Rishi Sunak is so scared of the voters he's running away from a May general election.
But Boris Johnson is the real Conservative coward.
My new weekly @theipaper column on 'bottler Boris' (and bottler Lee Anderson):
Calls to 'Bring Back Boris' are like the 1st cuckoo of spring, getting earlier each year. But that's exactly what he is, a cuckoo who outgrew the Tory nest and flew. Never forget, he VOLUNTARILY left Parliament + didn't let the voters decide his fate.
. @LordAshcroft's latest polling is a sobering reminder of just why Tory MPs ousted Johnson as leader too.
59% of the public think the man's a liability - that's worse than Sunak and 2nd only to Truss.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
No, because that was (roughly) Dave's Deal. Fully involved in the discussions, able to opt out of anything proposed in the future. That, ultimately, didn't fly.
The menu of options (more access for more alignment) broadly is what it is. Barnier's staircase and all that. The hope that there was some other deal under the counter, more of what we wanted for less of what we didn't want, has turned out to be a mirage. That was always pretty likely.
Dave's deal meant staying in the EU and we voted to leave. But if the government had decided to go for EEA membership, that would have got through Parliament and been accepted by a majority of voters. However, it would have irrevocably split what was then the Conservative party. Ironically, that pretty much ended up happening anyway.
The Tories will benefit polling wise if the Rwanda policy reduces the boat crossings . Regardless of the Stop the Boat slogan a considerable reduction will help them .
Conversely if the policy doesn’t work then they are in even more trouble.
Labour could have an issue if the policy works , together with an improving economy and a drop in interest rates the Tories could see a significant improvement to their polling.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
For me, from best to worst:
Cameron Steadied the ship. Worked well in a coalition.
May Did a reasonable job with a party that was not behind her. Had some good instincts.
Brown Spent years trying to defenestrate the party leader, then did not know what to do with the job when he got it. Let an awful economic inheritance from his time as chancellor. Could have been so much more than he ended up being.
Johnson Got two big calls right, many others wrong. Was never suited to be PM, but he was faced with an unprecedented crisis that few PMs would have come well out of.
Sunak Dealt a bad hand, which he has played terribly so far.
Truss Doesn't really figure; a footnote. She may have surprised on the upside; her subsequent actions suggest otherwise.
It's tough to call the order of competence.
Cameron's Brexit and North African/Middle Eastern adventures place a big question mark next to his name and probably bring him down a notch or two. How about we lump Cameron, Brown and May together as the least incompetent, then Sunak, then Truss and Johnson vying for the low point in 21st Century history. Measuring the damage done by Truss in just 49 days is pertinent, but Johnson dismantled the nation for his own ends over years, surely that counts for something.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
LOL, no. He was head and shoulders over his predecessor. Many of Labour's problems post-2010 were down to the civil war Brown instigated within the party to undermine Blair. And the effects of the crisis that helped do him in, the GFC, was made far worse by his earlier actions as chancellor. "No more boom and bust!" And the tactics Brown's minions used were downright dirty. Of course, Brown's fans say that he had nothing to do with that...
Cameron, on the other hand, had to work in a coalition; and he did that well.
I'll even give Cameron praise for one thing that will be controversial on here: the EU referendum. It was needed. It's a shame that remain lost, but some of the blame for that can be put on the head of Corbyn.
You are wrong about the GFC and even if we agree to differ on Brown's record in Number 11, this debate is about Prime Ministers.
For the reasons I've stated, Cameron was bottom. And that is without taking into account foreign policy, and as OKC reminds us, Cameron also broke the criminal justice system with cuts to legal aid, prisons, the courts and police. He also wrote the dullest political memoir.
But here he is showing The Sun round Downing Street, showing what he did well. As I said, Cameron was the prime minister from central casting.
Very good header - though no one has mentioned the fanciful last paragraph. Did no one read that far ?
From today's Times:
The government’s flagship Rwanda legislation could also finally pass, with the Home Office planning for the first flights to take off by mid May. This would be followed quickly by further flights with plans for a large foreign language social media campaign featuring these people who had been deported — and targeted at those still looking to come to the UK...
“Labour say they’re going to scrap the scheme — but if we can show that it’s working what are they going to say then? People on all sides are so convinced it’s not going to happen or that it’s not going to work that they are underestimating the political potential of it being successful.”
Classy.
This might work if people were still giving the government the benefit of the doubt. But that was squandered a long time ago.
For clarity, I've bolded the fanciful bit. Topping is likely right about what the government thinks it 'calculates'.. The Government, meanwhile, has seen what happens when the public believes a ruling party has no control in this area and calculates that if it can take back control of The Boats it will inspire the trust of the voters for it to take back control over other policy areas and, who knows, perhaps even parliament itself come the next General Election.
Well yes of course it's fanciful but put yourself in the government right now.
And how else to explain this disproportionate focus. What else is there.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
No, because that was (roughly) Dave's Deal. Fully involved in the discussions, able to opt out of anything proposed in the future. That, ultimately, didn't fly.
The menu of options (more access for more alignment) broadly is what it is. Barnier's staircase and all that. The hope that there was some other deal under the counter, more of what we wanted for less of what we didn't want, has turned out to be a mirage. That was always pretty likely.
Dave's deal meant staying in the EU and we voted to leave. But if the government had decided to go for EEA membership, that would have got through Parliament and been accepted by a majority of voters. However, it would have irrevocably split what was then the Conservative party. Ironically, that pretty much ended up happening anyway.
Would have been nice not to waste so many years in the meantime.
The Tories are all about divide and rule - it's howa corrupt oligarchy that has nothing in common with most of the population and is actively undermining their interests sustains itself in office. Hating on foreigners is a core plank of that strategy, Stop the Boats the latest iteration.
I think that’s true. The people who bankroll the Tory Party don’t really care about immigration, they just knew it was a useful lever to pull to get us out of the EU. They created the hysteria with their newspapers and fed it and nurtured it in order to ultimately remove us from a supranational organisation that wasn’t afraid to curtail their power.
I was in a McDonalds yesterday and the number of Asian males shuttling in and out, picking up orders for delivery, was striking. Here in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, where we’ve a lot of warehouses and logistics and stuff cos we’re where the A1 and M62 cross, the rise since Brexit of non-white faces in the streets and supermarkets is extremely noticeable. Whereas before immigrants were generally white Europeans. Poles, etc.
I welcome it, it’s about time we caught up with the diversity of Leeds, for example. But it isn’t what most Brexit voters round here anticipated as a result of their Leave vote.
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
Our society has decided that we all need the ability to click on our phone and have anything we like delivered quickly. That means we need an army of workers doing shitty jobs. So we want people delivering McDonalds but “I’m not getting a job delivering McDonalds”. So we have migrants but “how do we stop all these foreigners coming here and delivering my McDonalds”
We can’t blame Covid for making people stupid. Many people pre-date Covid in that regard
This isn't something unique to Britain.
Britain is fairly average now for percentage of immigrants in the developed world, with about 14% of us born abroad. Canada, Australia, Switzerland are notably higher, as are Saudi and the UAE. We see this politically too, with migration being the hot topic in nearly all our countries. The exceptions are places like South Korea and Japan where the population pyramid is dangerously upside down.
In a globalised world people want to move around, seeking out economic and social opportunity. There are many on here who have benefited from living abroad including posters who still do, and many more have friends or family from abroad. My own ancestors migrated to Australia in the 19th Century and back to England in the 1930's for example.
Why should we deny such opportunity to others?
The failure of migration policy is not so much the numbers but rather the failure to plan for such arrivals, and not just the PB obsession with housing, but also with programmes of integration and cultural assimilation.
Agree apart from the fact that they have allowed far too many far too quickly and knackered everything. If done at a manageable rate it may have been ok but now people feel overrun in many areas and the services, housing , facilities have went to rat shit due to no planning and just opening the floodgates to any Tom , Dick or Harry regardless. Add the fact that many immigrants all crowd together and we see why we have so many issues.
This highlights one of my points. Ayrshire has a falling population, even over a period when Scotlands population rose.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
Mr. Ghedebrav, still going well, next session is session 21, I think. At the start of 19 I had the players come up with locations in the world (island) map I'd made, so I'm going to start working those into personal/side-quests. Also got various plans, though vague because I don't want to do endless work only for them to go elsewhere.
Lots of excellent pre-made maps ready to go, and I've got an outline for drawing up a lich's former mountain castle lair.
Liking it a lot, and last time was especially fun as combats tend to be a little on the easy side and they had a rough time for once. No deaths, but lots of people got KO'd.
Starting a Pathfinder campaign with session zero at the end of the month, as a player. Going for a lizardfolk cleric of Sarenrae so I can focus on healing.
Is your new campaign as DM or player, and is it homebrewed or a module?
My limited experience of AI (for @Leon ). 1: Our communications team recently shot a promotional video in our office - but only shot a head and shoulders still photo of the individual concerned - forgetting that they were supposed to get a full body shot. Rather than remobilise a photographer they simply used AI to generate the missing photo. I would never have known if I had not been told... 2: I needed a formal business photo for company website, but I only had passport photos and informal shots. So I used AI to generate a suitable photo for me. There were lots of unrecognisable shots (containing all of the matching details of my mouth, nose, eyes etc - but the overall effect was just wrong - like a dodgy waxwork model). But I eventually got a brilliant picture. Very professional. Looked exactly me.
You should have got Kate to help. She’s a whizz at this sort of thing.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
I'm not considering Boris or Liz Truss, as I've tucked them away as sui generis — a legal term I pinched from Rumpole of the Bailey.
The Tories are all about divide and rule - it's howa corrupt oligarchy that has nothing in common with most of the population and is actively undermining their interests sustains itself in office. Hating on foreigners is a core plank of that strategy, Stop the Boats the latest iteration.
I think that’s true. The people who bankroll the Tory Party don’t really care about immigration, they just knew it was a useful lever to pull to get us out of the EU. They created the hysteria with their newspapers and fed it and nurtured it in order to ultimately remove us from a supranational organisation that wasn’t afraid to curtail their power.
I was in a McDonalds yesterday and the number of Asian males shuttling in and out, picking up orders for delivery, was striking. Here in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, where we’ve a lot of warehouses and logistics and stuff cos we’re where the A1 and M62 cross, the rise since Brexit of non-white faces in the streets and supermarkets is extremely noticeable. Whereas before immigrants were generally white Europeans. Poles, etc.
I welcome it, it’s about time we caught up with the diversity of Leeds, for example. But it isn’t what most Brexit voters round here anticipated as a result of their Leave vote.
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
Our society has decided that we all need the ability to click on our phone and have anything we like delivered quickly. That means we need an army of workers doing shitty jobs. So we want people delivering McDonalds but “I’m not getting a job delivering McDonalds”. So we have migrants but “how do we stop all these foreigners coming here and delivering my McDonalds”
We can’t blame Covid for making people stupid. Many people pre-date Covid in that regard
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
That's not quite true. They didn't want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing - for minimum wage. If you pay enough, you can get people to do almost anything. The issue we have is that lots of the worst paid jobs are also the most unpleasant. The correct solution is no immigration, and the market will fix it so that essential stuff happens, and the unimportant stuff doesn't - laws of supply and demand and all that. It will mean massive wage boosts for people doing the unpleasant but necessary jobs, and counterbalancing effective wage cuts (probably via inflation) for those doing cushy and pointless things (e.g. most HR roles).
As I keep saying, the current effectively unlimited immigration idea is a Ponzi scheme, we can't keep importing cheap labour to hold wages down indefinitely (we will eventually run out of room, if nothing else!). The adjustment at the end of this is going to be spectacular and painful, but we really should get it over with.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
No, because that was (roughly) Dave's Deal. Fully involved in the discussions, able to opt out of anything proposed in the future. That, ultimately, didn't fly.
The menu of options (more access for more alignment) broadly is what it is. Barnier's staircase and all that. The hope that there was some other deal under the counter, more of what we wanted for less of what we didn't want, has turned out to be a mirage. That was always pretty likely.
Dave's deal meant staying in the EU and we voted to leave. But if the government had decided to go for EEA membership, that would have got through Parliament and been accepted by a majority of voters. However, it would have irrevocably split what was then the Conservative party. Ironically, that pretty much ended up happening anyway.
EEA meant FOM so was a non-starter . Of course in hindsight now some Leave voters might accept that as they’ve seen the overall migration figures rocket since leaving.
I do think there is room for much closer EU links if Labour take over.
Mr. Observer, the crash and recession didn't occur in isolation. Australia's better regulation worked to good effect, the botched UK version Brown invented was rather less useful. And that's before we get to his selling off gold in bulk which crashed the price, or making it more expensive to cancel one aircraft carrier than build both, or bringing forward spending to worsen yet further the economic inheritance of the Coalition.
Not that the Conservatives will be any better on that last point.
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
LOL, no. He was head and shoulders over his predecessor. Many of Labour's problems post-2010 were down to the civil war Brown instigated within the party to undermine Blair. And the effects of the crisis that helped do him in, the GFC, was made far worse by his earlier actions as chancellor. "No more boom and bust!" And the tactics Brown's minions used were downright dirty. Of course, Brown's fans say that he had nothing to do with that...
Cameron, on the other hand, had to work in a coalition; and he did that well.
I'll even give Cameron praise for one thing that will be controversial on here: the EU referendum. It was needed. It's a shame that remain lost, but some of the blame for that can be put on the head of Corbyn.
You are wrong about the GFC and even if we agree to differ on Brown's record in Number 11, this debate is about Prime Ministers.
For the reasons I've stated, Cameron was bottom. And that is without taking into account foreign policy, and as OKC reminds us, Cameron also broke the criminal justice system with cuts to legal aid, prisons, the courts and police. He also wrote the dullest political memoir.
But here he is showing The Sun round Downing Street, showing what he did well. As I said, Cameron was the prime minister from central casting.
I am *not* wrong about the GFC; it's insane to suggest that Brown left the country in a good state to handle it. Brown's decisions as chancellor were not done for the good of the country; they were done to further his ambition to become PM. And that's why we were not in a good state to face the GFC.
Also remember that Cameron was in a coalition during the vast majority of his time in power; that alone was a heck of an achievement. I remember many people on here back in 2010/1 going on about how it would only last a few months...
As for foreign affairs; as I pointed out below, Libya was a rather different situation to the one critics point out. And it's a bit rich coming from anyone who voted Labour in 2005, after Iraq!
Take.back.control is just off the road between Belo Horizonte and Brasilia by the way.
Sunak’s (and any government’s) issue with making immigration a loud priority is that’s it’s a no-win:
- If you don’t manage to control it, well congratulations you’ve helped to increase the profile of a policy you’re failing at - If you do, or if numbers drop naturally, polling history shows it very quickly falls down the list of voter concerns, and they’ll move on to other priorities
Contrast with economic measures like wage growth, or public service measures like NHS waiting lists, where success actually wins you votes.
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
LOL.
Utterly deluded.
And how do they think the bankrupt councils will struggle on with further reductions in council tax base?
I thought Brown was a poor PM, but I am glad it was him and Darling in charge when the crash happened and not any of their successors.
Looking over recent PMs it's a tough call as all were pants in their own way. I would pick May as the best of a bad bunch as at least she seemed to have some principles, albeit ones I didn't particularly like.
The problem may well be that failure in government is inevitable, no matter who has the job.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
"... bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson"
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
Paid for by…?
Fictional public spending cuts the Tories know they cannot deliver.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
No, because that was (roughly) Dave's Deal. Fully involved in the discussions, able to opt out of anything proposed in the future. That, ultimately, didn't fly.
The menu of options (more access for more alignment) broadly is what it is. Barnier's staircase and all that. The hope that there was some other deal under the counter, more of what we wanted for less of what we didn't want, has turned out to be a mirage. That was always pretty likely.
Dave's deal meant staying in the EU and we voted to leave. But if the government had decided to go for EEA membership, that would have got through Parliament and been accepted by a majority of voters. However, it would have irrevocably split what was then the Conservative party. Ironically, that pretty much ended up happening anyway.
EEA meant FOM so was a non-starter . Of course in hindsight now some Leave voters might accept that as they’ve seen the overall migration figures rocket since leaving.
I do think there is room for much closer EU links if Labour take over.
EEA was a non-starter because it would have split the Conservative party. Some Leave voters would have accepted it from the get-go. Ask Richard Tyndall and Rochdale Pioneers - and Daniel Hannan! The 48% who voted Remain were entirely removed from the decision equation immediately. That was a huge mistake.
Nice header Topping - I have great respect for anyone who writes one as I’m generally too lazy to even put much thought and analysis into comments yet alone writing an article.
I wonder if we read too much “strategy” or “tactics” into the boats situation. I think it’s now simply a monster the party gave birth to years ago for political reasons at the time and nobody realised it would develop into the main priority, some devil child that should have been dispatched soon after birth.
So I think 99.9999% of the government would be happy if there was a way to drop Rwanda and the boats furore without getting the biggest load of egg on their faces but they can’t because their friendly press will go nuts, activists who’ve made it a religion will go nuts and the opposition will have a field day.
Ironically, the large scale net immigration we saw with FoM over the decade before the Brexit vote was a temporary, not a permanent, phenomenon. As countries in Central and Eastern Europe become wealthier within the EU, the need to leave to find work reduces. There is data to back this hypothesis up:
We have inflicted significant restrictions on our own freedoms and on our economy in response to what turns out to have been a moment in time.
This is one of the reasons why I think that a new, non-Tory, government will have a lot more space to get closer to the EU than might currently seem the case.
The problem with this argument is that net non-asylum immigration has soared since Brexit. In fact economists point to high immigration as the only Brexit win. Everything else is damage. Ironically we could have increased immigration without leaving the European Union but governments were focused on restricting it under pressure from the electorate.
But I agree with your point that a new government has the political space to do deals with the European Union that could potentially allow some degree of freedom of movement. The Brexit fiasco ensures that space.
The numbers we receive on small boats are indeed trivial compared to those we allow for willingly. I agree with @TOPPING that the key difference is control.
But the reality is that our lords and masters have once again lost control by absurdly lax rules on dependents, by failing to police student overstayers and by turning a blind eye to EU citizens claiming that they were here before the cut off date ( something we can’t really check because we never monitored that either).
Sunak is trying hard to distract people from the much broader lack of control. It is not working.
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
Sweeties always sound nice. But how exactly are they planning on paying for this? They won't cut spending (despite a good deal of it being pretty wasteful), and it's going to be tricky to find tax rises on the required scale which no-one will notice...
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
Paid for by…?
Fictional public spending cuts the Tories know they cannot deliver.
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
LOL.
Utterly deluded.
And how do they think the bankrupt councils will struggle on with further reductions in council tax base?
Good morning
These rumours are going to be a feature of daily life for the next 6 months and to be frank why bother getting exercised by them
It is a lovely day and in my case just pleased to see the sun and spring breaking out all over
I thought Brown was a poor PM, but I am glad it was him and Darling in charge when the crash happened and not any of their successors.
Looking over recent PMs it's a tough call as all were pants in their own way. I would pick May as the best of a bad bunch as at least she seemed to have some principles, albeit ones I didn't particularly like.
The problem may well be that failure in government is inevitable, no matter who has the job.
Rory & Alastair, in the piece mentioned earlier which everyone has now watched, made the point that under Macmillan (in particular) and Attlee and others, because they were working from such a low base, it was possible for governments to transform people's lives in a way which is now unimaginable. Rishi or any modern prime minister cannot take half the country from living in unheated rooms they can barely afford, without telephones, an inside toilet or even electricity.
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
LOL.
Utterly deluded.
And how do they think the bankrupt councils will struggle on with further reductions in council tax base?
Good morning
These rumours are going to be a feature of daily life for the next 6 months and to be frank why bother getting exercised by them
It is a lovely day and in my case just pleased to see the sun and spring breaking out all over
Looking lovely here. I might finally have a dry enough day to cut the lawn.
My main takeaway - I broadly agree that this is about a sense of control and sovereignty rather than immigration per se (I’m not sure I agree with your conclusion that the country ‘likes’ immigration - it implies a single overarching view that loses too much nuance and contradiction in our collective view).
But if it is about a sense of control and agency it is, once again, godawful politics from the Tories. There are many aspects of the immigration agenda that we could have almost complete sovereignty and control over. Numbers from UKR and HK for example. Dependents from Nigeria as another.
Why hang your control and sovereignty hat on this particular hook, which is tiny and inconsequential but out of reach and keeps visibly falling off the wall so your hat ends up trampled on the floor?
Which leads me to think it’s even more facile politics; it’s actually just about which part of the complex immigration agenda can most easily be summarised by a pithy three word slogan. That’s the depth of this government’s thinking and vision. Does it fit on a lectern?
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
My main takeaway - I broadly agree that this is about a sense of control and sovereignty rather than immigration per se (I’m not sure I agree with your conclusion that the country ‘likes’ immigration - it implies a single overarching view that loses too much nuance and contradiction in our collective view).
But if it is about a sense of control and agency it is, once again, godawful politics from the Tories. There are many aspects of the immigration agenda that we could have almost complete sovereignty and control over. Numbers from UKR and HK for example. Dependents from Nigeria as another.
Why hang your control and sovereignty hat on this particular hook, which is tiny and inconsequential but out of reach and keeps visibly falling off the wall so your hat ends up trampled on the floor?
Which leads me to think it’s even more facile politics; it’s actually just about which part of the complex immigration agenda can most easily be summarised by a pithy three word slogan. That’s the depth of this government’s thinking and vision. Does it fit on a lectern?
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
Paid for by…?
Fictional public spending cuts the Tories know they cannot deliver.
The council tax cuts in particular seem truly ludicrous. As councils go bankrupt and major percentage increases in tax take are needed simply to bail them out, the government talking about cutting tax rates seems even more fictional than normal.
That’s not to say the rest of it seems sensible, but that part stands out to me as acutely nonsensical, and visibly so even to an only slightly engaged electorate.
The numbers we receive on small boats are indeed trivial compared to those we allow for willingly. I agree with @TOPPING that the key difference is control.
But the reality is that our lords and masters have once again lost control by absurdly lax rules on dependents, by failing to police student overstayers and by turning a blind eye to EU citizens claiming that they were here before the cut off date ( something we can’t really check because we never monitored that either).
Sunak is trying hard to distract people from the much broader lack of control. It is not working.
Ironically, the large scale net immigration we saw with FoM over the decade before the Brexit vote was a temporary, not a permanent, phenomenon. As countries in Central and Eastern Europe become wealthier within the EU, the need to leave to find work reduces. There is data to back this hypothesis up:
We have inflicted significant restrictions on our own freedoms and on our economy in response to what turns out to have been a moment in time.
This is one of the reasons why I think that a new, non-Tory, government will have a lot more space to get closer to the EU than might currently seem the case.
The current immigration problem is not down to the EU; it's the boats. The boats are the symbol of the fact we don't have control.
Now, if I may put my tinfoil hat on, I might suggest that we might look towards Russia for *some* (not all), of this.
When people go down to the supermarket to pick up some cheese or buy some socks they just see the object in front of them. This is called product fetishisation. It is when you are blind to the enormous global supply chains and infrastructures that must be in place for those products to exist. In reality the product is like an iceberg: the visible tangiable objects is just 10% peeking out of the water. Thr people focusing on boats or the individual migrant landing on the shore is a victim to context blindness. It is a fetishisation of the migrant. Treating a problem with global vectors as if it is a local issue is a loser' game. Context blindness leave people prone to solutions that seem common sense but are in fact complicated. Thinking physical borders work in the 21st century... looking out the window and being assured the world is flat because that is what.your eyes are telling you. 🤷
I agree with much of that, but firstly, it does not invalidate my point: the boats are a *symbol*. That might be unwise, or even stupid, but it's the case.
Secondly, borders can 'work', if a country wants them to. Making them work might become nasty, though. It is much easier to make them 'work' in a country like the UK.
Trouble is that Rwanda has also become a symbolic fetish object. A couple of plane loads and people won't want to take the risk, yada yada. Which seems unlikely, given that the Home Office is now offering people a few grand to go there voluntarily.
Given that the project only really started to try and shore up BoJo's collapsing support, it's not surprising that it's rubbish. What is surprising is that Rishi has embraced it, much like Colonel Nicholson embraced the Bridge on the River Kwai.
(And as others have said before, the better answers involve a combination of better internal ID checks for work and suchlike, serious consequences for employers of illegal workers and some acceptance that the number of desperate people the UK should help is greater than zero. But all that inconveniences us, so it won't happen.)
Rwanda was a great policy for a mid-term government looking to change the conversation. It is much less so for an immensely unpopular one just months from an election. There will almost certainly be some flights there before we go to the polls but there will definitely be a lot more arrivals on small boats, so the balance of deportations to incomings will be negative. There is now no time to demonstrate any deterrence value to the scheme. Politically, it has failed.
Assuming of course, that nothing goes wrong in Rwanda.
Given the organisational skills of these idiots, they'll put them on a Boeing plane which explodes on the runway due to a leaking fuel tank.
More likely run out of fuel cos someone at the UK end was made to use Imperial gallons rather than litres, and muddled the conversion.
Mr. Password, while I agree on the difficulty (on an emotional level) of the UK-EU relationship I think it has nothing to do with empire, which is something pro-EU types might like to see as it's easier to condemn than to engage with, unlike what I'd consider the real cause. Well, causes.
The lessons from WWII for continental Europe and the UK were diametrically opposed. For us, it was that defiant resistance would see us through. For them, it was that every institution on a national level had failed so integration to make conflict impossible made sense.
In addition, UK politicians always portrayed themselves as standing up to the EU, only to then sign away powers, vetos, and renege upon referendum promises. They take an adversarial stance in words but then a collaborative approach in action, and wonder why people get (got) annoyed. The contempt for the electorate in refusing to hold a referendum on Lisbon was rancid (although Clegg's stated desire for a 'real' referendum on membership instead was darkly comic). Collectively, the political class had a pro-EU centre ground, but this was far from common ground with the electorate.
A mistake that was made then and may be made again by pro-EU types was a failure to engage on an emotional, cultural level with the electorate (although even the objective economic angle might've worked to keep us in had the campaign not been astonishingly inept). In the future, I anticipate a drive for us to rejoin. This will most likely then see far more integration in a bid to try and prevent us ever leaving again by increasing the amount of pain involved. A more sensible approach would be to try and actually make the case for the EU on both an economic level (which should be easy, but they ballsed it up last time) and in terms of identity. That will be far better in the long term for a stable political situation.
The alternative is we stay out and things gradually calm down and we end up with a more settled, external but friendly relationship. Which is fine.
The worst, whether in or out, is having constant arguments and bitterness on both sides (both UK to EU, and internally within the UK.
Oh, and for anyone wondering, uninstalling and reinstalling WPS Office appears to have mended its perverse desire for me to sign in to edit document using it.
The numbers we receive on small boats are indeed trivial compared to those we allow for willingly. I agree with @TOPPING that the key difference is control.
But the reality is that our lords and masters have once again lost control by absurdly lax rules on dependents, by failing to police student overstayers and by turning a blind eye to EU citizens claiming that they were here before the cut off date ( something we can’t really check because we never monitored that either).
Sunak is trying hard to distract people from the much broader lack of control. It is not working.
Mr. Ghedebrav, still going well, next session is session 21, I think. At the start of 19 I had the players come up with locations in the world (island) map I'd made, so I'm going to start working those into personal/side-quests. Also got various plans, though vague because I don't want to do endless work only for them to go elsewhere.
Lots of excellent pre-made maps ready to go, and I've got an outline for drawing up a lich's former mountain castle lair.
Liking it a lot, and last time was especially fun as combats tend to be a little on the easy side and they had a rough time for once. No deaths, but lots of people got KO'd.
Starting a Pathfinder campaign with session zero at the end of the month, as a player. Going for a lizardfolk cleric of Sarenrae so I can focus on healing.
Is your new campaign as DM or player, and is it homebrewed or a module?
21 sessions is very good going; glad to hear it’s doing well. It’s good to challenge players with occasional really tough (or puzzling) encounter.
I’m playing Pathfinder as well (2nd edition); a Tengu sorcerer in the Fist of the Ruby Phoenix module - lots of high-level fun. In many ways it’s a better game than 5e, though I can’t imagine wanting to run a game myself.
My new game is all homebrew and still in the setting my previous games were in - but I’m moving it to the biggest city on the planet, which has a sort of early-modern feel and playing it as I say to be quiet neo-noir with a strong dash of horror. Its a smaller group (I previously had two groups with ten characters to keep track of, all at level 8), so four characters at level one, which will mean a lot less bookkeeping, plus these players are all the most committed.
I’ve learnt that I really enjoy worldbuilding cities and letting players lean strongly into the roleplay side (albeit leavened with challenging combats - and I’m adapting the ‘gritty realism’ rules from the DMG for this as well).
My main takeaway - I broadly agree that this is about a sense of control and sovereignty rather than immigration per se (I’m not sure I agree with your conclusion that the country ‘likes’ immigration - it implies a single overarching view that loses too much nuance and contradiction in our collective view).
But if it is about a sense of control and agency it is, once again, godawful politics from the Tories. There are many aspects of the immigration agenda that we could have almost complete sovereignty and control over. Numbers from UKR and HK for example. Dependents from Nigeria as another.
Why hang your control and sovereignty hat on this particular hook, which is tiny and inconsequential but out of reach and keeps visibly falling off the wall so your hat ends up trampled on the floor?
Which leads me to think it’s even more facile politics; it’s actually just about which part of the complex immigration agenda can most easily be summarised by a pithy three word slogan. That’s the depth of this government’s thinking and vision. Does it fit on a lectern?
Don't disagree but perhaps they thought it would be a quick win. I mean how difficult can it be to stop some rickety boats off your own coast.
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
Paid for by…?
Fictional public spending cuts the Tories know they cannot deliver.
The council tax cuts in particular seem truly ludicrous. As councils go bankrupt and major percentage increases in tax take are needed simply to bail them out, the government talking about cutting tax rates seems even more fictional than normal.
That’s not to say the rest of it seems sensible, but that part stands out to me as acutely nonsensical, and visibly so even to an only slightly engaged electorate.
I fear one council after another going bankrupt and into special measures is going to be the heartbeat of this summer. It will reinforce the message that everything is broken and result in a feeling of despair that may drive the Tories lower yet. It is obvious why Sunak has decided to go long. It is a lot less obvious that it is going to do him or the Tories any good.
The Tories are all about divide and rule - it's howa corrupt oligarchy that has nothing in common with most of the population and is actively undermining their interests sustains itself in office. Hating on foreigners is a core plank of that strategy, Stop the Boats the latest iteration.
I think that’s true. The people who bankroll the Tory Party don’t really care about immigration, they just knew it was a useful lever to pull to get us out of the EU. They created the hysteria with their newspapers and fed it and nurtured it in order to ultimately remove us from a supranational organisation that wasn’t afraid to curtail their power.
I was in a McDonalds yesterday and the number of Asian males shuttling in and out, picking up orders for delivery, was striking. Here in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, where we’ve a lot of warehouses and logistics and stuff cos we’re where the A1 and M62 cross, the rise since Brexit of non-white faces in the streets and supermarkets is extremely noticeable. Whereas before immigrants were generally white Europeans. Poles, etc.
I welcome it, it’s about time we caught up with the diversity of Leeds, for example. But it isn’t what most Brexit voters round here anticipated as a result of their Leave vote.
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
Our society has decided that we all need the ability to click on our phone and have anything we like delivered quickly. That means we need an army of workers doing shitty jobs. So we want people delivering McDonalds but “I’m not getting a job delivering McDonalds”. So we have migrants but “how do we stop all these foreigners coming here and delivering my McDonalds”
We can’t blame Covid for making people stupid. Many people pre-date Covid in that regard
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
That's not quite true. They didn't want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing - for minimum wage. If you pay enough, you can get people to do almost anything. The issue we have is that lots of the worst paid jobs are also the most unpleasant. The correct solution is no immigration, and the market will fix it so that essential stuff happens, and the unimportant stuff doesn't - laws of supply and demand and all that. It will mean massive wage boosts for people doing the unpleasant but necessary jobs, and counterbalancing effective wage cuts (probably via inflation) for those doing cushy and pointless things (e.g. most HR roles).
As I keep saying, the current effectively unlimited immigration idea is a Ponzi scheme, we can't keep importing cheap labour to hold wages down indefinitely (we will eventually run out of room, if nothing else!). The adjustment at the end of this is going to be spectacular and painful, but we really should get it over with.
I can give you various examples of companies paying well over minimum wage and living wage and not finding any takers. Significant issues being that some of the jobs are in places where people don't live. This is where Bart says build more homes - and he has a point. But "stop migration" doesn't suddenly mean that unemployed people in Widnes can take migrant jobs working in food factories in Wisbech.
Lets say that we build stacks of new houses in Wizzy and that area where demand for labour at any price is high. Problem is that the houses are unaffordable at the wages paid - even higher than minimum.
So we either build council homes - which we don't want - or we accept another round of 40% price rises on food - which we don't want. Or we enjoy migrant labour as the cheapest quickest simplest solution to outr massive structural economic challenges...
Oh, and for anyone wondering, uninstalling and reinstalling WPS Office appears to have mended its perverse desire for me to sign in to edit document using it.
If you used the quote button, PBers could press "show previous quotes" to see the context of your response and follow the debate, whether on some obscure software package or your previous post on Europe. We get that not using the quote button is "your thing" but please let it drop.
My main takeaway - I broadly agree that this is about a sense of control and sovereignty rather than immigration per se (I’m not sure I agree with your conclusion that the country ‘likes’ immigration - it implies a single overarching view that loses too much nuance and contradiction in our collective view).
But if it is about a sense of control and agency it is, once again, godawful politics from the Tories. There are many aspects of the immigration agenda that we could have almost complete sovereignty and control over. Numbers from UKR and HK for example. Dependents from Nigeria as another.
Why hang your control and sovereignty hat on this particular hook, which is tiny and inconsequential but out of reach and keeps visibly falling off the wall so your hat ends up trampled on the floor?
Which leads me to think it’s even more facile politics; it’s actually just about which part of the complex immigration agenda can most easily be summarised by a pithy three word slogan. That’s the depth of this government’s thinking and vision. Does it fit on a lectern?
Don't disagree but perhaps they thought it would be a quick win. I mean how difficult can it be to stop some rickety boats off your own coast.
Ha! True. Quick and cheap probably, without harming uni funding or going against public sentiment that we should be the world’s PCSO on UKR and HK.
The Tories are all about divide and rule - it's howa corrupt oligarchy that has nothing in common with most of the population and is actively undermining their interests sustains itself in office. Hating on foreigners is a core plank of that strategy, Stop the Boats the latest iteration.
I think that’s true. The people who bankroll the Tory Party don’t really care about immigration, they just knew it was a useful lever to pull to get us out of the EU. They created the hysteria with their newspapers and fed it and nurtured it in order to ultimately remove us from a supranational organisation that wasn’t afraid to curtail their power.
I was in a McDonalds yesterday and the number of Asian males shuttling in and out, picking up orders for delivery, was striking. Here in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, where we’ve a lot of warehouses and logistics and stuff cos we’re where the A1 and M62 cross, the rise since Brexit of non-white faces in the streets and supermarkets is extremely noticeable. Whereas before immigrants were generally white Europeans. Poles, etc.
I welcome it, it’s about time we caught up with the diversity of Leeds, for example. But it isn’t what most Brexit voters round here anticipated as a result of their Leave vote.
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
Our society has decided that we all need the ability to click on our phone and have anything we like delivered quickly. That means we need an army of workers doing shitty jobs. So we want people delivering McDonalds but “I’m not getting a job delivering McDonalds”. So we have migrants but “how do we stop all these foreigners coming here and delivering my McDonalds”
We can’t blame Covid for making people stupid. Many people pre-date Covid in that regard
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
That's not quite true. They didn't want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing - for minimum wage. If you pay enough, you can get people to do almost anything. The issue we have is that lots of the worst paid jobs are also the most unpleasant. The correct solution is no immigration, and the market will fix it so that essential stuff happens, and the unimportant stuff doesn't - laws of supply and demand and all that. It will mean massive wage boosts for people doing the unpleasant but necessary jobs, and counterbalancing effective wage cuts (probably via inflation) for those doing cushy and pointless things (e.g. most HR roles).
As I keep saying, the current effectively unlimited immigration idea is a Ponzi scheme, we can't keep importing cheap labour to hold wages down indefinitely (we will eventually run out of room, if nothing else!). The adjustment at the end of this is going to be spectacular and painful, but we really should get it over with.
I can give you various examples of companies paying well over minimum wage and living wage and not finding any takers. Significant issues being that some of the jobs are in places where people don't live. This is where Bart says build more homes - and he has a point. But "stop migration" doesn't suddenly mean that unemployed people in Widnes can take migrant jobs working in food factories in Wisbech.
Lets say that we build stacks of new houses in Wizzy and that area where demand for labour at any price is high. Problem is that the houses are unaffordable at the wages paid - even higher than minimum.
So we either build council homes - which we don't want - or we accept another round of 40% price rises on food - which we don't want. Or we enjoy migrant labour as the cheapest quickest simplest solution to outr massive structural economic challenges...
The problem of jobs and people being in different places in made worse by home ownership. It has been suggested that one factor in Germany's industrial success is a mobile workforce mostly in rented accommodation.
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
Mr. Ghedebrav, cheers. One highlight was a multi-session siege defence, which I could use some historical knowledge for (defending against an initial assault, then a night raid to burn enemy siege engines while the other half of the party had to deal with a tunnelling attempt, then a final assault that was nice and close).
Are you playing with legacy or remastered rules?
From what I can tell (mostly via Archives of Nethys) level progression seems far better handled than 5e. I'm acutely aware that getting to level 12 and beyond might make things tough to try and balance. And DnD's challenge rating system is something I realised was broken way back in session 2. On the plus side, that meant when I screwed up and made an early 'tough' fight way too hard the party ended up managing to win. If I'd done that with Pathfinder's more tightly constructed encounters they probably would've been TPK'ed in session 5.
World-building's a lot of fun. Most of the action in mine is in a single city, but they've started going further afield on the island (just visited three archmage towers).
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
Paid for by…?
Fictional public spending cuts the Tories know they cannot deliver.
The council tax cuts in particular seem truly ludicrous. As councils go bankrupt and major percentage increases in tax take are needed simply to bail them out, the government talking about cutting tax rates seems even more fictional than normal.
That’s not to say the rest of it seems sensible, but that part stands out to me as acutely nonsensical, and visibly so even to an only slightly engaged electorate.
I fear one council after another going bankrupt and into special measures is going to be the heartbeat of this summer. It will reinforce the message that everything is broken and result in a feeling of despair that may drive the Tories lower yet. It is obvious why Sunak has decided to go long. It is a lot less obvious that it is going to do him or the Tories any good.
The school food issue we were discussing yesterday is (so to speak) a taster (albeit compounded by multople levels of contractors with the ensuing profit taking).
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
The pitch: 1. Here is a Christmas present. Free Money! 2. The voters that matter don't care about their down being a broken shabby shithole. They just want Free Money 3. You have to vote Tory or Starmer the Grinch will take your Free Money
One teeny tiny problem. Nothing works in this country and people want money spent on fixing it. At a bar in Manchester on Tuesday night. Socialising with other exhibitors from a trade show. Multiple conversations where the person raised how hard it was to get to Manchester as the trains are broken, and everything is broken, and what a mess. Unprompted. So I probe. And both were Tory voters. Well, ex Tory voters.
If that really is the Sunak master plan, Starmer will simply laugh in his face across the dispatch box. BTW, when in September? Are we having the "autumn" statement at the very beginning of September in those few weeks before conference season?
Sunak won't make it that far. Ask yourself what PM Rehman Chisti will do, that is the valid question...
The government now increasing the salary threshold to £37k for economic migrants will probably start to see immigration numbers start to fall. As will an end to bringing family members over.
Ending free movement for EEA migrants also needed tighter restrictions on all migrants to be effective in getting numbers down
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
No, because that was (roughly) Dave's Deal. Fully involved in the discussions, able to opt out of anything proposed in the future. That, ultimately, didn't fly.
The menu of options (more access for more alignment) broadly is what it is. Barnier's staircase and all that. The hope that there was some other deal under the counter, more of what we wanted for less of what we didn't want, has turned out to be a mirage. That was always pretty likely.
Dave's deal meant staying in the EU and we voted to leave. But if the government had decided to go for EEA membership, that would have got through Parliament and been accepted by a majority of voters. However, it would have irrevocably split what was then the Conservative party. Ironically, that pretty much ended up happening anyway.
EEA meant FOM so was a non-starter . Of course in hindsight now some Leave voters might accept that as they’ve seen the overall migration figures rocket since leaving.
I do think there is room for much closer EU links if Labour take over.
EEA was a non-starter because it would have split the Conservative party. Some Leave voters would have accepted it from the get-go. Ask Richard Tyndall and Rochdale Pioneers - and Daniel Hannan! The 48% who voted Remain were entirely removed from the decision equation immediately. That was a huge mistake.
The expression at the time was "suck it up".
The government is to this day acting as though it enjoyed the support of an outright majority of the electorate (see, for example, Gove's nasty little scheme last week).
The only correction for them is utter humiliation at the next election.
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
The pitch: 1. Here is a Christmas present. Free Money! 2. The voters that matter don't care about their down being a broken shabby shithole. They just want Free Money 3. You have to vote Tory or Starmer the Grinch will take your Free Money
One teeny tiny problem. Nothing works in this country and people want money spent on fixing it. At a bar in Manchester on Tuesday night. Socialising with other exhibitors from a trade show. Multiple conversations where the person raised how hard it was to get to Manchester as the trains are broken, and everything is broken, and what a mess. Unprompted. So I probe. And both were Tory voters. Well, ex Tory voters.
If that really is the Sunak master plan, Starmer will simply laugh in his face across the dispatch box. BTW, when in September? Are we having the "autumn" statement at the very beginning of September in those few weeks before conference season?
Sunak won't make it that far. Ask yourself what PM Rehman Chisti will do, that is the valid question...
It would have to be a statement on Tues 3rd Sept in order to allow the much mooted 10th October GE.
The numbers we receive on small boats are indeed trivial compared to those we allow for willingly. I agree with @TOPPING that the key difference is control.
But the reality is that our lords and masters have once again lost control by absurdly lax rules on dependents, by failing to police student overstayers and by turning a blind eye to EU citizens claiming that they were here before the cut off date ( something we can’t really check because we never monitored that either).
Sunak is trying hard to distract people from the much broader lack of control. It is not working.
If you look at the reported cases that have made the courts you will see that a majority appear to have started their time here as students. And of course the number of students has increased substantially.
This may reflect the type of case that gets to court but I think to claim that overstayers are a myth on the basis of one dodgy statistic challenging another equally dodgy one is a bit of a stretch.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
"... bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson"
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
My view, and it is my own cynical opinion piece, is Johnson got Ukraine right because it was the last chance saloon for saving his skin. I suppose whatever the justification, the call was correct. Nonetheless now the party is over his visits to Kyiv are less frequent, and what was he doing meeting Madura last month?
On the home front you will give me Kate Bingham and I will counter with Dido Harding.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
I'm not sure that Britain will ever find a relationship with the EU that is stable and enduring until it has come to terms with its post-Imperial place in the world.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I think memories of Empire are very niche and largely confined to small sections of the Conservative party and other parts of the right. For me, memories of WW2 and the perception of Britain standing alone were a much more powerful driver of Brexit. Growing up, they were everywhere for my generation - our parents hid in shelters ands/or were evacuated, our grandfathers fought and our grandmothers worked on the home front, there were bomb sites everywhere. We had films, TV programmes, comics and books all about it and so on. It was embedded in our folk memory - and understandably so. Whether we stood alone or not is immaterial, it seemed as if we did - and if we did it once, why not again?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
While memories of Empire are rapidly fading, that sense of British (English?) exceptionalism is strong. We still want the accoutrements of world power, when the reality is that we are a continental power now. Our defence and foreign policy needs to come into line with reality.
Solid from TOPPING. Yes, on the Boats, it's not about the (tiny) numbers it's the impressionistic sense of our Island Nation being under attack from the sea. This triggers deep primeval fears.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
No, because that was (roughly) Dave's Deal. Fully involved in the discussions, able to opt out of anything proposed in the future. That, ultimately, didn't fly.
The menu of options (more access for more alignment) broadly is what it is. Barnier's staircase and all that. The hope that there was some other deal under the counter, more of what we wanted for less of what we didn't want, has turned out to be a mirage. That was always pretty likely.
Dave's deal meant staying in the EU and we voted to leave. But if the government had decided to go for EEA membership, that would have got through Parliament and been accepted by a majority of voters. However, it would have irrevocably split what was then the Conservative party. Ironically, that pretty much ended up happening anyway.
It would have seen the Brexit Party overtake the Tories, which is what happened until Boris became Conservative leader.
Now he has been removed even if Brexit has now been done and FOM ended, Reform are back to UKIP 2015 levels with Yougov and Goodwin
The government now increasing the salary threshold to £37k for economic migrants will probably start to see immigration numbers start to fall. As will an end to bringing family members over.
Ending free movement for EEA migrants also needed tighter restrictions on all migrants to be effective in getting numbers down
Trouble with that argument is that, for all the noise, the UK needs immigrants to do the low paid jobs.
Hunt's last budget only added up at all by increasing the net migration numbers.
Mr. Ghedebrav, cheers. One highlight was a multi-session siege defence, which I could use some historical knowledge for (defending against an initial assault, then a night raid to burn enemy siege engines while the other half of the party had to deal with a tunnelling attempt, then a final assault that was nice and close).
Are you playing with legacy or remastered rules?
From what I can tell (mostly via Archives of Nethys) level progression seems far better handled than 5e. I'm acutely aware that getting to level 12 and beyond might make things tough to try and balance. And DnD's challenge rating system is something I realised was broken way back in session 2. On the plus side, that meant when I screwed up and made an early 'tough' fight way too hard the party ended up managing to win. If I'd done that with Pathfinder's more tightly constructed encounters they probably would've been TPK'ed in session 5.
World-building's a lot of fun. Most of the action in mine is in a single city, but they've started going further afield on the island (just visited three archmage towers).
I’m using the base 5e rules, more or less - but with a fair few house rules on top (including a fair few pinched from Pathfinder - I like to have degrees of success/failure on checks, for example).
5e definitely falls apart at mid-higher levels, as spellcasters (on the whole) become significantly more powerful than non-spellcasters. Martial characters on the whole are much better designed in Pathfinder.
Challenge rating is indeed a mess, but encounter building is one the key crafts of the DM and I’ve found that it has just taken me time and experience to get the hang of it. Kobold Fight Club is a great resource for this btw - hardly foolproof but makes for a good starting point.
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
The pitch: 1. Here is a Christmas present. Free Money! 2. The voters that matter don't care about their down being a broken shabby shithole. They just want Free Money 3. You have to vote Tory or Starmer the Grinch will take your Free Money
One teeny tiny problem. Nothing works in this country and people want money spent on fixing it. At a bar in Manchester on Tuesday night. Socialising with other exhibitors from a trade show. Multiple conversations where the person raised how hard it was to get to Manchester as the trains are broken, and everything is broken, and what a mess. Unprompted. So I probe. And both were Tory voters. Well, ex Tory voters.
If that really is the Sunak master plan, Starmer will simply laugh in his face across the dispatch box. BTW, when in September? Are we having the "autumn" statement at the very beginning of September in those few weeks before conference season?
Sunak won't make it that far. Ask yourself what PM Rehman Chisti will do, that is the valid question...
It would have to be a statement on Tues 3rd Sept in order to allow the much mooted 10th October GE.
I'm betting on Jan 2025 personally.
Can't really call it the autumn statement. How about "Emergency Budget" where the emergency is the imminent extinction of the Conservative Party.
The Tories are all about divide and rule - it's howa corrupt oligarchy that has nothing in common with most of the population and is actively undermining their interests sustains itself in office. Hating on foreigners is a core plank of that strategy, Stop the Boats the latest iteration.
I think that’s true. The people who bankroll the Tory Party don’t really care about immigration, they just knew it was a useful lever to pull to get us out of the EU. They created the hysteria with their newspapers and fed it and nurtured it in order to ultimately remove us from a supranational organisation that wasn’t afraid to curtail their power.
I was in a McDonalds yesterday and the number of Asian males shuttling in and out, picking up orders for delivery, was striking. Here in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, where we’ve a lot of warehouses and logistics and stuff cos we’re where the A1 and M62 cross, the rise since Brexit of non-white faces in the streets and supermarkets is extremely noticeable. Whereas before immigrants were generally white Europeans. Poles, etc.
I welcome it, it’s about time we caught up with the diversity of Leeds, for example. But it isn’t what most Brexit voters round here anticipated as a result of their Leave vote.
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
Our society has decided that we all need the ability to click on our phone and have anything we like delivered quickly. That means we need an army of workers doing shitty jobs. So we want people delivering McDonalds but “I’m not getting a job delivering McDonalds”. So we have migrants but “how do we stop all these foreigners coming here and delivering my McDonalds”
We can’t blame Covid for making people stupid. Many people pre-date Covid in that regard
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
That's not quite true. They didn't want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing - for minimum wage. If you pay enough, you can get people to do almost anything. The issue we have is that lots of the worst paid jobs are also the most unpleasant. The correct solution is no immigration, and the market will fix it so that essential stuff happens, and the unimportant stuff doesn't - laws of supply and demand and all that. It will mean massive wage boosts for people doing the unpleasant but necessary jobs, and counterbalancing effective wage cuts (probably via inflation) for those doing cushy and pointless things (e.g. most HR roles).
As I keep saying, the current effectively unlimited immigration idea is a Ponzi scheme, we can't keep importing cheap labour to hold wages down indefinitely (we will eventually run out of room, if nothing else!). The adjustment at the end of this is going to be spectacular and painful, but we really should get it over with.
It’s also untrue that the locals “don’t want to do the jobs”
IIRC, 80%+ of people working in caring for the elderly are U.K. residents, for example.
Immigration is (and was) just topping up the workforce.
My main takeaway - I broadly agree that this is about a sense of control and sovereignty rather than immigration per se (I’m not sure I agree with your conclusion that the country ‘likes’ immigration - it implies a single overarching view that loses too much nuance and contradiction in our collective view).
But if it is about a sense of control and agency it is, once again, godawful politics from the Tories. There are many aspects of the immigration agenda that we could have almost complete sovereignty and control over. Numbers from UKR and HK for example. Dependents from Nigeria as another.
Why hang your control and sovereignty hat on this particular hook, which is tiny and inconsequential but out of reach and keeps visibly falling off the wall so your hat ends up trampled on the floor?
Which leads me to think it’s even more facile politics; it’s actually just about which part of the complex immigration agenda can most easily be summarised by a pithy three word slogan. That’s the depth of this government’s thinking and vision. Does it fit on a lectern?
Don't disagree but perhaps they thought it would be a quick win. I mean how difficult can it be to stop some rickety boats off your own coast.
Ha! True. Quick and cheap probably, without harming uni funding or going against public sentiment that we should be the world’s PCSO on UKR and HK.
You could fix the problem in a week.
Hire the Libyan Coastguard. They have to pay head money to the U.K. Treasury, in return.
The Tories are all about divide and rule - it's howa corrupt oligarchy that has nothing in common with most of the population and is actively undermining their interests sustains itself in office. Hating on foreigners is a core plank of that strategy, Stop the Boats the latest iteration.
I think that’s true. The people who bankroll the Tory Party don’t really care about immigration, they just knew it was a useful lever to pull to get us out of the EU. They created the hysteria with their newspapers and fed it and nurtured it in order to ultimately remove us from a supranational organisation that wasn’t afraid to curtail their power.
I was in a McDonalds yesterday and the number of Asian males shuttling in and out, picking up orders for delivery, was striking. Here in Yvette Cooper’s constituency, where we’ve a lot of warehouses and logistics and stuff cos we’re where the A1 and M62 cross, the rise since Brexit of non-white faces in the streets and supermarkets is extremely noticeable. Whereas before immigrants were generally white Europeans. Poles, etc.
I welcome it, it’s about time we caught up with the diversity of Leeds, for example. But it isn’t what most Brexit voters round here anticipated as a result of their Leave vote.
Indeed. Though as I have pointed out endlessly the people who wanted the foreign to go home didn’t actually want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing. That’s why we need migration.
Our society has decided that we all need the ability to click on our phone and have anything we like delivered quickly. That means we need an army of workers doing shitty jobs. So we want people delivering McDonalds but “I’m not getting a job delivering McDonalds”. So we have migrants but “how do we stop all these foreigners coming here and delivering my McDonalds”
We can’t blame Covid for making people stupid. Many people pre-date Covid in that regard
This isn't something unique to Britain.
Britain is fairly average now for percentage of immigrants in the developed world, with about 14% of us born abroad. Canada, Australia, Switzerland are notably higher, as are Saudi and the UAE. We see this politically too, with migration being the hot topic in nearly all our countries. The exceptions are places like South Korea and Japan where the population pyramid is dangerously upside down.
In a globalised world people want to move around, seeking out economic and social opportunity. There are many on here who have benefited from living abroad including posters who still do, and many more have friends or family from abroad. My own ancestors migrated to Australia in the 19th Century and back to England in the 1930's for example.
Why should we deny such opportunity to others?
The failure of migration policy is not so much the numbers but rather the failure to plan for such arrivals, and not just the PB obsession with housing, but also with programmes of integration and cultural assimilation.
Canada and Australia have far more room for more migrants than we do and both have amongst the lowest population density in the world. Doesn't stop Australians voting for rightwing leaders like Abbott from time to time to 'stop the boats' too though
The government now increasing the salary threshold to £37k for economic migrants will probably start to see immigration numbers start to fall. As will an end to bringing family members over.
Ending free movement for EEA migrants also needed tighter restrictions on all migrants to be effective in getting numbers down
The other side of that coin is that people who work in industries such as entertainment are finding it increasingly difficult to find work in the EU, due to increased paperwork, and no opportunities in UK. Arguably, of course, they could work in different industries! ‘Fortress UK’ isn’t, to many of us, an attractive prospect.
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
That’s as pithy an outline of the Sunak leadership as I’ve read - thanks.
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
The pitch: 1. Here is a Christmas present. Free Money! 2. The voters that matter don't care about their down being a broken shabby shithole. They just want Free Money 3. You have to vote Tory or Starmer the Grinch will take your Free Money
One teeny tiny problem. Nothing works in this country and people want money spent on fixing it. At a bar in Manchester on Tuesday night. Socialising with other exhibitors from a trade show. Multiple conversations where the person raised how hard it was to get to Manchester as the trains are broken, and everything is broken, and what a mess. Unprompted. So I probe. And both were Tory voters. Well, ex Tory voters.
If that really is the Sunak master plan, Starmer will simply laugh in his face across the dispatch box. BTW, when in September? Are we having the "autumn" statement at the very beginning of September in those few weeks before conference season?
Sunak won't make it that far. Ask yourself what PM Rehman Chisti will do, that is the valid question...
It would have to be a statement on Tues 3rd Sept in order to allow the much mooted 10th October GE.
I'm betting on Jan 2025 personally.
Can't really call it the autumn statement. How about "Emergency Budget" where the emergency is the imminent extinction of the Conservative Party.
It’s a reminder, unfortunately, that this government still has the tools to damage the country further before they finally go.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
No, because that was (roughly) Dave's Deal. Fully involved in the discussions, able to opt out of anything proposed in the future. That, ultimately, didn't fly.
The menu of options (more access for more alignment) broadly is what it is. Barnier's staircase and all that. The hope that there was some other deal under the counter, more of what we wanted for less of what we didn't want, has turned out to be a mirage. That was always pretty likely.
Dave's deal meant staying in the EU and we voted to leave. But if the government had decided to go for EEA membership, that would have got through Parliament and been accepted by a majority of voters. However, it would have irrevocably split what was then the Conservative party. Ironically, that pretty much ended up happening anyway.
EEA meant FOM so was a non-starter . Of course in hindsight now some Leave voters might accept that as they’ve seen the overall migration figures rocket since leaving.
I do think there is room for much closer EU links if Labour take over.
There were plenty of Leave advocates in favour of the EEA option from well before Nrexit. Unfortunately we were not in that tiny minotity of people who are Tory MPs and so had no influence over the post-Brexit decisions.
I wouldn't mind Penny ousting Rishi, but will she even keep her seat at the next election?
Quite possibly not, and it could be a Portillo moment.
The moment the Penny dropped for the Tories.
Mordaunt seems more popular with the public than Portillo was then as the icon and heir apparent of the Thatcherite right.
Hunt losing his seat to the LDs as Chancellor would be more of a Portillo moment than Mordaunt.
Can't see Mordaunt becoming PM though, Tory MPs put her third last year behind Sunak and Truss. Even though she is the only alternative to Sunak in the Commons who might give the Tories even the slightest boost in the polls
The government now increasing the salary threshold to £37k for economic migrants will probably start to see immigration numbers start to fall. As will an end to bringing family members over.
Ending free movement for EEA migrants also needed tighter restrictions on all migrants to be effective in getting numbers down
Trouble with that argument is that, for all the noise, the UK needs immigrants to do the low paid jobs.
Hunt's last budget only added up at all by increasing the net migration numbers.
There are several million now of working age and not working who could do more of the low paid jobs.
Hunt is aiming to use UC to help get them back into the workforce
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
That’s as pithy an outline of the Sunak leadership as I’ve read - thanks.
Agreed; what was particularly notable about Blair’s Premiership was the difference between before and after Iraq.
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
"... bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson"
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
My view, and it is my own cynical opinion piece, is Johnson got Ukraine right because it was the last chance saloon for saving his skin. I suppose whatever the justification, the call was correct. Nonetheless now the party is over his visits to Kyiv are less frequent, and what was he doing meeting Madura last month?
On the home front you will give me Kate Bingham and I will counter with Dido Harding.
He was, and remains awful.
Any goodwill Bozo had re Ukraine he decided to trash by supporting Trump . A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin .
I wouldn't mind Penny ousting Rishi, but will she even keep her seat at the next election?
Quite possibly not, and it could be a Portillo moment.
The moment the Penny dropped for the Tories.
Mordaunt seems more popular with the public than Portillo was then as the icon and heir apparent of the Thatcherite right.
Hunt losing his seat to the LDs as Chancellor would be more of a Portillo moment than Mordaunt.
Can't see Mordaunt becoming PM though, Tory MPs put her third last year behind Sunak and Truss. Even though she is the only alternative to Sunak in the Commons who might give the Tories even the slightest boost in the polls
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
No, because that was (roughly) Dave's Deal. Fully involved in the discussions, able to opt out of anything proposed in the future. That, ultimately, didn't fly.
The menu of options (more access for more alignment) broadly is what it is. Barnier's staircase and all that. The hope that there was some other deal under the counter, more of what we wanted for less of what we didn't want, has turned out to be a mirage. That was always pretty likely.
Dave's deal meant staying in the EU and we voted to leave. But if the government had decided to go for EEA membership, that would have got through Parliament and been accepted by a majority of voters. However, it would have irrevocably split what was then the Conservative party. Ironically, that pretty much ended up happening anyway.
EEA meant FOM so was a non-starter . Of course in hindsight now some Leave voters might accept that as they’ve seen the overall migration figures rocket since leaving.
I do think there is room for much closer EU links if Labour take over.
There were plenty of Leave advocates in favour of the EEA option from well before Nrexit. Unfortunately we were not in that tiny minotity of people who are Tory MPs and so had no influence over the post-Brexit decisions.
The problem there was most Leavers wanted to end FOM too and most Remainers wanted to stop Brexit and stay in the EU with FOM.
The Leavers like you who wanted to leave the EU and keep FOM and stay in the single market ended up squeezed in the middle
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
Interesting perspective. I remember Rawnsley writing about post-Iraq Blair that, having once said the thing he hates most is losing, he was acting like a man with nothing to lose.
I wouldn't mind Penny ousting Rishi, but will she even keep her seat at the next election?
Quite possibly not, and it could be a Portillo moment.
The moment the Penny dropped for the Tories.
Mordaunt seems more popular with the public than Portillo was then as the icon and heir apparent of the Thatcherite right.
Hunt losing his seat to the LDs as Chancellor would be more of a Portillo moment than Mordaunt.
Can't see Mordaunt becoming PM though, Tory MPs put her third last year behind Sunak and Truss. Even though she is the only alternative to Sunak in the Commons who might give the Tories even the slightest boost in the polls
Who’s your insider tip for next leader?
Steve Barclay, Sunak to stay PM and Tory leader until the general election and then resign after likely defeat
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
Sweeties always sound nice. But how exactly are they planning on paying for this? They won't cut spending (despite a good deal of it being pretty wasteful), and it's going to be tricky to find tax rises on the required scale which no-one will notice...
The Tory strategy looks increasingly like “salting the earth” to me. And the more the electorate perceive that to be the case, the worse the party will be punished
I appalled myself recently when I realised that it is quite possible that the second best PM since Blair may well be Boris.
He did less damage (somehow) than Cameron*, and certainly was better (somehow) than Truss or Sunak. I’m just not sure where to rank him round May or Brown - difficult as I feel like the latter two are people I feel personally warmer to, whereas Spaffer revolts me.
*Cameron I see as the worst PM in my lifetime, just ahead of Thatcher and Liz ‘History’s Most Expensive Asterisk’ Truss.
I just don't see Johnson anywhere except at the bottom of the heap. I don't like Cameron, however like Blair he is characterised by starkly misjudged foreign policy, but beyond that there was competence and levity. Johnson was punctuated by such a series of egregious scandals, but more than that his time in office was all about being seen through smoke and mirrors, claiming world beating competence out of his incompetence; "I got all the big calls right" (did you, bollocks!).
However Johnson's malignancy is best borne out by the culture he brought with him and stamped on the Party and the Country. His legacy is a damaged party and "broken Britain".
David Cameron is the Conservative Prime Minister from central casting. Smooth, personable, even handsome in a certain light; Eton and Oxford; socially liberal. You could imagine him played by Hugh Grant in a hit romcom.
Leaving foreign policy to one side, Cameron's shadow cabinet spent five years preparing for government, yet gave us a health policy (Lansley's reforms) that was disowned and reversed by Cameron, a social policy, Universal Credit, whose introduction was a shambles, and which was undermined by the Chancellor, an economic policy that killed the recovery inherited from Labour and destroyed any prospect of growth, and that left debt at record levels. Local government was starved of funds. Traditional Tory values were thrown to the wolves as police and defence were cut.
Cameron was also bad at retail politics, at which he was supposed to shine. His relentlessly negative campaign style converted healthy leads over Labour into a hung parliament, almost lost Scotland and did lose Europe. (And before anyone points to 2015, that Conservative victory was due to the SNP driving Labour out of Scotland, not Cameron.)
Worst of all is Cameron's gerrymandering, tampering with the electoral system for partisan advantage. Ironically, it would probably cause Brexit and the end of Cameron's ministry.
David Cameron was our worst prime minister since Lord North.
All valid points, but when one looks at the gravitas of Cameron on the World stage today compared to the bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson and the barely sane nincompoop that is Truss, he ascends the list.
"... bumbling embarrassment that was Johnson"
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
My view, and it is my own cynical opinion piece, is Johnson got Ukraine right because it was the last chance saloon for saving his skin. I suppose whatever the justification, the call was correct. Nonetheless now the party is over his visits to Kyiv are less frequent, and what was he doing meeting Madura last month?
The appeal of Ukraine to Johnson and other tories was the chance to bask in the reflected glow of a war without any politically inconvenient British Gruz 200s landing back at Brize. All it cost Johson was other people's money which, as we all know, is his preferred type of money.
For a bit there, when the Russians discovered they couldn't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it was all very exciting for the tories. Now that the Ukrainians have also discovered that they can't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it's all gone a bit boring and the UK government is losing interest.
There are degrees of crap, though. I think most of us could have lived with a much closer relationship in which there was still an element of pooled sovereignty and we accepted the four freedoms. It's pretty certain that's where we are going to end up.
No, because that was (roughly) Dave's Deal. Fully involved in the discussions, able to opt out of anything proposed in the future. That, ultimately, didn't fly.
The menu of options (more access for more alignment) broadly is what it is. Barnier's staircase and all that. The hope that there was some other deal under the counter, more of what we wanted for less of what we didn't want, has turned out to be a mirage. That was always pretty likely.
Dave's deal meant staying in the EU and we voted to leave. But if the government had decided to go for EEA membership, that would have got through Parliament and been accepted by a majority of voters. However, it would have irrevocably split what was then the Conservative party. Ironically, that pretty much ended up happening anyway.
EEA meant FOM so was a non-starter . Of course in hindsight now some Leave voters might accept that as they’ve seen the overall migration figures rocket since leaving.
I do think there is room for much closer EU links if Labour take over.
There were plenty of Leave advocates in favour of the EEA option from well before Nrexit. Unfortunately we were not in that tiny minotity of people who are Tory MPs and so had no influence over the post-Brexit decisions.
The problem was that Tory Leave supporting MPs decided to push for the hardest of Brexits. May over compensated at being seen as a Remainer and the rest is history . People can at least see now that the UKs problems are down to our useless governments, the EU is no longer the scapegoat and there is room for closer co-operation .
Mr. 679, your retelling does neglect to mention the Labour MPs had three opportunities to back May's deal, and declined. That's thei prerogative, but when pro-EU and anti-EU MPs are voting the same way on a deal with the EU, someone's getting it wrong.
I wouldn't mind Penny ousting Rishi, but will she even keep her seat at the next election?
Quite possibly not, and it could be a Portillo moment.
The moment the Penny dropped for the Tories.
Mordaunt seems more popular with the public than Portillo was then as the icon and heir apparent of the Thatcherite right.
Hunt losing his seat to the LDs as Chancellor would be more of a Portillo moment than Mordaunt.
Can't see Mordaunt becoming PM though, Tory MPs put her third last year behind Sunak and Truss. Even though she is the only alternative to Sunak in the Commons who might give the Tories even the slightest boost in the polls
Who’s your insider tip for next leader?
Steve Barclay, Sunak to stay PM and Tory leader until the general election and then resign after likely defeat
Whilst I think there is a chance of Sunak surviving a putsch, there is one coming. Today's Penny Coronation story will only enrage the five families and the other assorted fruit cakes, loonies and closet racists in the parliamentary Conservative Party.
What can Sunak offer to buy off the letter writers?
I wouldn't mind Penny ousting Rishi, but will she even keep her seat at the next election?
Quite possibly not, and it could be a Portillo moment.
The moment the Penny dropped for the Tories.
Mordaunt seems more popular with the public than Portillo was then as the icon and heir apparent of the Thatcherite right.
Hunt losing his seat to the LDs as Chancellor would be more of a Portillo moment than Mordaunt.
Can't see Mordaunt becoming PM though, Tory MPs put her third last year behind Sunak and Truss. Even though she is the only alternative to Sunak in the Commons who might give the Tories even the slightest boost in the polls
Who’s your insider tip for next leader?
Steve Barclay, Sunak to stay PM and Tory leader until the general election and then resign after likely defeat
I wouldn’t say he’s likely (and I agree on Barclay), but I think Gove is undervalued in this market.
I wouldn't mind Penny ousting Rishi, but will she even keep her seat at the next election?
Quite possibly not, and it could be a Portillo moment.
The moment the Penny dropped for the Tories.
Mordaunt seems more popular with the public than Portillo was then as the icon and heir apparent of the Thatcherite right.
Hunt losing his seat to the LDs as Chancellor would be more of a Portillo moment than Mordaunt.
Can't see Mordaunt becoming PM though, Tory MPs put her third last year behind Sunak and Truss. Even though she is the only alternative to Sunak in the Commons who might give the Tories even the slightest boost in the polls
Who’s your insider tip for next leader?
Steve Barclay, Sunak to stay PM and Tory leader until the general election and then resign after likely defeat
Thank you for the heading @Topping. It's an interesting viewpoint and one which I hadn't considered.
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!
The numbers we receive on small boats are indeed trivial compared to those we allow for willingly. I agree with @TOPPING that the key difference is control.
But the reality is that our lords and masters have once again lost control by absurdly lax rules on dependents, by failing to police student overstayers and by turning a blind eye to EU citizens claiming that they were here before the cut off date ( something we can’t really check because we never monitored that either).
Sunak is trying hard to distract people from the much broader lack of control. It is not working.
If you look at the reported cases that have made the courts you will see that a majority appear to have started their time here as students. And of course the number of students has increased substantially.
This may reflect the type of case that gets to court but I think to claim that overstayers are a myth on the basis of one dodgy statistic challenging another equally dodgy one is a bit of a stretch.
It’s not a dodgy statistic. It’s a figure from the ONS based on extensive data collection. The ONS is the government body tasked to answer such questions. If there’s some flaw in the ONS’s methodology, please explain it.
A lot of recent British Prime Ministers seem to share one common and surprising failing. Which is a failure to realise that if you want people to follow you, they have to be persuaded to do so. It's kinda baffling that politicians would make this mistake - what with being reliant on voters voting for them at election - but it seems to be the case.
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
That’s as pithy an outline of the Sunak leadership as I’ve read - thanks.
It's a pretty good account of all those premierships.
Comments
Rishi Sunak is so scared of the voters he's running away from a May general election.
But Boris Johnson is the real Conservative coward.
My new weekly @theipaper column on 'bottler Boris' (and bottler Lee Anderson):
Calls to 'Bring Back Boris' are like the 1st cuckoo of spring, getting earlier each year.
But that's exactly what he is, a cuckoo who outgrew the Tory nest and flew.
Never forget, he VOLUNTARILY left Parliament + didn't let the voters decide his fate.
.
@LordAshcroft's latest polling is a sobering reminder of just why Tory MPs ousted Johnson as leader too.
59% of the public think the man's a liability - that's worse than Sunak and 2nd only to Truss.
Conversely if the policy doesn’t work then they are in even more trouble.
Labour could have an issue if the policy works , together with an improving economy and a drop in interest rates the Tories could see a significant improvement to their polling.
Cameron's Brexit and North African/Middle Eastern adventures place a big question mark next to his name and probably bring him down a notch or two. How about we lump Cameron, Brown and May together as the least incompetent, then Sunak, then Truss and Johnson vying for the low point in 21st Century history. Measuring the damage done by Truss in just 49 days is pertinent, but Johnson dismantled the nation for his own ends over years, surely that counts for something.
For the reasons I've stated, Cameron was bottom. And that is without taking into account foreign policy, and as OKC reminds us, Cameron also broke the criminal justice system with cuts to legal aid, prisons, the courts and police. He also wrote the dullest political memoir.
But here he is showing The Sun round Downing Street, showing what he did well. As I said, Cameron was the prime minister from central casting.
A Day in the Life of David Cameron
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9hqE5HVVQk
And how else to explain this disproportionate focus. What else is there.
https://www.ayrshire-today.co.uk/news/23791728.ayrshire-scotlands-census-shows-population-fall/
Lots of excellent pre-made maps ready to go, and I've got an outline for drawing up a lich's former mountain castle lair.
Liking it a lot, and last time was especially fun as combats tend to be a little on the easy side and they had a rough time for once. No deaths, but lots of people got KO'd.
Starting a Pathfinder campaign with session zero at the end of the month, as a player. Going for a lizardfolk cleric of Sarenrae so I can focus on healing.
Is your new campaign as DM or player, and is it homebrewed or a module?
That's not quite true. They didn't want to do the jobs the foreigners were doing - for minimum wage. If you pay enough, you can get people to do almost anything. The issue we have is that lots of the worst paid jobs are also the most unpleasant.
The correct solution is no immigration, and the market will fix it so that essential stuff happens, and the unimportant stuff doesn't - laws of supply and demand and all that. It will mean massive wage boosts for people doing the unpleasant but necessary jobs, and counterbalancing effective wage cuts (probably via inflation) for those doing cushy and pointless things (e.g. most HR roles).
As I keep saying, the current effectively unlimited immigration idea is a Ponzi scheme, we can't keep importing cheap labour to hold wages down indefinitely (we will eventually run out of room, if nothing else!). The adjustment at the end of this is going to be spectacular and painful, but we really should get it over with.
I do think there is room for much closer EU links if Labour take over.
Not that the Conservatives will be any better on that last point.
EXC via @alexwickham & me
- Tax cuts in Sept ahead of Oct / Nov election
- Early suggestions include a significant reduction in income tax, slashing stamp duty and council tax cuts that could mean those on the lowest income don’t pay
Also remember that Cameron was in a coalition during the vast majority of his time in power; that alone was a heck of an achievement. I remember many people on here back in 2010/1 going on about how it would only last a few months...
As for foreign affairs; as I pointed out below, Libya was a rather different situation to the one critics point out. And it's a bit rich coming from anyone who voted Labour in 2005, after Iraq!
Sunak’s (and any government’s) issue with making immigration a loud priority is that’s it’s a no-win:
- If you don’t manage to control it, well congratulations you’ve helped to increase the profile of a policy you’re failing at
- If you do, or if numbers drop naturally, polling history shows it very quickly falls down the list of voter concerns, and they’ll move on to other priorities
Contrast with economic measures like wage growth, or public service measures like NHS waiting lists, where success actually wins you votes.
Utterly deluded.
And how do they think the bankrupt councils will struggle on with further reductions in council tax base?
The problem may well be that failure in government is inevitable, no matter who has the job.
When it comes to world events, Johnson did excellently on Ukraine. Incidentally, so did May, over Salisbury.
Fictional public spending cuts the Tories know they cannot deliver.
Britain hasn't moved on from the period of Empire and so the EU was viewed in that context. This meant that, because we weren't the Imperial masters of the EU, we had to be the colonized victims. Until this changes Britain can never be comfortable with accepting any supra-national jurisdiction that enforces common rules.
Even many pro-Europeans view the EU in a similar way, but they argue that a post-Imperial Britain is unable to make its own way in the world, and so has no choice but to be part of the EU. This is a product of a crisis in confidence in a post-Imperial Britain. The kind of mentality that would welcome Imperial domination out of fear.
Another post-Imperial delusion was exposed most clearly during the Truss Ministry. The bequest of Empire has been spent, and the world does not owe Britain a living. If Britain wants to be able to have better public services and lower taxes then it has to earn the extra wealth to pay for it.
Once Britain has dealt with its Imperial insecurity, guilt and delusions, then it will be ready to create a lasting relationship with the EU that is based on reality, self-confidence and enlightened self-interest.
I personally hope that would be a close relationship, but who knows? It might not be.
I wonder if we read too much “strategy” or “tactics” into the boats situation. I think it’s now simply a monster the party gave birth to years ago for political reasons at the time and nobody realised it would develop into the main priority, some devil child that should have been dispatched soon after birth.
So I think 99.9999% of the government would be happy if there was a way to drop Rwanda and the boats furore without getting the biggest load of egg on their faces but they can’t because their friendly press will go nuts, activists who’ve made it a religion will go nuts and the opposition will have a field day.
Medvedev calling for the Latvian president to be hanged.
I await the tankies' response. "Latvia should be part of Russia!" "Latvia should give in to Russia for peace!", etc, etc....
But I agree with your point that a new government has the political space to do deals with the European Union that could potentially allow some degree of freedom of movement. The Brexit fiasco ensures that space.
But the reality is that our lords and masters have once again lost control by absurdly lax rules on dependents, by failing to police student overstayers and by turning a blind eye to EU citizens claiming that they were here before the cut off date ( something we can’t really check because we never monitored that either).
Sunak is trying hard to distract people from the much broader lack of control. It is not working.
These rumours are going to be a feature of daily life for the next 6 months and to be frank why bother getting exercised by them
It is a lovely day and in my case just pleased to see the sun and spring breaking out all over
My main takeaway - I broadly agree that this is about a sense of control and sovereignty rather than immigration per se (I’m not sure I agree with your conclusion that the country ‘likes’ immigration - it implies a single overarching view that loses too much nuance and contradiction in our collective view).
But if it is about a sense of control and agency it is, once again, godawful politics from the Tories. There are many aspects of the immigration agenda that we could have almost complete sovereignty and control
over. Numbers from UKR and HK for example. Dependents from Nigeria as another.
Why hang your control and sovereignty hat on this particular hook, which is tiny and inconsequential but out of reach and keeps visibly falling off the wall so your hat ends up trampled on the floor?
Which leads me to think it’s even more facile politics; it’s actually just about which part of the complex immigration agenda can most easily be summarised by a pithy three word slogan. That’s the depth of this government’s thinking and vision. Does it fit on a lectern?
That folk memory is dying now. The immediate contact has gone. For my kids' generation, WW2 is as remote as WW1 was for us. What's more, everything is just much more interconnected than it was, often at the press of a button. As a result, they just do not see the world in the same way - again, understandably so. That is going to fundamentally change how the UK sees itself in the coming years.
That’s not to say the rest of it seems sensible, but that part stands out to me as acutely nonsensical, and visibly so even to an only slightly engaged electorate.
The lessons from WWII for continental Europe and the UK were diametrically opposed. For us, it was that defiant resistance would see us through. For them, it was that every institution on a national level had failed so integration to make conflict impossible made sense.
In addition, UK politicians always portrayed themselves as standing up to the EU, only to then sign away powers, vetos, and renege upon referendum promises. They take an adversarial stance in words but then a collaborative approach in action, and wonder why people get (got) annoyed. The contempt for the electorate in refusing to hold a referendum on Lisbon was rancid (although Clegg's stated desire for a 'real' referendum on membership instead was darkly comic). Collectively, the political class had a pro-EU centre ground, but this was far from common ground with the electorate.
A mistake that was made then and may be made again by pro-EU types was a failure to engage on an emotional, cultural level with the electorate (although even the objective economic angle might've worked to keep us in had the campaign not been astonishingly inept). In the future, I anticipate a drive for us to rejoin. This will most likely then see far more integration in a bid to try and prevent us ever leaving again by increasing the amount of pain involved. A more sensible approach would be to try and actually make the case for the EU on both an economic level (which should be easy, but they ballsed it up last time) and in terms of identity. That will be far better in the long term for a stable political situation.
The alternative is we stay out and things gradually calm down and we end up with a more settled, external but friendly relationship. Which is fine.
The worst, whether in or out, is having constant arguments and bitterness on both sides (both UK to EU, and internally within the UK.
/endramble
I’m playing Pathfinder as well (2nd edition); a Tengu sorcerer in the Fist of the Ruby Phoenix module - lots of high-level fun. In many ways it’s a better game than 5e, though I can’t imagine wanting to run a game myself.
My new game is all homebrew and still in the setting my previous games were in - but I’m moving it to the biggest city on the planet, which has a sort of early-modern feel and playing it as I say to be quiet neo-noir with a strong dash of horror. Its a smaller group (I previously had two groups with ten characters to keep track of, all at level 8), so four characters at level one, which will mean a lot less bookkeeping, plus these players are all the most committed.
I’ve learnt that I really enjoy worldbuilding cities and letting players lean strongly into the roleplay side (albeit leavened with challenging combats - and I’m adapting the ‘gritty realism’ rules from the DMG for this as well).
From whom?
He took back control. He won.
Or maybe control and sovereignty were not what it was about at all...
Lets say that we build stacks of new houses in Wizzy and that area where demand for labour at any price is high. Problem is that the houses are unaffordable at the wages paid - even higher than minimum.
So we either build council homes - which we don't want - or we accept another round of 40% price rises on food - which we don't want. Or we enjoy migrant labour as the cheapest quickest simplest solution to outr massive structural economic challenges...
Sunak's Premiership has been a constant hunt for the gimmick that will overturn the political situation. This hunt has meant that he's failed to articulate, even to his own MPs, what a Conservative government is for, and why his MPs should support him in fighting to preserve it.
Truss failed to realise that the chief role of the OBR was to persuade the financial markets that the British government could be trusted with their money.
Boris Johnson stands out as realising that people have to be persuaded - though his approach to persuasion has a limited shelf-life because of its disregard for reality.
Theresa May provided definitive proof of her inability to persuade not once (GE 2017) but twice (Brexit deal). One of the overlooked mysteries of recent British politics is how someone so incapable of persuasion made it so far.
Cameron's end came in part because he rushed the job of persuading the British public to support his EU settlement, in the hope of getting it out of the way quickly and concentrating on other things. But he should have realised that persuasion is the job of politics.
Is it necessary to detail Brown's failures in the art of persuasion?
With Blair I think you can discern a difference between early-Blair, who put a lot of effort into persuasion, into making his case, and late-Blair, who seemed to disdain the necessity of doing so and was frustrated when people disagreed. Early Blair would seek to understand that disagreement and disarm it, but late Blair was simply exasperated.
Major's signature soap box was a powerful symbol of his recognition of the importance of persuading people.
As to Starmer? At the moment his strategy appears to be to do so little that he hopes persuasion becomes superfluous as a consequence. Will be reveal hitherto unseen powers of persuasion when they do become necessary? Only time will tell.
Are you playing with legacy or remastered rules?
From what I can tell (mostly via Archives of Nethys) level progression seems far better handled than 5e. I'm acutely aware that getting to level 12 and beyond might make things tough to try and balance. And DnD's challenge rating system is something I realised was broken way back in session 2. On the plus side, that meant when I screwed up and made an early 'tough' fight way too hard the party ended up managing to win. If I'd done that with Pathfinder's more tightly constructed encounters they probably would've been TPK'ed in session 5.
World-building's a lot of fun. Most of the action in mine is in a single city, but they've started going further afield on the island (just visited three archmage towers).
1. Here is a Christmas present. Free Money!
2. The voters that matter don't care about their down being a broken shabby shithole. They just want Free Money
3. You have to vote Tory or Starmer the Grinch will take your Free Money
One teeny tiny problem. Nothing works in this country and people want money spent on fixing it. At a bar in Manchester on Tuesday night. Socialising with other exhibitors from a trade show. Multiple conversations where the person raised how hard it was to get to Manchester as the trains are broken, and everything is broken, and what a mess. Unprompted. So I probe. And both were Tory voters. Well, ex Tory voters.
If that really is the Sunak master plan, Starmer will simply laugh in his face across the dispatch box. BTW, when in September? Are we having the "autumn" statement at the very beginning of September in those few weeks before conference season?
Sunak won't make it that far. Ask yourself what PM Rehman Chisti will do, that is the valid question...
Ending free movement for EEA migrants also needed tighter restrictions on all migrants to be effective in getting numbers down
The government is to this day acting as though it enjoyed the support of an outright majority of the electorate (see, for example, Gove's nasty little scheme last week).
The only correction for them is utter humiliation at the next election.
I'm betting on Jan 2025 personally.
This may reflect the type of case that gets to court but I think to claim that overstayers are a myth on the basis of one dodgy statistic challenging another equally dodgy one is a bit of a stretch.
My view, and it is my own cynical opinion piece, is Johnson got Ukraine right because it was the last chance saloon for saving his skin. I suppose whatever the justification, the call was correct. Nonetheless now the party is over his visits to Kyiv are less frequent, and what was he doing meeting Madura last month?
On the home front you will give me Kate Bingham and I will counter with Dido Harding.
He was, and remains awful.
Now he has been removed even if Brexit has now been done and FOM ended, Reform are back to UKIP 2015 levels with Yougov and Goodwin
Hunt's last budget only added up at all by increasing the net migration numbers.
5e definitely falls apart at mid-higher levels, as spellcasters (on the whole) become significantly more powerful than non-spellcasters. Martial characters on the whole are much better designed in Pathfinder.
Challenge rating is indeed a mess, but encounter building is one the key crafts of the DM and I’ve found that it has just taken me time and experience to get the hang of it. Kobold Fight Club is a great resource for this btw - hardly foolproof but makes for a good starting point.
https://x.com/thefastshow1/status/1768913337461473679?s=46
Ridicule without spite.
IIRC, 80%+ of people working in caring for the elderly are U.K. residents, for example.
Immigration is (and was) just topping up the workforce.
The moment the Penny dropped for the Tories.
Hire the Libyan Coastguard. They have to pay head money to the U.K. Treasury, in return.
Arguably, of course, they could work in different industries!
‘Fortress UK’ isn’t, to many of us, an attractive prospect.
Hunt losing his seat to the LDs as Chancellor would be more of a Portillo moment than Mordaunt.
Can't see Mordaunt becoming PM though, Tory MPs put her third last year behind Sunak and Truss. Even though she is the only alternative to Sunak in the Commons who might give the Tories even the slightest boost in the polls
Hunt is aiming to use UC to help get them back into the workforce
Leavers wanted to end FOM too and most Remainers wanted to stop Brexit and stay in the EU with FOM.
The Leavers like you who wanted to leave the EU and keep FOM and stay in the single market ended up squeezed in the middle
For a bit there, when the Russians discovered they couldn't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it was all very exciting for the tories. Now that the Ukrainians have also discovered that they can't do US-style high mobility, combined arms offensives, it's all gone a bit boring and the UK government is losing interest.
(I thank you!)
- Call off the Hunt
- Hands down
- Mercer-less
- Jacob and sons now depending on farming to earn their keep
- Mel strides off the stage
What can Sunak offer to buy off the letter writers?
Having now considered it, I think the idea that 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control' is too nuanced.
Whenever I hear immigration come up in day-to-day conversation (not that often tbf) it's along the lines of 'there are too many', 'the country's full up', 'we can't take any more', alongside genuinely held concerns about the dilution of our culture and way of life.
So no, I don't think the nation believes 'high immigration is fine so long as we have control'.
One other point: 'In short, when it comes to the huge numbers of people coming to this country, it has been situation: no change.' No, it is not situation no change; the numbers have more than doubled and the nature of that immigration has changed dramatically, fuelling the 'cultural dilution' concern.
Sorry sorry to disagree - still a very thought-provoking thread header though. Thanks!