country is well meaning, compassionate and nuts. It is simply unsustainable. We need to move from a rights based system to a compassionate one that allows us the right to choose. So, we might choose Ukrainians or Hong Kong Chinese, for example. But we are unlikely to choose those from religions whose central tenants we find incompatible with our own beliefs. And we must reclaim the right to say no. I believe that this is inevitable and I would rather we did not elect a quasi fascist government to achieve it.
This isn't really borne out by the current numbers.
If we take in several hundred thousand immigrants a year, and get a hundred thousand asylum seekers a year, then the numbers are by definition sustainable, as we could reduce the non refugee migration numbers to whatever we choose. Unsustainable imo, would be if the asylum seeker numbers squeeze out other immigration.
That there are many more who could potentially claim asylum but have no interest or realistic capability to do so is something to be aware of that could become a sustainability issue in the future but a current issue.
And we absolutely need to build more houses and infrastructure to cope with our recent and expected immigration, but that is the case whether the immigrants are asylum seekers or not.
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Had Starmer had his way, we would probably have lower immigration now.
We lost many thousands in critical services and service sectors back to the EU after Brexit, and the tories have incompetently had to make up the numbers. That has been a key driver of the much higher figures this year.
The maths likely means that total net migration will drop in the next couple of years, because this year was boosted by there being fewer new overseas students in 2020 who would have been due to leave in 2023. Plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong arrivals.
Labour may well be presiding over net numbers around half of 2023 without actually doing anything.
It doesn't matter. The public thinks that net migration is around 100,000 or fewer
When they realise it is four or seven times that, as is slowly beginning to happen, and will probably kick in next year under Labour, watch out
And Labour saying "well, we've got it just under half a million a year" isn't going to cut it
The problem is that the economy, in current form, requires immigration (indeed, I'm of the opinion that immigration brings many benefits, though they may require some work to realise them). People might well want immigration cut to the bone but they don't want the economic pain of doing so and will ultimately punish the Government that delivers it.
True. And I don't envy the next government - Labour - that has to deal with this Gordian Knot
And this is really my point. Starmer has no idea what to do about the issue, and I am pretty sure it is going to be THE issue over the next few years, along with its ancillary problems- pressure on the NHS, housing, crime etc
Hence my belief he will probably win a stonking majority, but become deeply unpopular within a couple of years - as happened to Boris, let us note
And with that, I must away - AWAY - to the wine cellars of old Kampuchea
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
He regularly insults quite a few of those who say they'll vote for him, if they are insufficiently subservient. 'Little Marco'; 'Birdbrain' etc.
It's part of Trump's brand - it annoys some voters, and it works for others. "He tells it like it is" "he stands up to the elite" bla bla bla. Clinton saying half of Trump's supporters are a basket of deplorables supports the branding of her as part of the elite, someone who looks down her nose at ordinary people, and I can't see any positive side to it for her.
I said on here that it was daft the day she said it. Looking at the company he's kept since, it's not a lie, though.
Yes, just speculating on why Clinton calling half of Trump's supporters deplorables might be terrible politics, while Trump insulting all kinds of people doesn't seem to lose him much support (net). There's also an element of sexism probably.
None of you begin to understand what is going on. Have you been to America? Talked to Trump voters? They aren't all shit-eating rednecks with three teeth and a banjo
Trump voters are, in general, desperate. They think they are losing America, the America they know: largely white, powerful, peaceful (in its own way), largely Christian, tolerant of diversity, but not shoving it down your throat
You can deplore those opinions but they aren't necessarily insane. So, as they are desperate, Trump voters have nowhere else to go. Therefore they are willing to vote for a lunatic like Trump. as they sense he might, just might, reverse a tide which has been flowing the other way for decades, BECAUSE he is an offensive and aggressive oaf, whereas everyone else is spineless
Meanwhile, the left has many options. They sense they are winning the culture wars (and they are right). Wokeness prevails. DEI is everywhere. They can loftily abstain and talk about Bernie Sanders. 3m immigrants are illegally crossing into America, annually, they are potential future Democrat voters. And so on
So your argument is they're not deplorable, they're just white supremacists?
I can see why you think those two things are different.
Ethnocentric, rather than supremacist. They don't want to lord it over anyone, but, yeah, they prefer a white majority America
Most humans - of any race - are ethnocentric, they prefer their own kind. Denying this is futile
Ethnocentric is a cute way of saying "racist".
If you're not an ignorant racist shiteater then "their own kind" has nothing to do with race.
Many rightwing white Tories will find Patel, Badenoch and Sunak more "their own kind" than Corbyn, Raynor and Long-Bailey.
When watching The Ashes I find Moeen Ali to be more "my own kind" than Steve Smith.
Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."
Though note Paul entirely ignored his "neither make nor female" bit, the old misogynist.
I seem to remember the early church was driven forward with a high level of female input.
There is a case to be made that Paul was a progressive in his day.
Instructing women how to behave in church was progressive because it accepted that women should be there, and was instruction in decorum. Many previous religions banned women from places of worship entirely.
The formalised church a few hundred years post JC tended to write out the role of women. But in the early days it was women and slaves who tended to convert first and then drag the rest with them. Today Id say that about 60% of congregations are female with women still the bedrock of the church.
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Had Starmer had his way, we would probably have lower immigration now.
We lost many thousands in critical services and service sectors back to the EU after Brexit, and the tories have incompetently had to make up the numbers. That has been a key driver of the much higher figures this year.
The maths likely means that total net migration will drop in the next couple of years, because this year was boosted by there being fewer new overseas students in 2020 who would have been due to leave in 2023. Plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong arrivals.
Labour may well be presiding over net numbers around half of 2023 without actually doing anything.
It doesn't matter. The public thinks that net migration is around 100,000 or fewer
When they realise it is four or seven times that, as is slowly beginning to happen, and will probably kick in next year under Labour, watch out
And Labour saying "well, we've got it just under half a million a year" isn't going to cut it
SFA to do with asylum. Largely due to the need to have working people to prop up the economy because so many late middle aged people have decided that they have made enough personally and don't want to work as much, or at all.
Once you get to the very late middle aged stage fortunately some of those do relieve the burden slightly by taking winters abroad.
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
On asylum and immigration in general, people being granted asylum is a small proportion of total immigration. The Conservatives have linked the two in the public’s consciousness, but stopping every single small boat would still have meant we saw record immigration in 2023. The immigration figures are driven by student visas (and the public are generally supportive of overseas students coming to the UK) and employment visas.
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
He regularly insults quite a few of those who say they'll vote for him, if they are insufficiently subservient. 'Little Marco'; 'Birdbrain' etc.
It's part of Trump's brand - it annoys some voters, and it works for others. "He tells it like it is" "he stands up to the elite" bla bla bla. Clinton saying half of Trump's supporters are a basket of deplorables supports the branding of her as part of the elite, someone who looks down her nose at ordinary people, and I can't see any positive side to it for her.
I said on here that it was daft the day she said it. Looking at the company he's kept since, it's not a lie, though.
Yes, just speculating on why Clinton calling half of Trump's supporters deplorables might be terrible politics, while Trump insulting all kinds of people doesn't seem to lose him much support (net). There's also an element of sexism probably.
None of you begin to understand what is going on. Have you been to America? Talked to Trump voters? They aren't all shit-eating rednecks with three teeth and a banjo
Trump voters are, in general, desperate. They think they are losing America, the America they know: largely white, powerful, peaceful (in its own way), largely Christian, tolerant of diversity, but not shoving it down your throat
You can deplore those opinions but they aren't necessarily insane. So, as they are desperate, Trump voters have nowhere else to go. Therefore they are willing to vote for a lunatic like Trump. as they sense he might, just might, reverse a tide which has been flowing the other way for decades, BECAUSE he is an offensive and aggressive oaf, whereas everyone else is spineless
Meanwhile, the left has many options. They sense they are winning the culture wars (and they are right). Wokeness prevails. DEI is everywhere. They can loftily abstain and talk about Bernie Sanders. 3m immigrants are illegally crossing into America, annually, they are potential future Democrat voters. And so on
Even my wife, as patriotic American as they come, would balk at describing America as peaceful, in any sense of the word.
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Wrong. They are reflecting the will of the public. We simply don't care enough about immigration or we would have done something about it (cf Brexit).
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
He regularly insults quite a few of those who say they'll vote for him, if they are insufficiently subservient. 'Little Marco'; 'Birdbrain' etc.
It's part of Trump's brand - it annoys some voters, and it works for others. "He tells it like it is" "he stands up to the elite" bla bla bla. Clinton saying half of Trump's supporters are a basket of deplorables supports the branding of her as part of the elite, someone who looks down her nose at ordinary people, and I can't see any positive side to it for her.
I said on here that it was daft the day she said it. Looking at the company he's kept since, it's not a lie, though.
Yes, just speculating on why Clinton calling half of Trump's supporters deplorables might be terrible politics, while Trump insulting all kinds of people doesn't seem to lose him much support (net). There's also an element of sexism probably.
None of you begin to understand what is going on. Have you been to America? Talked to Trump voters? They aren't all shit-eating rednecks with three teeth and a banjo
Trump voters are, in general, desperate. They think they are losing America, the America they know: largely white, powerful, peaceful (in its own way), largely Christian, tolerant of diversity, but not shoving it down your throat
You can deplore those opinions but they aren't necessarily insane. So, as they are desperate, Trump voters have nowhere else to go. Therefore they are willing to vote for a lunatic like Trump. as they sense he might, just might, reverse a tide which has been flowing the other way for decades, BECAUSE he is an offensive and aggressive oaf, whereas everyone else is spineless
Meanwhile, the left has many options. They sense they are winning the culture wars (and they are right). Wokeness prevails. DEI is everywhere. They can loftily abstain and talk about Bernie Sanders. 3m immigrants are illegally crossing into America, annually, they are potential future Democrat voters. And so on
So your argument is they're not deplorable, they're just white supremacists?
I can see why you think those two things are different.
Ethnocentric, rather than supremacist. They don't want to lord it over anyone, but, yeah, they prefer a white majority America
Most humans - of any race - are ethnocentric, they prefer their own kind. Denying this is futile
Ethnocentric is a cute way of saying "racist".
If you're not an ignorant racist shiteater then "their own kind" has nothing to do with race.
Many rightwing white Tories will find Patel, Badenoch and Sunak more "their own kind" than Corbyn, Raynor and Long-Bailey.
When watching The Ashes I find Moeen Ali to be more "my own kind" than Steve Smith.
Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."
Though note Paul entirely ignored his "neither make nor female" bit, the old misogynist.
I seem to remember the early church was driven forward with a high level of female input.
Participation, certainly.
Their input was more controversial. "As in all the congregations of the Lord’s people. Women should remain silent in the churches, They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church..." "A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet..."
Whether that's Paul himself, or later interpolation can't be certain, of course.
I sense that the immigration/asylum issue is going to destroy Starmer in his first term
Every fibre in his Woke body - and all his acolytes, MPs and activists - will want to let in more asylum seekers and more immigrants in general. All of Britain will want the opposite
It will be the most tremendous clash
Contrast that with Sunak's success with the Rwanda scheme.
The Tories are dismally pathetic. They deserve the electoral drubbing coming their way
But then we will all move on, and it will be Labour trying to deal with this enormously corrosive and explosive issue. I see absolutely no ideas from the, on how to do it, indeed I see the opposite, a desire to hide away from it, bollocks about "being nicer to France", like that will solve it. Simply ludicrous
This will get found out very soon and then it will be Labour's turn to face the voters' wrath, and it could come really quickly, as Labour are even MORE pathetic, at their core
Dear old Sir Wibble hasnt actually done anything to engage with the electorate. Having serially failed to set out his stall, he'll end up disappointing everyone.
Being boring and over timid has transformed the Labour polling lead from -20% to +20% in 4 years.
It would be idiotic to change such a winning formula that is on course to deliver him the biggest Labour majority in our history.
His support is like a soup dish, wide but shallow. He may well get in but has nothing to back it. His massive change in the polls is not because of him ( compare to Blair ) but because HMG has decided to regularly shoot themselves in the foot with a pair of AK47s.
I think people’s memory of Blair’s popularity pre 1997 is a bit rosy. Turnout in 97 was very low and I distinctly remember loads of people claiming to be unexcited by either party and just keen to get the Tories out.
Labour have also spent much of the last month setting out very clear policy positions on business, taxation and regulation. Much clearer than any on the mush coming out of Sunak’s government. At work we have a live table tracking fiscal policies of the 3 main parties. The Labour tab is twice as long as the government one. The “they don’t have any policies” thing is a brand issue rather than based on an objective assessment of policies.
UK election turnout was 71%. The low turnout election was 2001 at 59%.
Labour currently have set out positions on business along the lines of we'll do what Sunak is doing. And since Sunak and Hunt are currently in government there isnt quite the need to say what they will do as they are doing it. Unfortunately. The only thing I can give Starmer credit for is his statement on housing - which I support. But I doubt he'll do anything about it.
Plus ca change.
The turnout of 71% in 1997 was a post-war record low, and followed 77% in 1992. It was much remarked on at the time.
The Labour business and fiscal programme is significantly more detailed than “we’ll do what Sunak is doing”. That’s why we’re keeping the table updated. The headlines you’re seeing in the papers are we’ll do what Sunak is doing.
Lowish but not compared to what followed. 97 was more about Tory voters staying at home
As for Labours plan we'll have to agree to disagree, The only things that click are the housing the promise and Schrodingers £28billion for green projects.
And Im someone who follows politics, if I ask my wife or kids thayll just stare at me blankly. My middle daughter ( aged 30 )would probably ask me who is Keir Starmer, which puts our deliberations here into some kind of context
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Wrong. They are reflecting the will of the public. We simply don't care enough about immigration or we would have done something about it (cf Brexit).
I agree. Immigration is an obsession to some, but not in the top 3 important issues for most, and few have thought through the implications of a "zero immigration" policy.
Had Starmer had his way, we would probably have lower immigration now.
We lost many thousands in critical services and service sectors back to the EU after Brexit, and the tories have incompetently had to make up the numbers. That has been a key driver of the much higher figures this year.
The maths likely means that total net migration will drop in the next couple of years, because this year was boosted by there being fewer new overseas students in 2020 who would have been due to leave in 2023. Plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong arrivals.
Labour may well be presiding over net numbers around half of 2023 without actually doing anything.
It doesn't matter. The public thinks that net migration is around 100,000 or fewer
When they realise it is four or seven times that, as is slowly beginning to happen, and will probably kick in next year under Labour, watch out
And Labour saying "well, we've got it just under half a million a year" isn't going to cut it
SFA to do with asylum. Largely due to the need to have working people to prop up the economy because so many late middle aged people have decided that they have made enough personally and don't want to work as much, or at all.
Once you get to the very late middle aged stage fortunately some of those do relieve the burden slightly by taking winters abroad.
That's all very well, but we need them doing a shift or three at their local care home.
Bottom line is that a government that has supposedly been all over immigration for over a decade has gone backwards. Because the consequences of actually getting numbers below 100k, let alone to zero, are too awful to contemplate.
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Wrong. They are reflecting the will of the public. We simply don't care enough about immigration or we would have done something about it (cf Brexit).
I agree. Immigration is an obsession to some, but not in the top 3 important issues for most, and few have thought through the implications of a "zero immigration" policy.
Has anyone thought through the implications of *any* level immigration?
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Good question. I suppose the answer is because if they run on it as *the* major issue (and they are going to have to), if they don't do it, RefUK will wipe them out next time round. Cameron didn't want an EU referendum; UKIP essentially held his feet to the fire and made him do it.
My hard work out here in the east is making me money. I have sums to invest
But where? My sense is that the AI/tech boom has a long way to go yet, and that it’s hard to go wrong with the Magnificent Seven - Google, Amazon, Nvidia, MS, etc
Even if there’s a war the tech companies will be crucial, if Trump wins I can’t see that harming US tech either. I know these shares have already risen a lot but I see them rising further for quite a while
Am i wrong?
My approach is to choose a number of indexes. I moved to ii, which has a flat rate charge, about six months ago. Since then:
XNAQ (Nasdaq) is doing best up 9.9%, Fidelity Index World P is up 6.9%, VUSA (S&P 500) is up 6.7%, Vanguard FTSE All Share is up 3.3% My Vanguard Emerging Markets is down 1.9%.
For excitement and the long term I have some individual Tesla shares.
i've just put £X000 into Fidelity, weirdly enough!
My idea is to do this over a week or so, choose one investment a day
Though 70% of FTSE earnings are from overseas so that is an odd rule of thumb.
I have 50% of my portfolio in UK listed shares, and 50% in funds investing outside the UK.
CoPilot : "The percentage of UK shares in the FTSE All-Share Index depends on how UK shares are defined. One possible definition is to use the country of incorporation, which is the legal domicile of a company. According to this definition, about 77% of the companies in the FTSE All-Share Index are UK shares3. Another possible definition is to use the country of exposure, which is the geographical breakdown of a company’s revenues. According to this definition, about 30% of the companies in the FTSE All-Share Index are UK shares4. The difference between these two definitions reflects the fact that many UK companies have significant operations and sales overseas."
So, yes. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
He regularly insults quite a few of those who say they'll vote for him, if they are insufficiently subservient. 'Little Marco'; 'Birdbrain' etc.
It's part of Trump's brand - it annoys some voters, and it works for others. "He tells it like it is" "he stands up to the elite" bla bla bla. Clinton saying half of Trump's supporters are a basket of deplorables supports the branding of her as part of the elite, someone who looks down her nose at ordinary people, and I can't see any positive side to it for her.
I said on here that it was daft the day she said it. Looking at the company he's kept since, it's not a lie, though.
Yes, just speculating on why Clinton calling half of Trump's supporters deplorables might be terrible politics, while Trump insulting all kinds of people doesn't seem to lose him much support (net). There's also an element of sexism probably.
None of you begin to understand what is going on. Have you been to America? Talked to Trump voters? They aren't all shit-eating rednecks with three teeth and a banjo
Trump voters are, in general, desperate. They think they are losing America, the America they know: largely white, powerful, peaceful (in its own way), largely Christian, tolerant of diversity, but not shoving it down your throat
You can deplore those opinions but they aren't necessarily insane. So, as they are desperate, Trump voters have nowhere else to go. Therefore they are willing to vote for a lunatic like Trump. as they sense he might, just might, reverse a tide which has been flowing the other way for decades, BECAUSE he is an offensive and aggressive oaf, whereas everyone else is spineless
Meanwhile, the left has many options. They sense they are winning the culture wars (and they are right). Wokeness prevails. DEI is everywhere. They can loftily abstain and talk about Bernie Sanders. 3m immigrants are illegally crossing into America, annually, they are potential future Democrat voters. And so on
So your argument is they're not deplorable, they're just white supremacists?
I can see why you think those two things are different.
Ethnocentric, rather than supremacist. They don't want to lord it over anyone, but, yeah, they prefer a white majority America
Most humans - of any race - are ethnocentric, they prefer their own kind. Denying this is futile
Ethnocentric is a cute way of saying "racist".
If you're not an ignorant racist shiteater then "their own kind" has nothing to do with race.
Many rightwing white Tories will find Patel, Badenoch and Sunak more "their own kind" than Corbyn, Raynor and Long-Bailey.
When watching The Ashes I find Moeen Ali to be more "my own kind" than Steve Smith.
Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."
Though note Paul entirely ignored his "neither make nor female" bit, the old misogynist.
I seem to remember the early church was driven forward with a high level of female input.
There is a case to be made that Paul was a progressive in his day.
Instructing women how to behave in church was progressive because it accepted that women should be there, and was instruction in decorum. Many previous religions banned women from places of worship entirely.
Generally, religious reformers - Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Mohammed, Guru Nanak, Martin Luther etc - are 'progressive' compared to the religious establishment they are seeking to reform.
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Wrong. They are reflecting the will of the public. We simply don't care enough about immigration or we would have done something about it (cf Brexit).
I agree. Immigration is an obsession to some, but not in the top 3 important issues for most, and few have thought through the implications of a "zero immigration" policy.
It is also (at least) tangentially part of housing, health, care, education, the economy and taxation though.
Had Starmer had his way, we would probably have lower immigration now.
We lost many thousands in critical services and service sectors back to the EU after Brexit, and the tories have incompetently had to make up the numbers. That has been a key driver of the much higher figures this year.
The maths likely means that total net migration will drop in the next couple of years, because this year was boosted by there being fewer new overseas students in 2020 who would have been due to leave in 2023. Plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong arrivals.
Labour may well be presiding over net numbers around half of 2023 without actually doing anything.
It doesn't matter. The public thinks that net migration is around 100,000 or fewer
When they realise it is four or seven times that, as is slowly beginning to happen, and will probably kick in next year under Labour, watch out
And Labour saying "well, we've got it just under half a million a year" isn't going to cut it
SFA to do with asylum. Largely due to the need to have working people to prop up the economy because so many late middle aged people have decided that they have made enough personally and don't want to work as much, or at all.
Once you get to the very late middle aged stage fortunately some of those do relieve the burden slightly by taking winters abroad.
That's all very well, but we need them doing a shift or three at their local care home.
Bottom line is that a government that has supposedly been all over immigration for over a decade has gone backwards. Because the consequences of actually getting numbers below 100k, let alone to zero, are too awful to contemplate.
Or is that Project Fear?
If we structure our society to require lots of extremely bad paid, poor condition jobs. Even then we have options to deal with this.
"National Service! in The National Care Service!"
Germany, for instance, used conscription to get people to do basic task in hospitals.
Had Starmer had his way, we would probably have lower immigration now.
We lost many thousands in critical services and service sectors back to the EU after Brexit, and the tories have incompetently had to make up the numbers. That has been a key driver of the much higher figures this year.
The maths likely means that total net migration will drop in the next couple of years, because this year was boosted by there being fewer new overseas students in 2020 who would have been due to leave in 2023. Plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong arrivals.
Labour may well be presiding over net numbers around half of 2023 without actually doing anything.
It doesn't matter. The public thinks that net migration is around 100,000 or fewer
When they realise it is four or seven times that, as is slowly beginning to happen, and will probably kick in next year under Labour, watch out
And Labour saying "well, we've got it just under half a million a year" isn't going to cut it
SFA to do with asylum. Largely due to the need to have working people to prop up the economy because so many late middle aged people have decided that they have made enough personally and don't want to work as much, or at all.
Once you get to the very late middle aged stage fortunately some of those do relieve the burden slightly by taking winters abroad.
That's all very well, but we need them doing a shift or three at their local care home.
Bottom line is that a government that has supposedly been all over immigration for over a decade has gone backwards. Because the consequences of actually getting numbers below 100k, let alone to zero, are too awful to contemplate.
Or is that Project Fear?
If we structure our society to require lots of extremely bad paid, poor condition jobs. Even then we have options to deal with this.
"National Service! in The National Care Service!"
Germany, for instance, used conscription to get people to do basic task in hospitals.
Thats certainly one way to drive up the youth vote. And to get quickly kicked out of office too.....
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Wrong. They are reflecting the will of the public. We simply don't care enough about immigration or we would have done something about it (cf Brexit).
I agree. Immigration is an obsession to some, but not in the top 3 important issues for most, and few have thought through the implications of a "zero immigration" policy.
It is also (at least) tangentially part of housing, health, care, education, the economy and taxation though.
The rate of increase or decrease of the population (and the resulting population profile) is one of the most fundamental inputs into policy making for the country.
It's as basic as - How many people will be taking a dump in 2032?
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Wrong. They are reflecting the will of the public. We simply don't care enough about immigration or we would have done something about it (cf Brexit).
I agree. Immigration is an obsession to some, but not in the top 3 important issues for most, and few have thought through the implications of a "zero immigration" policy.
Mostly, people are more in favour of immigration when you specify particular groups than in the general. People aren’t too positive about asylum seekers, but they’re more positive about asylum seekers from Afghanistan, more positive still about the Hong Kong scheme, and most positive about the Ukraine scheme. People aren’t positive about low-skilled immigration, but if you specify particular low-skilled jobs, like care workers or farm workers, they give more positive answers.
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Wrong. They are reflecting the will of the public. We simply don't care enough about immigration or we would have done something about it (cf Brexit).
I agree. Immigration is an obsession to some, but not in the top 3 important issues for most, and few have thought through the implications of a "zero immigration" policy.
It is also (at least) tangentially part of housing, health, care, education, the economy and taxation though.
The rate of increase or decrease of the population (and the resulting population profile) is one of the most fundamental inputs into policy making for the country.
It's as basic as - How many people will be taking a dump in 2032?
Sure, and it is the profile rather than the overall number that has the bigger policy impact. And the profile demands more immigration, even if the overall number does not.
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Wrong. They are reflecting the will of the public. We simply don't care enough about immigration or we would have done something about it (cf Brexit).
I agree. Immigration is an obsession to some, but not in the top 3 important issues for most, and few have thought through the implications of a "zero immigration" policy.
Has anyone thought through the implications of *any* level immigration?
The whole point of operating a market based capitalist economy is that we shouldn't have to think through the implications of absolutely everything that happens. The price mechanism exists to solve problems and allocate resources - this is its great advantage over a centrally planned economy. Of course there are things the state has to do, like make land available for housing and allocate resources towards additional capacity in public services. None of this should be particularly hard, though.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
Our most recent poll, conducted on the 31st January and 1st February 2024, marks a continued uptick in support for the Labour Party, alongside a slight decrease for the Conservative Party. The Liberal Democrats hold steady, Reform Party sees a gain, while the Green Party experiences a drop. The SNP and other parties’ support remains unchanged.
The current figures, set against the previous poll from the 25th January 2024, are as follows:
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
He regularly insults quite a few of those who say they'll vote for him, if they are insufficiently subservient. 'Little Marco'; 'Birdbrain' etc.
It's part of Trump's brand - it annoys some voters, and it works for others. "He tells it like it is" "he stands up to the elite" bla bla bla. Clinton saying half of Trump's supporters are a basket of deplorables supports the branding of her as part of the elite, someone who looks down her nose at ordinary people, and I can't see any positive side to it for her.
I said on here that it was daft the day she said it. Looking at the company he's kept since, it's not a lie, though.
Yes, just speculating on why Clinton calling half of Trump's supporters deplorables might be terrible politics, while Trump insulting all kinds of people doesn't seem to lose him much support (net). There's also an element of sexism probably.
None of you begin to understand what is going on. Have you been to America? Talked to Trump voters? They aren't all shit-eating rednecks with three teeth and a banjo
Trump voters are, in general, desperate. They think they are losing America, the America they know: largely white, powerful, peaceful (in its own way), largely Christian, tolerant of diversity, but not shoving it down your throat
You can deplore those opinions but they aren't necessarily insane. So, as they are desperate, Trump voters have nowhere else to go. Therefore they are willing to vote for a lunatic like Trump. as they sense he might, just might, reverse a tide which has been flowing the other way for decades, BECAUSE he is an offensive and aggressive oaf, whereas everyone else is spineless
Meanwhile, the left has many options. They sense they are winning the culture wars (and they are right). Wokeness prevails. DEI is everywhere. They can loftily abstain and talk about Bernie Sanders. 3m immigrants are illegally crossing into America, annually, they are potential future Democrat voters. And so on
I don't think that Donald Trump is objectively any more mad or dangerous than many progressive politicians, we are just confused by a sense of false familiarity with the latter. For instance Trudeau looks like someone centrist and familiar but if you investigate what is happening in Canadian politics it reveals a much darker story.
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
He regularly insults quite a few of those who say they'll vote for him, if they are insufficiently subservient. 'Little Marco'; 'Birdbrain' etc.
It's part of Trump's brand - it annoys some voters, and it works for others. "He tells it like it is" "he stands up to the elite" bla bla bla. Clinton saying half of Trump's supporters are a basket of deplorables supports the branding of her as part of the elite, someone who looks down her nose at ordinary people, and I can't see any positive side to it for her.
I said on here that it was daft the day she said it. Looking at the company he's kept since, it's not a lie, though.
Yes, just speculating on why Clinton calling half of Trump's supporters deplorables might be terrible politics, while Trump insulting all kinds of people doesn't seem to lose him much support (net). There's also an element of sexism probably.
None of you begin to understand what is going on. Have you been to America? Talked to Trump voters? They aren't all shit-eating rednecks with three teeth and a banjo
Trump voters are, in general, desperate. They think they are losing America, the America they know: largely white, powerful, peaceful (in its own way), largely Christian, tolerant of diversity, but not shoving it down your throat
You can deplore those opinions but they aren't necessarily insane. So, as they are desperate, Trump voters have nowhere else to go. Therefore they are willing to vote for a lunatic like Trump. as they sense he might, just might, reverse a tide which has been flowing the other way for decades, BECAUSE he is an offensive and aggressive oaf, whereas everyone else is spineless
Meanwhile, the left has many options. They sense they are winning the culture wars (and they are right). Wokeness prevails. DEI is everywhere. They can loftily abstain and talk about Bernie Sanders. 3m immigrants are illegally crossing into America, annually, they are potential future Democrat voters. And so on
So your argument is they're not deplorable, they're just white supremacists?
I can see why you think those two things are different.
Ethnocentric, rather than supremacist. They don't want to lord it over anyone, but, yeah, they prefer a white majority America
Most humans - of any race - are ethnocentric, they prefer their own kind. Denying this is futile
What bollocks.
Normal people don't care what colour skin someone has. They may reasonably object to unsustainable levels of migration or people who fail to integrate into society, but I've not met anyone in my life who would give a shit if their next door neighbours were third generation Indian/Chinese/Nigerian etc.
You are just projecting.
sigh
No, I'm not. Look at where people immigrate TO
They always prefer to immigrate to somewhere that has "people like them", and then they cluster with their own kind in cities. This is a human universal, it is a well known phenomenon, it's why you get suddenly African or Jamaican or Korean or Inuit neighborhoods, it's why British colonialists had their own quarters of town - ethnocentrism, preference for neighbours like yourself, it is a FACT
I mean, I know I decry the stupidity of PB quite a lot, but this level of discourse is fucking infantile, and it can't all be blamed on @DougSeal and @BartholomewRoberts dribbling away in the corner, as per, that's just what they do
The rest of you have less excuse; shape up
You're not even trying to put a mask on being a racist shiteater anymore are you? The "knapper" cover story is more plausible.
Some people may do that, many do not.
I live in a semi, in the other half of a semi is a couple who moved in after we did. One is from Turkey, do you think he moved in because he thinks we're Turkish or this neighbourhood is Turkish? Or did he move there because that's where he wanted to live? His husband is from the Middle East, do you think he moved here because he thinks the neighbourhood is Middle Eastern and we're Middle Eastern? Or because that's where he too wanted to live?
You may travel in circles of racist shiteaters, but that doesn't mean the rest of us do.
Had Starmer had his way, we would probably have lower immigration now.
We lost many thousands in critical services and service sectors back to the EU after Brexit, and the tories have incompetently had to make up the numbers. That has been a key driver of the much higher figures this year.
The maths likely means that total net migration will drop in the next couple of years, because this year was boosted by there being fewer new overseas students in 2020 who would have been due to leave in 2023. Plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong arrivals.
Labour may well be presiding over net numbers around half of 2023 without actually doing anything.
It doesn't matter. The public thinks that net migration is around 100,000 or fewer
When they realise it is four or seven times that, as is slowly beginning to happen, and will probably kick in next year under Labour, watch out
And Labour saying "well, we've got it just under half a million a year" isn't going to cut it
SFA to do with asylum. Largely due to the need to have working people to prop up the economy because so many late middle aged people have decided that they have made enough personally and don't want to work as much, or at all.
Once you get to the very late middle aged stage fortunately some of those do relieve the burden slightly by taking winters abroad.
That's all very well, but we need them doing a shift or three at their local care home.
Bottom line is that a government that has supposedly been all over immigration for over a decade has gone backwards. Because the consequences of actually getting numbers below 100k, let alone to zero, are too awful to contemplate.
Or is that Project Fear?
Counterintuitively it's the result of short-termism in the interests of pensioners and against the interests of their grandchildren.
Our most recent poll, conducted on the 31st January and 1st February 2024, marks a continued uptick in support for the Labour Party, alongside a slight decrease for the Conservative Party. The Liberal Democrats hold steady, Reform Party sees a gain, while the Green Party experiences a drop. The SNP and other parties’ support remains unchanged.
The current figures, set against the previous poll from the 25th January 2024, are as follows:
There's a lot of naivety and wishful thinking from Tories regarding the political landscape on the other side of a general election.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
While Wales is rightly trying to reduce number of second homes and empty homes - it got things very wrong with fire sprinklers. It adds £500-1000 to cost of new builds and I believe there is not a single example of them being used succesfully - because house fires usually occur in old homes.... This is a stupid piece of legislation that should be scrapped.
I can understand in flats but surely they're not required in houses ?
Yes they are. All new builds in Wales must have them. I don't have an exact figure for the cost of the installation at my parent's new house, but I think it was a lot more than £1k, probably more like £3-4k if you actually costed it out separately (there's quite a lot of physical kit installed).
Why is there this sudden focus on fire safety? We've had the same thing with interconnected alarms in Scotland. Grenfell? Charging of electric vehicles?
I'm generally in favour living in a flat with some dodgy STLs below me, but it's expensive.
Grenfell made fire safety cool. "This is something, therefore we must do this", plus the idea that regulations are zero cost and always worth trying.
The result, in the building industry, is a separation that reminds me of childcare.
Middle class and up Follow The Regulations - For example, I fitted mains powered, interconnected fire alarms during my recent project. It was arguable that they weren't required under the regs, but I took the view that while we had a sparky running *all* the wires, what's a slack half dozen. That and changing all internal doors to fire doors.
Meanwhile, in the impromptu Homes in Multiple Occupation that the builders live in (AKA flats/houses with adults in every room - the nice ones have one person per room).. Fire alarms? Fire doors* Ha ha ha ha ha
*The last one I saw had fire doors, in the sense that they will burn very, very well in a fire. Literally cardboard core....
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
The taxpayer and balance of payments right up there in the big losers column too. Hence the Tories saying one thing and doing the opposite.
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
He regularly insults quite a few of those who say they'll vote for him, if they are insufficiently subservient. 'Little Marco'; 'Birdbrain' etc.
It's part of Trump's brand - it annoys some voters, and it works for others. "He tells it like it is" "he stands up to the elite" bla bla bla. Clinton saying half of Trump's supporters are a basket of deplorables supports the branding of her as part of the elite, someone who looks down her nose at ordinary people, and I can't see any positive side to it for her.
I said on here that it was daft the day she said it. Looking at the company he's kept since, it's not a lie, though.
Yes, just speculating on why Clinton calling half of Trump's supporters deplorables might be terrible politics, while Trump insulting all kinds of people doesn't seem to lose him much support (net). There's also an element of sexism probably.
None of you begin to understand what is going on. Have you been to America? Talked to Trump voters? They aren't all shit-eating rednecks with three teeth and a banjo
Trump voters are, in general, desperate. They think they are losing America, the America they know: largely white, powerful, peaceful (in its own way), largely Christian, tolerant of diversity, but not shoving it down your throat
You can deplore those opinions but they aren't necessarily insane. So, as they are desperate, Trump voters have nowhere else to go. Therefore they are willing to vote for a lunatic like Trump. as they sense he might, just might, reverse a tide which has been flowing the other way for decades, BECAUSE he is an offensive and aggressive oaf, whereas everyone else is spineless
Meanwhile, the left has many options. They sense they are winning the culture wars (and they are right). Wokeness prevails. DEI is everywhere. They can loftily abstain and talk about Bernie Sanders. 3m immigrants are illegally crossing into America, annually, they are potential future Democrat voters. And so on
So your argument is they're not deplorable, they're just white supremacists?
I can see why you think those two things are different.
Ethnocentric, rather than supremacist. They don't want to lord it over anyone, but, yeah, they prefer a white majority America
Most humans - of any race - are ethnocentric, they prefer their own kind. Denying this is futile
What bollocks.
Normal people don't care what colour skin someone has. They may reasonably object to unsustainable levels of migration or people who fail to integrate into society, but I've not met anyone in my life who would give a shit if their next door neighbours were third generation Indian/Chinese/Nigerian etc.
You are just projecting.
sigh
No, I'm not. Look at where people immigrate TO
They always prefer to immigrate to somewhere that has "people like them", and then they cluster with their own kind in cities. This is a human universal, it is a well known phenomenon, it's why you get suddenly African or Jamaican or Korean or Inuit neighborhoods, it's why British colonialists had their own quarters of town - ethnocentrism, preference for neighbours like yourself, it is a FACT
I mean, I know I decry the stupidity of PB quite a lot, but this level of discourse is fucking infantile, and it can't all be blamed on @DougSeal and @BartholomewRoberts dribbling away in the corner, as per, that's just what they do
The rest of you have less excuse; shape up
You're not even trying to put a mask on being a racist shiteater anymore are you? The "knapper" cover story is more plausible.
Some people may do that, many do not.
I live in a semi, in the other half of a semi is a couple who moved in after we did. One is from Turkey, do you think he moved in because he thinks we're Turkish or this neighbourhood is Turkish? Or did he move there because that's where he wanted to live? His husband is from the Middle East, do you think he moved here because he thinks the neighbourhood is Middle Eastern and we're Middle Eastern? Or because that's where he too wanted to live?
You may travel in circles of racist shiteaters, but that doesn't mean the rest of us do.
He heard that a pirate lived next door and thought that would increase the chances you'd be ok with his Alternative Life style?
Our most recent poll, conducted on the 31st January and 1st February 2024, marks a continued uptick in support for the Labour Party, alongside a slight decrease for the Conservative Party. The Liberal Democrats hold steady, Reform Party sees a gain, while the Green Party experiences a drop. The SNP and other parties’ support remains unchanged.
The current figures, set against the previous poll from the 25th January 2024, are as follows:
It's hard to fault Starmers strategy that has put him so far ahead.
It may be boring, but it's working.
To be fair he has failed to stop the boats, sort out the Post Office scandal, global warming or help England win the World Cup. And he had a korma once, always a poor choice.
There's a lot of naivety and wishful thinking from Tories regarding the political landscape on the other side of a general election.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
Yes, the Tories are determined to double down in defeat.
It is inevitable that they will decide that the reason that they lost is they went too soft with unpopular policies and people.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
And if the plan was "tweak society and the economy so that the UK was less dependent on importing working age people", that would be fine. There could be a conversation about the benefits and costs of those measures.
That's not what shouty people are shouting for. They just want to cut immigration with no consideration for the side effects. Which, in a world where everything is connected, everything has consequences, is a recipe for disaster.
Mostly, people are more in favour of immigration when you specify particular groups than in the general. People aren’t too positive about asylum seekers, but they’re more positive about asylum seekers from Afghanistan, more positive still about the Hong Kong scheme, and most positive about the Ukraine scheme. People aren’t positive about low-skilled immigration, but if you specify particular low-skilled jobs, like care workers or farm workers, they give more positive answers.
This is somewhere where it might be interesting to have a government body chosen by sortition rather than election, because it would allow you to distinguish "the people want x but the elites won't give it to them because they have a different agenda" from "the people want x but only because they've got better things to do with their time than sitting around thinking about it".
Had Starmer had his way, we would probably have lower immigration now.
We lost many thousands in critical services and service sectors back to the EU after Brexit, and the tories have incompetently had to make up the numbers. That has been a key driver of the much higher figures this year.
The maths likely means that total net migration will drop in the next couple of years, because this year was boosted by there being fewer new overseas students in 2020 who would have been due to leave in 2023. Plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong arrivals.
Labour may well be presiding over net numbers around half of 2023 without actually doing anything.
It doesn't matter. The public thinks that net migration is around 100,000 or fewer
When they realise it is four or seven times that, as is slowly beginning to happen, and will probably kick in next year under Labour, watch out
And Labour saying "well, we've got it just under half a million a year" isn't going to cut it
SFA to do with asylum. Largely due to the need to have working people to prop up the economy because so many late middle aged people have decided that they have made enough personally and don't want to work as much, or at all.
Once you get to the very late middle aged stage fortunately some of those do relieve the burden slightly by taking winters abroad.
That's all very well, but we need them doing a shift or three at their local care home.
Bottom line is that a government that has supposedly been all over immigration for over a decade has gone backwards. Because the consequences of actually getting numbers below 100k, let alone to zero, are too awful to contemplate.
Or is that Project Fear?
If we structure our society to require lots of extremely bad paid, poor condition jobs. Even then we have options to deal with this.
"National Service! in The National Care Service!"
Germany, for instance, used conscription to get people to do basic task in hospitals.
It is, or was, *already* an option in the UK conscription scheme post-war (and, strictly speaking, also in wartime). David Hockney, for instance, worked his two years' national service as a hospital orderly/porter.
Survation recently conducted constituency polls in Ynys Môn and Carmarthen. The Conservatives are currently placed to lose Ynys Môn to Plaid Cymru, with their vote share reduced by 10% compared to the 2019 general election
PC 39% (+10) LAB 27% (-3) CON 26% (-10) REF 4% (-2) LD 1% OTH 3% Changes vs 2019 Election FW: 21/12/23 - 05/01/24
Polling in the new seat of Carmarthen shows also a Plaid Cymru lead.
PC 30% LAB 24% CON 24% IND 10% LD 4% REF 4% OTH: 3%
FW: 02/01/24 – 04/02/24
Both polls were conducted on behalf of Plaid Cymru.
---Snip--- Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact. ---Snip---
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
Why would we believe a Tory party promising net zero immigration, when it has been promising to reduce it to "tens of thousands" for 15 years, and actually presided over record immigration these last 2 years?
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Wrong. They are reflecting the will of the public. We simply don't care enough about immigration or we would have done something about it (cf Brexit).
I agree. Immigration is an obsession to some, but not in the top 3 important issues for most, and few have thought through the implications of a "zero immigration" policy.
Mostly, people are more in favour of immigration when you specify particular groups than in the general. People aren’t too positive about asylum seekers, but they’re more positive about asylum seekers from Afghanistan, more positive still about the Hong Kong scheme, and most positive about the Ukraine scheme. People aren’t positive about low-skilled immigration, but if you specify particular low-skilled jobs, like care workers or farm workers, they give more positive answers.
Many are unconcerned when its other people's pay which is being reduced by immigration.
But it doesn't need many immigrants before the knock effect starts reducing the pay in other sectors.
Aside from which many who migrate to work in low paid unpleasant jobs soon move into other sectors.
"Zero immigration" is not an option, because re-training and reintegrating local workers, for any country, is a very long-term project.
In the meantime, over a course of years, we'd gradually become like Hozha-era Albania, and investment would go. The failures and partial impoverishment since Brexit, are only a hint of where things would go, were the country to go down this sort of ultrapopulist route, unlike anywhere else in Europe.
There's a lot of naivety and wishful thinking from Tories regarding the political landscape on the other side of a general election.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
Yes, the Tories are determined to double down in defeat.
It is inevitable that they will decide that the reason that they lost is they went too soft with unpopular policies and people.
I think that they will find that their criticisms on things like immigration, culture will have more resonance with the public when they are in opposition than in government. It is a bit like the experience of the republicans post Trump who are now getting stuff done in their 'war on woke' (despite what some commentators say).
There's a lot of naivety and wishful thinking from Tories regarding the political landscape on the other side of a general election.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
Yes, the Tories are determined to double down in defeat.
It is inevitable that they will decide that the reason that they lost is they went too soft with unpopular policies and people.
I think Immigration & Asylum have moved up in issues polling because the Tories keep talking about it. But the Tories have a terrible track record on this, so this then drives up Con->RefUK switching. If they keep doing this in opposition, they are even greater fools.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
You didn't read what I said. Again, wanting to create more jobs for natives is not a problem. But we need to do that first, and then reduce migration.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
And if the plan was "tweak society and the economy so that the UK was less dependent on importing working age people", that would be fine. There could be a conversation about the benefits and costs of those measures.
That's not what shouty people are shouting for. They just want to cut immigration with no consideration for the side effects. Which, in a world where everything is connected, everything has consequences, is a recipe for disaster.
No its not remotely.
The idea we need migrants to do jobs is a complete myth, every bit as much of a myth as migrants come to "steal jobs".
The quantity of jobs in a country scales with the amount of people in the country, and migrants disproportionately create more jobs than they fill because they require new investment.
I like immigration, but we absolutely do not "need" it. If net migration somehow magically dropped to zero overnight, the number of jobs that need filling would relatively fall, not rise, since demand would stop going up as much. Which would completely balance the fall in available labour.
There's a lot of naivety and wishful thinking from Tories regarding the political landscape on the other side of a general election.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
Yes, the Tories are determined to double down in defeat.
It is inevitable that they will decide that the reason that they lost is they went too soft with unpopular policies and people.
This is the lunatic thing about the @leon / Sunak position shouting about the boats and Labour not having a plan. The Tories do not have a plan. Rwanda is not a plan. The boats aren't stopping and even if they went to zero migration is sky high.
For all that Tories & fellow travellers foam on about Labour, after the election it is them who will be exposed. A decade-long lie, literally claiming the sy is green and sneering that people are stupid enough to believe it.
Had Starmer had his way, we would probably have lower immigration now.
We lost many thousands in critical services and service sectors back to the EU after Brexit, and the tories have incompetently had to make up the numbers. That has been a key driver of the much higher figures this year.
The maths likely means that total net migration will drop in the next couple of years, because this year was boosted by there being fewer new overseas students in 2020 who would have been due to leave in 2023. Plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong arrivals.
Labour may well be presiding over net numbers around half of 2023 without actually doing anything.
It doesn't matter. The public thinks that net migration is around 100,000 or fewer
When they realise it is four or seven times that, as is slowly beginning to happen, and will probably kick in next year under Labour, watch out
And Labour saying "well, we've got it just under half a million a year" isn't going to cut it
SFA to do with asylum. Largely due to the need to have working people to prop up the economy because so many late middle aged people have decided that they have made enough personally and don't want to work as much, or at all.
Once you get to the very late middle aged stage fortunately some of those do relieve the burden slightly by taking winters abroad.
That's all very well, but we need them doing a shift or three at their local care home.
Bottom line is that a government that has supposedly been all over immigration for over a decade has gone backwards. Because the consequences of actually getting numbers below 100k, let alone to zero, are too awful to contemplate.
Or is that Project Fear?
If we structure our society to require lots of extremely bad paid, poor condition jobs. Even then we have options to deal with this.
"National Service! in The National Care Service!"
Germany, for instance, used conscription to get people to do basic task in hospitals.
It is, or was, *already* an option in the UK conscription scheme post-war (and, strictly speaking, also in wartime). David Hockney, for instance, worked his two years' national service as a hospital orderly/porter.
Which in turn came out of the WWI policy on conscription - Conscientious Objectors were given medical related jobs and similar, which could include frontline service.
Which turned around social attitudes towards CO. Those had fought remembered the stretcher bearers who dragged the wounded back, under fire.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
You didn't read what I said. Again, wanting to create more jobs for natives is not a problem. But we need to do that first, and then reduce migration.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
The fact that we have a cap on training medical staff that is substantially below the planned requirements of the NHS is absurd. And, as you say, is essentially Ponzi scheme thinking - we will keep taking staff from poorer countries until they get rich and have more demand for healthcare. Then we will move on to the next lot of poor countries....
Our most recent poll, conducted on the 31st January and 1st February 2024, marks a continued uptick in support for the Labour Party, alongside a slight decrease for the Conservative Party. The Liberal Democrats hold steady, Reform Party sees a gain, while the Green Party experiences a drop. The SNP and other parties’ support remains unchanged.
The current figures, set against the previous poll from the 25th January 2024, are as follows:
It's hard to fault Starmers strategy that has put him so far ahead.
It may be boring, but it's working.
To be fair he has failed to stop the boats, sort out the Post Office scandal, global warming or help England win the World Cup. And he had a korma once, always a poor choice.
If he'd only had a bhuna instead the world would be a better place.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
You didn't read what I said. Again, wanting to create more jobs for natives is not a problem. But we need to do that first, and then reduce migration.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
The fact that we have a cap on training medical staff that is substantially below the planned requirements of the NHS is absurd. And, as you say, is essentially Ponzi scheme thinking - we will keep taking staff from poorer countries until they get rich and have more demand for healthcare. Then we will move on to the next lot of poor countries....
Allthough we've also lost a huge amount of EU Doctors and nurses over the last ten years, with no similar implications for global unsustainability.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
You didn't read what I said. Again, wanting to create more jobs for natives is not a problem. But we need to do that first, and then reduce migration.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
Absolutely!
I thought the whole point of Brexit was to put up the wages of sturdy British yeomen like myself, yet when we agitate for a pay rise the government complains...
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
You didn't read what I said. Again, wanting to create more jobs for natives is not a problem. But we need to do that first, and then reduce migration.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
The fact that we have a cap on training medical staff that is substantially below the planned requirements of the NHS is absurd. And, as you say, is essentially Ponzi scheme thinking - we will keep taking staff from poorer countries until they get rich and have more demand for healthcare. Then we will move on to the next lot of poor countries....
The DHSC won't fund more postgraduate training posts, even though nearly all are oversubscribed. No wonder folk get cheesed off and emigrate.
Had Starmer had his way, we would probably have lower immigration now.
We lost many thousands in critical services and service sectors back to the EU after Brexit, and the tories have incompetently had to make up the numbers. That has been a key driver of the much higher figures this year.
The maths likely means that total net migration will drop in the next couple of years, because this year was boosted by there being fewer new overseas students in 2020 who would have been due to leave in 2023. Plus the Ukraine and Hong Kong arrivals.
Labour may well be presiding over net numbers around half of 2023 without actually doing anything.
It doesn't matter. The public thinks that net migration is around 100,000 or fewer
When they realise it is four or seven times that, as is slowly beginning to happen, and will probably kick in next year under Labour, watch out
And Labour saying "well, we've got it just under half a million a year" isn't going to cut it
SFA to do with asylum. Largely due to the need to have working people to prop up the economy because so many late middle aged people have decided that they have made enough personally and don't want to work as much, or at all.
Once you get to the very late middle aged stage fortunately some of those do relieve the burden slightly by taking winters abroad.
That's all very well, but we need them doing a shift or three at their local care home.
Bottom line is that a government that has supposedly been all over immigration for over a decade has gone backwards. Because the consequences of actually getting numbers below 100k, let alone to zero, are too awful to contemplate.
Or is that Project Fear?
If we structure our society to require lots of extremely bad paid, poor condition jobs. Even then we have options to deal with this.
"National Service! in The National Care Service!"
Germany, for instance, used conscription to get people to do basic task in hospitals.
It is, or was, *already* an option in the UK conscription scheme post-war (and, strictly speaking, also in wartime). David Hockney, for instance, worked his two years' national service as a hospital orderly/porter.
Which in turn came out of the WWI policy on conscription - Conscientious Objectors were given medical related jobs and similar, which could include frontline service.
Which turned around social attitudes towards CO. Those had fought remembered the stretcher bearers who dragged the wounded back, under fire.
Nicely acknowledged in Dad's Army quite early on, come to think of it.
There's a lot of naivety and wishful thinking from Tories regarding the political landscape on the other side of a general election.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
Yes, the Tories are determined to double down in defeat.
It is inevitable that they will decide that the reason that they lost is they went too soft with unpopular policies and people.
I think there's something to be said for doubling down in defeat. It lets you reenthuse your base, then you can lose the next election and get it out of their system. Labour would have been better off if they'd elected Corbyn in 2010 instead of 2015, and arguably we'd have both avoided Brexit and got a Labour government or at least a Hung Parliament from 2020.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
You didn't read what I said. Again, wanting to create more jobs for natives is not a problem. But we need to do that first, and then reduce migration.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
Absolutely!
I thought the whole point of Brexit was to put up the wages of sturdy British yeomen like myself, yet when we agitate for a pay rise the government complains...
I'll bet you missed Sunday archery practise again. Sturdy Yeoman, forsooth! We'll never conquer France with an attitude like that.
There's a lot of naivety and wishful thinking from Tories regarding the political landscape on the other side of a general election.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
Yes, the Tories are determined to double down in defeat.
It is inevitable that they will decide that the reason that they lost is they went too soft with unpopular policies and people.
I think that they will find that their criticisms on things like immigration, culture will have more resonance with the public when they are in opposition than in government. It is a bit like the experience of the republicans post Trump who are now getting stuff done in their 'war on woke' (despite what some commentators say).
It didn't work in either 2001 or 2005 ("are you thinking what we are thinking?").
What got the Tories back to power in 2010 was a shift away from reactionary dog whistles, and embracing social change and shifting centrally.
But sure, why not try again with reactionary populism.
I see that the Met has decided to take seriously improvements to its culture by hiring former Post Office investigators.
Clearly that due diligence and vetting procedure has not been updated yet.
Or, possibly, it has and hiring incompetent thugs in suits with no understanding of either the law or how to do investigations is the culture change the Met wants to implement.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
You didn't read what I said. Again, wanting to create more jobs for natives is not a problem. But we need to do that first, and then reduce migration.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
The fact that we have a cap on training medical staff that is substantially below the planned requirements of the NHS is absurd. And, as you say, is essentially Ponzi scheme thinking - we will keep taking staff from poorer countries until they get rich and have more demand for healthcare. Then we will move on to the next lot of poor countries....
Allthough we've also lost a huge amount of EU Doctors and nurses over the last ten years, with no similar implications for global unsustainability.
Just stupidity.
Though the profile of where in the EU they came from was interesting - yes, the poorer countries.
1) We know the education system in the UK is failing a large number of people. 2) The scale suggests that we are wasting the potential for technically trained people by a factor of 2 or 3. At least. 3) This suggests that we could double training of medical staff. If we could get the secondary education system producing. @ydoethur to the Red Courtesy Phone..... 4) The UK could be a net generator of medical staff. Skills which are in shortage worldwide, and predictably, will be in shortage for the foreseeable future.
There's a lot of naivety and wishful thinking from Tories regarding the political landscape on the other side of a general election.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
Yes, the Tories are determined to double down in defeat.
It is inevitable that they will decide that the reason that they lost is they went too soft with unpopular policies and people.
I think that they will find that their criticisms on things like immigration, culture will have more resonance with the public when they are in opposition than in government. It is a bit like the experience of the republicans post Trump who are now getting stuff done in their 'war on woke' (despite what some commentators say).
It didn't work in either 2001 or 2005 ("are you thinking what we are thinking?").
What got the Tories back to power in 2010 was a shift away from reactionary dog whistles, and embracing social change and shifting centrally.
But sure, why not try again with reactionary populism.
The problem with "are you thinking what we are thinking" is that collectively as a nation we looked at that and said "no".
There's a lot of naivety and wishful thinking from Tories regarding the political landscape on the other side of a general election.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
Yes, the Tories are determined to double down in defeat.
It is inevitable that they will decide that the reason that they lost is they went too soft with unpopular policies and people.
I think Immigration & Asylum have moved up in issues polling because the Tories keep talking about it. But the Tories have a terrible track record on this, so this then drives up Con->RefUK switching. If they keep doing this in opposition, they are even greater fools.
I don't think its just that. The new mode of arrival, mirroring what was seen on a far bigger scale in the Med, has also driven the story.
I see that the Met has decided to take seriously improvements to its culture by hiring former Post Office investigators.
Clearly that due diligence and vetting procedure has not been updated yet.
Or, possibly, it has and hiring incompetent thugs in suits with no understanding of either the law or how to do investigations is the culture change the Met wants to implement.
That is merely to be expected. It's a matter of hiring people who are a good Cultural Fit, as HR likes to say.
Finding enough bigoted idiots must be trying - a rich vein of raw material like that isn't going to be left unexploited for long.
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
You didn't read what I said. Again, wanting to create more jobs for natives is not a problem. But we need to do that first, and then reduce migration.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
The fact that we have a cap on training medical staff that is substantially below the planned requirements of the NHS is absurd. And, as you say, is essentially Ponzi scheme thinking - we will keep taking staff from poorer countries until they get rich and have more demand for healthcare. Then we will move on to the next lot of poor countries....
Allthough we've also lost a huge amount of EU Doctors and nurses over the last ten years, with no similar implications for global unsustainability.
Just stupidity.
Though the profile of where in the EU they came from was interesting - yes, the poorer countries.
1) We know the education system in the UK is failing a large number of people. 2) The scale suggests that we are wasting the potential for technically trained people by a factor of 2 or 3. At least. 3) This suggests that we could double training of medical staff. If we could get the secondary education system producing. @ydoethur to the Red Courtesy Phone..... 4) The UK could be a net generator of medical staff. Skills which are in shortage worldwide, and predictably, will be in shortage for the foreseeable future.
Is it the fault of secondary system that we aren't training enough medical staff?
As far as I know the medical courses are oversubscribed and turning people away, not failing to fill their vacancies.
There are problems in secondary education I'm sure, but a failure to educate enough people who could go on to become doctors etc is not one of them - that problem exists in the system later on.
I see that the Met has decided to take seriously improvements to its culture by hiring former Post Office investigators.
Clearly that due diligence and vetting procedure has not been updated yet.
Or, possibly, it has and hiring incompetent thugs in suits with no understanding of either the law or how to do investigations is the culture change the Met wants to implement.
Oh and the date when Post Office management definitively knew of Horizon problems and how they affected subpostmasters has moved back to 2002 when it was warned by its own investigators in writing that Fujitsu helpdesk staff were telling subpostmasters about the problems.
I see that the Met has decided to take seriously improvements to its culture by hiring former Post Office investigators.
Clearly that due diligence and vetting procedure has not been updated yet.
Or, possibly, it has and hiring incompetent thugs in suits with no understanding of either the law or how to do investigations is the culture change the Met wants to implement.
That is merely to be expected. It's a matter of hiring people who are a good Cultural Fit, as HR likes to say.
Finding enough bigoted idiots must be trying - a rich vein of raw material like that isn't going to be left unexploited for long.
Why is this place famous; or, should I say, infamous?
Ok it’s a tiny bit hard but the answer is so deliciously warped it’s worth a punt
Is it the Christian Seminary where Abdul Ezedi absorbed the beauty of the bible and the Ten Commandments on the way to his absolutely honest conversion?
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
You didn't read what I said. Again, wanting to create more jobs for natives is not a problem. But we need to do that first, and then reduce migration.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
The fact that we have a cap on training medical staff that is substantially below the planned requirements of the NHS is absurd. And, as you say, is essentially Ponzi scheme thinking - we will keep taking staff from poorer countries until they get rich and have more demand for healthcare. Then we will move on to the next lot of poor countries....
Allthough we've also lost a huge amount of EU Doctors and nurses over the last ten years, with no similar implications for global unsustainability.
Just stupidity.
Though the profile of where in the EU they came from was interesting - yes, the poorer countries.
1) We know the education system in the UK is failing a large number of people. 2) The scale suggests that we are wasting the potential for technically trained people by a factor of 2 or 3. At least. 3) This suggests that we could double training of medical staff. If we could get the secondary education system producing. @ydoethur to the Red Courtesy Phone..... 4) The UK could be a net generator of medical staff. Skills which are in shortage worldwide, and predictably, will be in shortage for the foreseeable future.
Is it the fault of secondary system that we aren't training enough medical staff?
As far as I know the medical courses are oversubscribed and turning people away, not failing to fill their vacancies.
There are problems in secondary education I'm sure, but a failure to educate enough people who could go on to become doctors etc is not one of them - that problem exists in the system later on.
If you unblock the teaching-posts-in-teaching-hospitals problem, then you can have more graduates. This would then, rapidly hit the barriers of how many people have the required A level results - you would get some increase, then stall out. The next problem will be in secondary education. Which may well result from issues in primary education. At least partially.
It's a problem in queuing. It is essential to think up and down the system.
I see that the Met has decided to take seriously improvements to its culture by hiring former Post Office investigators.
Clearly that due diligence and vetting procedure has not been updated yet.
Or, possibly, it has and hiring incompetent thugs in suits with no understanding of either the law or how to do investigations is the culture change the Met wants to implement.
Oh and the date when Post Office management definitively knew of Horizon problems and how they affected subpostmasters has moved back to 2002 when it was warned by its own investigators in writing that Fujitsu helpdesk staff were telling subpostmasters about the problems.
Scene - Met SMT office
Chief Constable Savage (OBE) - "So you are saying you've found a group of potential recruits who are skilled in fitting people up, blindly obeying orders *and* are a bit racist"
Underlying - "Er..."
Chief Constable Savage (OBE) - "Shut up and get them into CID. Now!"
On asylum and immigration in general, the question is always this - what is the alternative?
The UK is part of the world. If we unilaterally withdraw from international treaties then thats our ability to trade gone with it. You can't trust Britain if it rips up agreements.
If we "simply" shut the border, or go further and actively try to send the foreign invaders home, what then? Our economy needs migrant labour in all of the jobs that Brits are too stupid / lazy / far away to do.
If we want a program to educate people to become doctors, or pay enough for elderly care that homes can employ locals now happy to clean up someone else's mother's piss for the living wage, or work in hospitality, or in factories where the jobs pay £ but the housing costs £££, then we need to do that first.
Wanting to create jobs for natives is not a problem. But the "send them home" people also don't want to spend money paying workers or training doctors or building new towns in the fens to house workers. For them, "send them home" is the end game.
Great! So we do. What happens now? We're fucked, that's what happens. There are a few million people out there viscerally angry, having been whipped into a rage by a right wing wanting to exploit their ignorance and stupidity. @Leon foams on about them and what they could do.
Sure! But on this issue They Are Wrong. We cannot do any of the simple solutions or we'd be fucked. The world doesn't operate at simple. It largely isn't black and white, and the job of politicians is to nudge people away from simplistic non-solutions like Rwanda, not keep selling it to them.
Stop erecting straw men.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof. Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
You didn't read what I said. Again, wanting to create more jobs for natives is not a problem. But we need to do that first, and then reduce migration.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
The fact that we have a cap on training medical staff that is substantially below the planned requirements of the NHS is absurd. And, as you say, is essentially Ponzi scheme thinking - we will keep taking staff from poorer countries until they get rich and have more demand for healthcare. Then we will move on to the next lot of poor countries....
Allthough we've also lost a huge amount of EU Doctors and nurses over the last ten years, with no similar implications for global unsustainability.
Just stupidity.
Though the profile of where in the EU they came from was interesting - yes, the poorer countries.
1) We know the education system in the UK is failing a large number of people. 2) The scale suggests that we are wasting the potential for technically trained people by a factor of 2 or 3. At least. 3) This suggests that we could double training of medical staff. If we could get the secondary education system producing. @ydoethur to the Red Courtesy Phone..... 4) The UK could be a net generator of medical staff. Skills which are in shortage worldwide, and predictably, will be in shortage for the foreseeable future.
Is it the fault of secondary system that we aren't training enough medical staff?
As far as I know the medical courses are oversubscribed and turning people away, not failing to fill their vacancies.
There are problems in secondary education I'm sure, but a failure to educate enough people who could go on to become doctors etc is not one of them - that problem exists in the system later on.
If you unblock the teaching-posts-in-teaching-hospitals problem, then you can have more graduates. This would then, rapidly hit the barriers of how many people have the required A level results - you would get some increase, then stall out. The next problem will be in secondary education. Which may well result from issues in primary education. At least partially.
It's a problem in queuing. It is essential to think up and down the system.
Is there a shortage of people getting the required A level results? I don't believe there is.
Sometimes with a bottleneck, there's one point that is causing the problem, and not up and down the system, and fixing that bottleneck relieves the strain in the whole system.
This country has an abundance of 16 year olds getting good GCSEs and 18 year olds getting good A levels. What it doesn't have is an abundance of medical training places.
I can see it happening, Freeman, like Portillo, is a Cambridge man, which means he is very intelligent, a great communicator, and is in touch with the common man and woman, the public love that.
A former minister who quit claiming that his salary would not cover his mortgage has set his sights on a new role fronting TV documentaries.
George Freeman has told colleagues that he wants to showcase pioneering scientific projects covering the oceans, space and subatomic advances in life sciences.
Friends suggested that he could be “the next Michael Portillo”, alluding to another former Tory minister who found a post-politics career in broadcasting with documentaries about trains.
There's a lot of naivety and wishful thinking from Tories regarding the political landscape on the other side of a general election.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
Yes, the Tories are determined to double down in defeat.
It is inevitable that they will decide that the reason that they lost is they went too soft with unpopular policies and people.
I think that they will find that their criticisms on things like immigration, culture will have more resonance with the public when they are in opposition than in government. It is a bit like the experience of the republicans post Trump who are now getting stuff done in their 'war on woke' (despite what some commentators say).
It didn't work in either 2001 or 2005 ("are you thinking what we are thinking?").
What got the Tories back to power in 2010 was a shift away from reactionary dog whistles, and embracing social change and shifting centrally.
But sure, why not try again with reactionary populism.
Of course a harder line on immigration would be shifting centrally.
A key part of Rishi Sunak’s effort to stop the boats has collapsed after Home Office officials declared that Turkey was not a safe country to send migrants back to because of human rights concerns.
Ministers hoped to set up a migrant returns deal with Ankara after a surge in the number of Turkish people arriving illegally in Britain by small boat.
Three thousand Turkish nationals arrived that way last year, making them the third largest nationality to do so and representing a 162 per cent increase from the year before.
The deal would have mirrored an accord with Albania which has significantly cut the number of its citizens entering the UK in this way.
An internal Home Office review described Turkey as “a state that does not meet the criteria of being ‘generally safe’”.
It said that previous analysis of Turkish cases and anecdotal evidence had found 99 per cent of Turkish asylum cases in the UK were based on a fear of the state.
The majority were “political” opponents of the regime due to their actual or perceived involvement in opposition movements, including the Peoples’ Democratic Party, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the Gulen movement.
The assessment criticised Turkey’s “over-zealous” application of anti-terrorism laws and raised concerns over the independence of the judiciary and the provision of fair trials, particularly in “political” cases.
There are allegations of torture and ill-treatment in police custody and prison.
Notably, the assessment also raises concerns over Turkey’s compliance with adverse rulings from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which the Home Office assessment said “raised questions about adherence to the rule of law”.
This is significant given Sunak’s plans not to comply with interim injunctions from the same court.
His Rwanda bill will give ministers the power to ignore these so-called Rule 39 orders despite the president of the ECHR saying last month that this would be a breach of international law.
The Turkish example is a good example of why our current asylum system is simply unsustainable. There are dozens of absolute shit holes in the world with appalling views on gays, women, Christians, minorities along with huge propensities towards violence to assert their control. More than a billion people live in such places, a lot more if you look too carefully at China.
The idea that all of them have the right to seek asylum in this country is well meaning, compassionate and nuts. It is simply unsustainable. We need to move from a rights based system to a compassionate one that allows us the right to choose. So, we might choose Ukrainians or Hong Kong Chinese, for example. But we are unlikely to choose those from religions whose central tenants we find incompatible with our own beliefs. And we must reclaim the right to say no. I believe that this is inevitable and I would rather we did not elect a quasi fascist government to achieve it.
Withdrawing from the UN Convention on Refugees would be required, but seems not to have any real sanction. Indeed it seems no country has had any enforcement action for not following the rules while in membership.
It seems taking any refugees is voluntary.
It is not "voluntary" for us because we are a country that takes the rule of law very seriously, and that is of course something to be proud of. The price of withdrawing the UNCR would be so high I would not commend this country doing it unilaterally. We need to build an international consensus about it. As this century progresses and the numbers from Africa explode I do not think that will be too hard.
If we want to reduce the number of inward migrants then we have to adjust the law in order to do that. You will recall my well-worn rants about making promises that can't be kept, doing things in a silly way, and so on. It is not realistic for us to create a new international consensus in the short term, so in the interim laws can be passed to derogate from/resile from/repudiate/leave/whatever the requisite conventions so we can do so legally.
Discussion over the past fifteen years of Conservative rule has repeatedly consisted of people pretending the law is one thing, the juduciary pointing out that its not, the politicians whining about the blob, and the poor civil servants on the ground having to clear up the mess. This really has to stop.
Comments
I'm generally in favour living in a flat with some dodgy STLs below me, but it's expensive.
What would the actual sanction be for withdrawing from the UNCR?
There are a number of countries in the world who are not members, the largest being India and Indonesia, but also Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand. It doesn't seem to inhibit their trade. Though neither has it solved their refugee problems.
It's incompatible with EU membership, but that isn't an issue at present.
The Labour business and fiscal programme is significantly more detailed than “we’ll do what Sunak is doing”. That’s why we’re keeping the table updated. The headlines you’re seeing in the papers are we’ll do what Sunak is doing.
But to answer your questions, yes I have been to America, and yes I have talked to Trump voters. None of the ones I know are rednecks or white supremacists, but some of them might be a bit insane on some issues. The ones I know are broadly 2 types:
1. Friends who afaik wouldn't have voted Republican in the past (probably wouldn't have voted at all), but believe things like the Democrats (and the establishment generally) are all running paedophile rings. Correlated with a belief in chemtrails, and crop circles being messages from aliens.
2. People who probably did vote Republican before Trump, are generally conservative, and also like paying less tax.
I know that this is a very unrepresentative group, and there must be a few Trump supporters who are, as you say, banjo players without any teeth - I'm just not in contact with them.
Instructing women how to behave in church was progressive because it accepted that women should be there, and was instruction in decorum. Many previous religions banned women from places of worship entirely.
If we take in several hundred thousand immigrants a year, and get a hundred thousand asylum seekers a year, then the numbers are by definition sustainable, as we could reduce the non refugee migration numbers to whatever we choose. Unsustainable imo, would be if the asylum seeker numbers squeeze out other immigration.
That there are many more who could potentially claim asylum but have no interest or realistic capability to do so is something to be aware of that could become a sustainability issue in the future but a current issue.
And we absolutely need to build more houses and infrastructure to cope with our recent and expected immigration, but that is the case whether the immigrants are asylum seekers or not.
If the public get steamed up enough about something, politicians do act, because if they won't we'll vote for different politicians who will. Worked example - we left the EU, against the wishes of both Tory and Labour leadership, because otherwise UKIP were going to eat Cameron's lunch.
Net Zero Immigration will happen. It is utterly inevitable. It's just the Tories are to stupid to run with it yet. It's just a question of whether Labour lose in 2029ish to a Net Zero Immigration Tory party, or RefUK.
And this is really my point. Starmer has no idea what to do about the issue, and I am pretty sure it is going to be THE issue over the next few years, along with its ancillary problems- pressure on the NHS, housing, crime etc
Hence my belief he will probably win a stonking majority, but become deeply unpopular within a couple of years - as happened to Boris, let us note
And with that, I must away - AWAY - to the wine cellars of old Kampuchea
That's the problem for the Tories on the issue. They lack any credibility at all.
Their input was more controversial.
"As in all the congregations of the Lord’s people. Women should remain silent in the churches, They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church..."
"A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet..."
Whether that's Paul himself, or later interpolation can't be certain, of course.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1050929/voter-turnout-in-the-uk/
As for Labours plan we'll have to agree to disagree, The only things that click are the housing the promise and Schrodingers £28billion for green projects.
And Im someone who follows politics, if I ask my wife or kids thayll just stare at me blankly. My middle daughter ( aged 30 )would probably ask me who is Keir Starmer, which puts our deliberations here into some kind of context
Bottom line is that a government that has supposedly been all over immigration for over a decade has gone backwards. Because the consequences of actually getting numbers below 100k, let alone to zero, are too awful to contemplate.
Or is that Project Fear?
So, yes. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
"National Service! in The National Care Service!"
Germany, for instance, used conscription to get people to do basic task in hospitals.
It's as basic as - How many people will be taking a dump in 2032?
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk-public-opinion-toward-immigration-overall-attitudes-and-level-of-concern/ has a huge amount of polling on the topic, including polling showing people prefer immigration from Australia > France > Poland > Romania > Nigeria = Pakistan.
Mostly, people are more in favour of immigration when you specify particular groups than in the general. People aren’t too positive about asylum seekers, but they’re more positive about asylum seekers from Afghanistan, more positive still about the Hong Kong scheme, and most positive about the Ukraine scheme. People aren’t positive about low-skilled immigration, but if you specify particular low-skilled jobs, like care workers or farm workers, they give more positive answers.
I think we should train vastly more doctors and nurses here. (We also need to do something to prevent them getting trained at our expense, then vanishing off to Australia after a couple of years).
I think that ending mass immigration would almost certainly shake up large sectors of the economy which have become addicted to cheap labour, and there would be winners and losers.
Obvious Winners - the low paid - low end wages (and therefore investment in productivity) would go through the roof.
Obvious Losers - mostly the well off - Nannys, eating out etc will get a lot more expensive.
I'm an employer, in a sector funded by people's surplus desposable incomes. It would probably hurt me personally. But it's still the right thing to do, as the current mass migration is simply an unsustainable ponzi scheme.
https://www.techneuk.com/tracker/
Our most recent poll, conducted on the 31st January and 1st February 2024, marks a continued uptick in support for the Labour Party, alongside a slight decrease for the Conservative Party. The Liberal Democrats hold steady, Reform Party sees a gain, while the Green Party experiences a drop. The SNP and other parties’ support remains unchanged.
The current figures, set against the previous poll from the 25th January 2024, are as follows:
Lab: 45% (+1)
Con: 23% (-1)
Lib Dem: 10% (=)
Reform: 10% (+1)
Green: 6% (-1)
SNP: 3% (=)
Others: 3% (=)
Some people may do that, many do not.
I live in a semi, in the other half of a semi is a couple who moved in after we did. One is from Turkey, do you think he moved in because he thinks we're Turkish or this neighbourhood is Turkish? Or did he move there because that's where he wanted to live? His husband is from the Middle East, do you think he moved here because he thinks the neighbourhood is Middle Eastern and we're Middle Eastern? Or because that's where he too wanted to live?
You may travel in circles of racist shiteaters, but that doesn't mean the rest of us do.
It may be boring, but it's working.
Whilst Labour's honeymoon will be short, they are missing that the victor writes the history books and sets the agenda. There will be a lot of "clearing up the mess of the Tory years" and the "Tories lost control of the border".
Expect in the early days an opening of the books to reveal a situation far worse than we can see today.
The Tories will discover in opposition that they have the same amount of oxygen that Ed Milliband had taking on the coalition dealing with debt. none
The result, in the building industry, is a separation that reminds me of childcare.
Middle class and up Follow The Regulations - For example, I fitted mains powered, interconnected fire alarms during my recent project. It was arguable that they weren't required under the regs, but I took the view that while we had a sparky running *all* the wires, what's a slack half dozen. That and changing all internal doors to fire doors.
Meanwhile, in the impromptu Homes in Multiple Occupation that the builders live in (AKA flats/houses with adults in every room - the nice ones have one person per room).. Fire alarms? Fire doors* Ha ha ha ha ha
*The last one I saw had fire doors, in the sense that they will burn very, very well in a fire. Literally cardboard core....
It is inevitable that they will decide that the reason that they lost is they went too soft with unpopular policies and people.
That's not what shouty people are shouting for. They just want to cut immigration with no consideration for the side effects. Which, in a world where everything is connected, everything has consequences, is a recipe for disaster.
https://twitter.com/Survation/status/1753030023919890500
Survation recently conducted constituency polls in Ynys Môn and Carmarthen. The Conservatives are currently placed to lose Ynys Môn to Plaid Cymru, with their vote share reduced by 10% compared to the 2019 general election
PC 39% (+10)
LAB 27% (-3)
CON 26% (-10)
REF 4% (-2)
LD 1%
OTH 3%
Changes vs 2019 Election
FW: 21/12/23 - 05/01/24
Polling in the new seat of Carmarthen shows also a Plaid Cymru lead.
PC 30%
LAB 24%
CON 24%
IND 10%
LD 4%
REF 4%
OTH: 3%
FW: 02/01/24 – 04/02/24
Both polls were conducted on behalf of Plaid Cymru.
But it doesn't need many immigrants before the knock effect starts reducing the pay in other sectors.
Aside from which many who migrate to work in low paid unpleasant jobs soon move into other sectors.
In the meantime, over a course of years, we'd gradually become like Hozha-era Albania, and investment would go. The failures and partial impoverishment since Brexit, are only a hint of where things would go, were the country to go down this sort of ultrapopulist route, unlike anywhere else in Europe.
Would it be better for us to have British doctors and healthcare staff, so that we raid less of the resources of poorer countries? Absolutely! But to do that we need to invest in training and frankly in working conditions. The people saying "stop the migrants" also want to keep cutting spending on training and working environments.
The idea we need migrants to do jobs is a complete myth, every bit as much of a myth as migrants come to "steal jobs".
The quantity of jobs in a country scales with the amount of people in the country, and migrants disproportionately create more jobs than they fill because they require new investment.
I like immigration, but we absolutely do not "need" it. If net migration somehow magically dropped to zero overnight, the number of jobs that need filling would relatively fall, not rise, since demand would stop going up as much. Which would completely balance the fall in available labour.
For all that Tories & fellow travellers foam on about Labour, after the election it is them who will be exposed. A decade-long lie, literally claiming the sy is green and sneering that people are stupid enough to believe it.
Which turned around social attitudes towards CO. Those had fought remembered the stretcher bearers who dragged the wounded back, under fire.
Just stupidity.
I thought the whole point of Brexit was to put up the wages of sturdy British yeomen like myself, yet when we agitate for a pay rise the government complains...
Why is this place famous; or, should I say, infamous?
Ok it’s a tiny bit hard but the answer is so deliciously warped it’s worth a punt
What got the Tories back to power in 2010 was a shift away from reactionary dog whistles, and embracing social change and shifting centrally.
But sure, why not try again with reactionary populism.
Clearly that due diligence and vetting procedure has not been updated yet.
Or, possibly, it has and hiring incompetent thugs in suits with no understanding of either the law or how to do investigations is the culture change the Met wants to implement.
1) We know the education system in the UK is failing a large number of people.
2) The scale suggests that we are wasting the potential for technically trained people by a factor of 2 or 3. At least.
3) This suggests that we could double training of medical staff. If we could get the secondary education system producing. @ydoethur to the Red Courtesy Phone.....
4) The UK could be a net generator of medical staff. Skills which are in shortage worldwide, and predictably, will be in shortage for the foreseeable future.
(Or not, innocent face...)
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-cia-officer-joshua-adam-schulte-sentenced-40-years-prison-espionage-and-child
Finding enough bigoted idiots must be trying - a rich vein of raw material like that isn't going to be left unexploited for long.
LInk to the story, please?
As far as I know the medical courses are oversubscribed and turning people away, not failing to fill their vacancies.
There are problems in secondary education I'm sure, but a failure to educate enough people who could go on to become doctors etc is not one of them - that problem exists in the system later on.
It's a problem in queuing. It is essential to think up and down the system.
New thread
Chief Constable Savage (OBE) - "So you are saying you've found a group of potential recruits who are skilled in fitting people up, blindly obeying orders *and* are a bit racist"
Underlying - "Er..."
Chief Constable Savage (OBE) - "Shut up and get them into CID. Now!"
Sometimes with a bottleneck, there's one point that is causing the problem, and not up and down the system, and fixing that bottleneck relieves the strain in the whole system.
This country has an abundance of 16 year olds getting good GCSEs and 18 year olds getting good A levels. What it doesn't have is an abundance of medical training places.
Those YouGov tables haven’t appeared yet, what’s going on???
Discussion over the past fifteen years of Conservative rule has repeatedly consisted of people pretending the law is one thing, the juduciary pointing out that its not, the politicians whining about the blob, and the poor civil servants on the ground having to clear up the mess. This really has to stop.