Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
But if the dependents are children who will join the workforce later, surely it's a net gain?
Only if they'll be joining the workforce above median wages.
You're not thinking straight. Otherwise you could make the country richer by deporting all the cleaners, all the people in hospitality and food, all the young people at the start of their careers.
Getting rid of minimum wage jobs by automating them etc absolutely does make our country richer, yes.
Unskilled jobs do need doing, but extra people doing them for minimum wage deflates our GDP per capita it doesn't inflate it. Even the unskilled should be on a good wage and being as efficient and productive as possible and bringing in extra people so that firms don't need to invest in training or productivity doesn't boost our GDP per capita one iota.
Get rid of all children for a richer Britain!
You're bonkers.
I never said get rid of children.
But its GDP per capita that matters, not GDP.
If we added 80 million children to the country every one of them destined to do minimum wage work, then would we be "richer" as a result? No of course not.
We should be investing in our children to have a good education and have as many skilled jobs as possible. And ensuring that migrants we bring over are skilled too.
Unskilled jobs we can leave for our own unskilled children that for some reason can't or won't learn during school, which should be as few as possible. We shouldn't be aiming to not give skills to our kids while at school, nor should we be importing people without skills.
It's not even GDP per capita that matters. If you allow a load of poor people into the country to do menial work, then their lives have improved (or less they wouldn't be here) and the lives of those already here are also better (because they don't have to do shit work). So everyone's personally better off even though GDP per capita may have fallen. People sometimes find this hard to grasp.
That's nonsense that's why.
The solution to menial work is to ensure that menial work is paid well, so that those who are doing it are rewarded for doing it.
Not importing unskilled people to do it. We have enough people in this country already who can do menial work and those doing it should be paid appropriately.
Importing unskilled people to be paid less to do menial work both deflates our skills, upending what we should be doing, making us poorer, and means that those who are doing menial work are paid less for it as the minimum wage becomes a floor so they're worse off.
Import skills, not unskilled.
It's simply an unintuitive but correct mathematical fact. It's possible to have migration than makes every individual better off but reduces overall GDP per capita. Whether it's a good idea or not is a different question.
Lowering GDP per capita means we're poorer per capita, not richer.
Especially since investment in infrastructure (which is needed for population growth) is capital-heavy so needs outsized funding.
Migration needs to significantly boost GDP per capita to pay its way. It absolutely can and should happen, but it can and should happen via skilled migration, not unskilled.
Oh FFS, you're simply not reading what I'm writing are you?
Someone shared a video of a police officer stamping on and kicking a man in the head that lead to serious disorder in Rochdale. It was completely without the full context of the situation and designed to be incendiary. And we're not just talking about something that went viral, we're talking about a number one news item on the TV. Even if they hadn't filmed the whole altercation they might have pointed out it was only a partial reflection of what had happened.
How do they feel about the consequences of it. Are they sorry? Apologetic? What was their motive? Has anyone asked any questions of them?
Sharing something that actually happened is one thing. Posting on a forum the completely false information that someone had been stabbed by Muslims in Stoke recklessly is quite another.
For example the Reform Councillor that shared the Ali name claimed to have been told that name from eye-witnesses to the stabbing. That gave it the aura of authority which we now know to have been entirely false. Elon Musk sharing the Falkland Island internment story should have thought about checking if it was true before stirring the pot to his 193m followers. Some of the 2m that read that tweet when it was up will still believe that the UK is going to send the right wing to a Falkland Island gulag. That's a problem.
You wouldn't question the motive of the person who did it? And isn't it strange that no-one has thus far wanted to do that?
I can't imagine what would lead someone to go to a dance class full of young girls and stab as many of them as possible. I don't feel the need to speculate on what that motive might be and even if I did, there's no benefit to anyone else to hear what uninformed ideas I might come up with.
So if someone posted a brief video of a muslim man kicking and stamping on a white man's head that incited serious disorder in a town only for it later to emerge that the white men had assaulted the muslims first, you wouldn't question the motive of the individual sharer? Fair enough. But I suspect many in our media would. They like to talk about motive a lot. Particularly if they think it is racism.
As I posted upthread there were false claims of an acid attack on a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough which were repeated by people who should really know better and there was alot of trouble in Middlesbrough at the time.
I cannot recall on the news, local or national, anyone having their collars felt for it from our single tier Police force.
So unless the police can nick 100% of people committing a crime they aren't allowed to nick anyone?
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence."
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
People should take the traditional and consequence free route of becoming a columnist for the Spectator.
Sunder Katwala @sundersays "The public will have to go in, & the public will have to sort this out themselves, & it'll be very, very brutal. I don't want them here. I don't want them to live here. They came under false pretences" - Douglas Murray widespread violence
Someone shared a video of a police officer stamping on and kicking a man in the head that lead to serious disorder in Rochdale. It was completely without the full context of the situation and designed to be incendiary. And we're not just talking about something that went viral, we're talking about a number one news item on the TV. Even if they hadn't filmed the whole altercation they might have pointed out it was only a partial reflection of what had happened.
How do they feel about the consequences of it. Are they sorry? Apologetic? What was their motive? Has anyone asked any questions of them?
Sharing something that actually happened is one thing. Posting on a forum the completely false information that someone had been stabbed by Muslims in Stoke recklessly is quite another.
For example the Reform Councillor that shared the Ali name claimed to have been told that name from eye-witnesses to the stabbing. That gave it the aura of authority which we now know to have been entirely false. Elon Musk sharing the Falkland Island internment story should have thought about checking if it was true before stirring the pot to his 193m followers. Some of the 2m that read that tweet when it was up will still believe that the UK is going to send the right wing to a Falkland Island gulag. That's a problem.
You wouldn't question the motive of the person who did it? And isn't it strange that no-one has thus far wanted to do that?
I can't imagine what would lead someone to go to a dance class full of young girls and stab as many of them as possible. I don't feel the need to speculate on what that motive might be and even if I did, there's no benefit to anyone else to hear what uninformed ideas I might come up with.
So if someone posted a brief video of a muslim man kicking and stamping on a white man's head that incited serious disorder in a town only for it later to emerge that the white men had assaulted the muslims first, you wouldn't question the motive of the individual sharer? Fair enough. But I suspect many in our media would. They like to talk about motive a lot. Particularly if they think it is racism.
As I posted upthread there were false claims of an acid attack on a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough which were repeated by people who should really know better and there was alot of trouble in Middlesbrough at the time.
I cannot recall on the news, local or national, anyone having their collars felt for it from our single tier Police force.
So unless the police can nick 100% of people committing a crime they aren't allowed to nick anyone?
This was attitude of some opponents to 20mph limits - "Some people are still speeding, so it was pointless!"
Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The torment. The self-loathing.
I'm having a nice cup of tea before I turn to my flints and arrange my next eager escape, sorry, foreign trip. Trust me, I'm not mired in tormented self hatred
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
But if the dependents are children who will join the workforce later, surely it's a net gain?
Only if they'll be joining the workforce above median wages.
You're not thinking straight. Otherwise you could make the country richer by deporting all the cleaners, all the people in hospitality and food, all the young people at the start of their careers.
Getting rid of minimum wage jobs by automating them etc absolutely does make our country richer, yes.
Unskilled jobs do need doing, but extra people doing them for minimum wage deflates our GDP per capita it doesn't inflate it. Even the unskilled should be on a good wage and being as efficient and productive as possible and bringing in extra people so that firms don't need to invest in training or productivity doesn't boost our GDP per capita one iota.
Get rid of all children for a richer Britain!
You're bonkers.
I never said get rid of children.
But its GDP per capita that matters, not GDP.
If we added 80 million children to the country every one of them destined to do minimum wage work, then would we be "richer" as a result? No of course not.
We should be investing in our children to have a good education and have as many skilled jobs as possible. And ensuring that migrants we bring over are skilled too.
Unskilled jobs we can leave for our own unskilled children that for some reason can't or won't learn during school, which should be as few as possible. We shouldn't be aiming to not give skills to our kids while at school, nor should we be importing people without skills.
It's not even GDP per capita that matters. If you allow a load of poor people into the country to do menial work, then their lives have improved (or less they wouldn't be here) and the lives of those already here are also better (because they don't have to do shit work). So everyone's personally better off even though GDP per capita may have fallen. People sometimes find this hard to grasp.
That's nonsense that's why.
The solution to menial work is to ensure that menial work is paid well, so that those who are doing it are rewarded for doing it.
Not importing unskilled people to do it. We have enough people in this country already who can do menial work and those doing it should be paid appropriately.
Importing unskilled people to be paid less to do menial work both deflates our skills, upending what we should be doing, making us poorer, and means that those who are doing menial work are paid less for it as the minimum wage becomes a floor so they're worse off.
Import skills, not unskilled.
It's simply an unintuitive but correct mathematical fact. It's possible to have migration than makes every individual better off but reduces overall GDP per capita. Whether it's a good idea or not is a different question.
Lowering GDP per capita means we're poorer per capita, not richer.
Especially since investment in infrastructure (which is needed for population growth) is capital-heavy so needs outsized funding.
Migration needs to significantly boost GDP per capita to pay its way. It absolutely can and should happen, but it can and should happen via skilled migration, not unskilled.
Oh FFS, you're simply not reading what I'm writing are you?
I am reading it - and disagreeing fundamentally with it.
Do you agree that lowering the wages of those who are doing menial work is bad for those doing menial work?
Do you agree that investment needs to match population growth?
Do you agree that being richer or poorer needs to happen per capita?
Your notion that we can just outsource menial work is just patent nonsense. The overwhelming majority of people doing menial work in this country were born in this country. They're not aided by suppressing their wages down to minimum wage.
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
"The report discussed by Newsweek – authored by Agora, a Russian human rights group – found that 411 criminal cases were brought against internet users in Russia in 2017. The article does not give a figure for arrests.
In 2017 The Times made a Freedom of Information request which found 3,395 arrests had been made by 29 UK police forces for “section 127” offences, which is used for cases of online abuse. According to the article, 1,696 people were subsequently charged. Section 127 offences cover harassment that takes place via an “electronic communications network”, and is not limited to social media posts – harassment via email or other forms of online communication can also fall under this definition."
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
But if the dependents are children who will join the workforce later, surely it's a net gain?
Only if they'll be joining the workforce above median wages.
You're not thinking straight. Otherwise you could make the country richer by deporting all the cleaners, all the people in hospitality and food, all the young people at the start of their careers.
Getting rid of minimum wage jobs by automating them etc absolutely does make our country richer, yes.
Unskilled jobs do need doing, but extra people doing them for minimum wage deflates our GDP per capita it doesn't inflate it. Even the unskilled should be on a good wage and being as efficient and productive as possible and bringing in extra people so that firms don't need to invest in training or productivity doesn't boost our GDP per capita one iota.
Get rid of all children for a richer Britain!
You're bonkers.
I never said get rid of children.
But its GDP per capita that matters, not GDP.
If we added 80 million children to the country every one of them destined to do minimum wage work, then would we be "richer" as a result? No of course not.
We should be investing in our children to have a good education and have as many skilled jobs as possible. And ensuring that migrants we bring over are skilled too.
Unskilled jobs we can leave for our own unskilled children that for some reason can't or won't learn during school, which should be as few as possible. We shouldn't be aiming to not give skills to our kids while at school, nor should we be importing people without skills.
It's not even GDP per capita that matters. If you allow a load of poor people into the country to do menial work, then their lives have improved (or less they wouldn't be here) and the lives of those already here are also better (because they don't have to do shit work). So everyone's personally better off even though GDP per capita may have fallen. People sometimes find this hard to grasp.
That's nonsense that's why.
The solution to menial work is to ensure that menial work is paid well, so that those who are doing it are rewarded for doing it.
Not importing unskilled people to do it. We have enough people in this country already who can do menial work and those doing it should be paid appropriately.
Importing unskilled people to be paid less to do menial work both deflates our skills, upending what we should be doing, making us poorer, and means that those who are doing menial work are paid less for it as the minimum wage becomes a floor so they're worse off.
Import skills, not unskilled.
It's simply an unintuitive but correct mathematical fact. It's possible to have migration than makes every individual better off but reduces overall GDP per capita. Whether it's a good idea or not is a different question.
Lowering GDP per capita means we're poorer per capita, not richer.
Especially since investment in infrastructure (which is needed for population growth) is capital-heavy so needs outsized funding.
Migration needs to significantly boost GDP per capita to pay its way. It absolutely can and should happen, but it can and should happen via skilled migration, not unskilled.
Oh FFS, you're simply not reading what I'm writing are you?
I am reading it - and disagreeing fundamentally with it.
Do you agree that lowering the wages of those who are doing menial work is bad for those doing menial work?
Do you agree that investment needs to match population growth?
Do you agree that being richer or poorer needs to happen per capita?
Your notion that we can just outsource menial work is just patent nonsense. The overwhelming majority of people doing menial work in this country were born in this country. They're not aided by suppressing their wages down to minimum wage.
No, you're completely ignoring what I'm writing. I'm not making any sort of suggestion at all. I'm merely pointing out that it is mathematically possible for migration to give an outcome in which every person is better off but GDP per capita is lower. I'm not suggesting that this is good or bad. It's a subtle point, but any sort of subtlety is clearly lost on you. You just keep on banging your drum.
...The FTSE 100 owner of the Drax power plant made profits of £500m over the first half of this year, helped by biomass subsidies of almost £400m over this period. It handed its shareholders a windfall of £300m for the first half of the year...
There's a potential spending cut, right there.
..The government is considering the company’s request for billpayers to foot the cost of supporting its power plant beyond the subsidy scheme’s deadline in 2027 so it can keep burning wood for power until the end of the decade...
Just no.
Drax's clever switch to American wood pellets (which I deplore in principle) is the only thing that has allowed it to stay open, and by extension keep the UK's lights on. Condemning it is remarkably stupid.
Biomass amount to about 6% of UK generation. It's eminently replaceable.
Subsidising dead end tech - and outsize profits to its owners - is remarkably stupid.
Someone shared a video of a police officer stamping on and kicking a man in the head that lead to serious disorder in Rochdale. It was completely without the full context of the situation and designed to be incendiary. And we're not just talking about something that went viral, we're talking about a number one news item on the TV. Even if they hadn't filmed the whole altercation they might have pointed out it was only a partial reflection of what had happened.
How do they feel about the consequences of it. Are they sorry? Apologetic? What was their motive? Has anyone asked any questions of them?
Sharing something that actually happened is one thing. Posting on a forum the completely false information that someone had been stabbed by Muslims in Stoke recklessly is quite another.
For example the Reform Councillor that shared the Ali name claimed to have been told that name from eye-witnesses to the stabbing. That gave it the aura of authority which we now know to have been entirely false. Elon Musk sharing the Falkland Island internment story should have thought about checking if it was true before stirring the pot to his 193m followers. Some of the 2m that read that tweet when it was up will still believe that the UK is going to send the right wing to a Falkland Island gulag. That's a problem.
You wouldn't question the motive of the person who did it? And isn't it strange that no-one has thus far wanted to do that?
I can't imagine what would lead someone to go to a dance class full of young girls and stab as many of them as possible. I don't feel the need to speculate on what that motive might be and even if I did, there's no benefit to anyone else to hear what uninformed ideas I might come up with.
So if someone posted a brief video of a muslim man kicking and stamping on a white man's head that incited serious disorder in a town only for it later to emerge that the white men had assaulted the muslims first, you wouldn't question the motive of the individual sharer? Fair enough. But I suspect many in our media would. They like to talk about motive a lot. Particularly if they think it is racism.
As I posted upthread there were false claims of an acid attack on a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough which were repeated by people who should really know better and there was alot of trouble in Middlesbrough at the time.
I cannot recall on the news, local or national, anyone having their collars felt for it from our single tier Police force.
So unless the police can nick 100% of people committing a crime they aren't allowed to nick anyone?
Clearly not what I said. But why should they cherry pick who they act against too. They police by consent.
In a time of heightened tensions where the evidence is clearly there then one has to wonder why not in this case It is, after all, misinformation that would have helped inflame tensions. I Would rather question why in this case than just doff my cap to authority. I also think the woman arrested over the Southport tweet deserved her collar feeling based on the law.
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
But if the dependents are children who will join the workforce later, surely it's a net gain?
Only if they'll be joining the workforce above median wages.
You're not thinking straight. Otherwise you could make the country richer by deporting all the cleaners, all the people in hospitality and food, all the young people at the start of their careers.
Getting rid of minimum wage jobs by automating them etc absolutely does make our country richer, yes.
Unskilled jobs do need doing, but extra people doing them for minimum wage deflates our GDP per capita it doesn't inflate it. Even the unskilled should be on a good wage and being as efficient and productive as possible and bringing in extra people so that firms don't need to invest in training or productivity doesn't boost our GDP per capita one iota.
Get rid of all children for a richer Britain!
You're bonkers.
I never said get rid of children.
But its GDP per capita that matters, not GDP.
If we added 80 million children to the country every one of them destined to do minimum wage work, then would we be "richer" as a result? No of course not.
We should be investing in our children to have a good education and have as many skilled jobs as possible. And ensuring that migrants we bring over are skilled too.
Unskilled jobs we can leave for our own unskilled children that for some reason can't or won't learn during school, which should be as few as possible. We shouldn't be aiming to not give skills to our kids while at school, nor should we be importing people without skills.
It's not even GDP per capita that matters. If you allow a load of poor people into the country to do menial work, then their lives have improved (or less they wouldn't be here) and the lives of those already here are also better (because they don't have to do shit work). So everyone's personally better off even though GDP per capita may have fallen. People sometimes find this hard to grasp.
That's nonsense that's why.
The solution to menial work is to ensure that menial work is paid well, so that those who are doing it are rewarded for doing it.
Not importing unskilled people to do it. We have enough people in this country already who can do menial work and those doing it should be paid appropriately.
Importing unskilled people to be paid less to do menial work both deflates our skills, upending what we should be doing, making us poorer, and means that those who are doing menial work are paid less for it as the minimum wage becomes a floor so they're worse off.
Import skills, not unskilled.
It's simply an unintuitive but correct mathematical fact. It's possible to have migration than makes every individual better off but reduces overall GDP per capita. Whether it's a good idea or not is a different question.
Lowering GDP per capita means we're poorer per capita, not richer.
Especially since investment in infrastructure (which is needed for population growth) is capital-heavy so needs outsized funding.
Migration needs to significantly boost GDP per capita to pay its way. It absolutely can and should happen, but it can and should happen via skilled migration, not unskilled.
Oh FFS, you're simply not reading what I'm writing are you?
I am reading it - and disagreeing fundamentally with it.
Do you agree that lowering the wages of those who are doing menial work is bad for those doing menial work?
Do you agree that investment needs to match population growth?
Do you agree that being richer or poorer needs to happen per capita?
Your notion that we can just outsource menial work is just patent nonsense. The overwhelming majority of people doing menial work in this country were born in this country. They're not aided by suppressing their wages down to minimum wage.
No, you're completely ignoring what I'm writing. I'm not making any sort of suggestion at all. I'm merely pointing out that it is mathematically possible for migration to give an outcome in which every person is better off but GDP per capita is lower. I'm not suggesting that this is good or bad. It's a subtle point, but any sort of subtlety is clearly lost on you. You just keep on banging your drum.
If you're making a cylindrical chicken in a vacuum argument then yes that's theoretically possible.
However its also moot as its not true and not happening in the real world and won't happen either.
I'd rather discuss reality than abstract theoreticals.
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
I remind you of my long-standing rant on this: specifically that free speech does not exists in the UK, has never existed, and the only task of the statistician is to measure what speech is repressed. This is why I invented the #PBfreespeech hashtag. The British are perfectly comfortable with people being arrested/jobs lost etc for their speech, only complaining when the wrong kind of people/speech is repressed. We are the country that put somebody in prison for saying something bad about Captain Tom. We have non-crime hate-speech registers. We're not a global embarrassment, we're a global bad example.
Keely is already odds-on for SPotY which imo is a dangerous bet because it involves second-guessing the BBC's SPotY shortlist and some of us have had our fingers burnt in previous Olympics years when obvious contenders have been spurned by the panel. That said, I wish I'd lumped on Keely at odds-against because I think she is the most likely winner.
The BBC pretty much has to nominate someone from the Track & Field, and right now Keely is the most obvious nominee.
She's bound to be nominated and (imo) it'd be surprising if she didn't win. Odd things can happen in the Spoty vote though. I'd need a bit better than 1.6 to be lumping on.
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
I remind you of my long-standing rant on this: specifically that free speech does not exists in the UK, has never existed, and the only task of the statistician is to measure what speech is repressed. This is why I invented the #PBfreespeech hashtag. The British are perfectly comfortable with people being arrested/jobs lost etc for their speech, only complaining when the wrong kind of people/speech is repressed. We are the country that put somebody in prison for saying something bad about Captain Tom. We have non-crime hate-speech registers. We're not a global embarrassment, we're a global bad example.
Yes, I agree with that. The salient point is that this is now getting worse, quite fast
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
Hatred is an emotion. Incitement to hatred is open to wide interpretation, as well as the views of the alleged victims. One may be very confident that one's social media post is not an incitement to violence, but considerably less so that controversial concepts or passionate debate will not fall into somebody's definition of inciting hatred. That's why the latter has a chilling effect on freedom of speech of a far greater magnitude - I would say a gulf in magnitude, than the former.
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
I think that just confirms what a cesspit twitter is. It's perfectly reasonable government communications during a period of violence, highlighting what the law is and bringing attention to a tweet by E&W's independent prosecution service.
This kind of violent threat has driven a number of active travel advocates off social media (including me to an extent, after I was warned by the police that someone had my address). It stifles the kind of free speech you wish to defend.
You may have missed it - the other day I recommended a book "Record, Retreat, Report", about Active Travel Advocacy Online through the lens of a history of cycle cammers, interspersed with accounts of interviews and good commentary. Mine arrived yesterday and I would recommend.
The book is very well-written, and if you do Kindle I'd suggest that version. The design of my paperback copy is not quite up to the beautiful design of some cycling books.
It shows how far we have come - the first conviction for a 3rd party report of a traffic offence was August 2012 by Cyclegaz near the Oval - afaics the first inkling of cammers being treated as witnesses not victims, which became the critical resource-saving insight. How far we've some since then in many places.
There's also an insightful little story from Anne Ramsay (Cycle Granny, also a professional bus driver at one time) about how a London Bus Driver breezed into Belfast for his new job, and went back to London at record speed once his bus was hijacked and blown up.
Not in general a massive fan of the "If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" line, but do we have examples of someone being convicted of an online hate crime that wasn't a clear example of incitement?
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
People should take the traditional and consequence free route of becoming a columnist for the Spectator.
Sunder Katwala @sundersays "The public will have to go in, & the public will have to sort this out themselves, & it'll be very, very brutal. I don't want them here. I don't want them to live here. They came under false pretences" - Douglas Murray widespread violence
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
Not in general a massive fan of the "If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" line, but do we have examples of someone being convicted of an online hate crime that wasn't a clear example of incitement?
I would say Mark Meechan, the nazi dog guy. On balance I think that more on the very stupid than clear incitement.
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
"The report discussed by Newsweek – authored by Agora, a Russian human rights group – found that 411 criminal cases were brought against internet users in Russia in 2017. The article does not give a figure for arrests.
In 2017 The Times made a Freedom of Information request which found 3,395 arrests had been made by 29 UK police forces for “section 127” offences, which is used for cases of online abuse. According to the article, 1,696 people were subsequently charged. Section 127 offences cover harassment that takes place via an “electronic communications network”, and is not limited to social media posts – harassment via email or other forms of online communication can also fall under this definition."
Precisely. The figures are not comparable, and the UK number is not related to freedom of speech.
Not in general a massive fan of the "If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" line, but do we have examples of someone being convicted of an online hate crime that wasn't a clear example of incitement?
I would say Mark Meechan, the nazi dog guy. On balance I think that more on the very stupid than clear incitement.
Good call. Getting your dog to do a Nazi salute on YouTube in response to "gas the Jews!" is in that gray area between incitement and objectionable commentary.
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
I remind you of my long-standing rant on this: specifically that free speech does not exists in the UK, has never existed, and the only task of the statistician is to measure what speech is repressed. This is why I invented the #PBfreespeech hashtag. The British are perfectly comfortable with people being arrested/jobs lost etc for their speech, only complaining when the wrong kind of people/speech is repressed. We are the country that put somebody in prison for saying something bad about Captain Tom. We have non-crime hate-speech registers. We're not a global embarrassment, we're a global bad example.
I'm not sure - we're still better than many if not most but we've a very long way to go.
Free Speech is one thing - Fair Speech is another. Too many voices are never heard and too few voices are heard all the time. Social media empowers radical speech as a way of getting "noticed" (followers). They shout and they type and they cancel as someone recently said.
The echo chamber is comforting and reassuring and makes people happy. Being confronted continuously with views and opinions isn't easy and it's easier to shut up and run away or just fall in line with the majority who are, of course, the largest number of people wrong about any given topic at any given time.
Those who shout loudest get heard (unfortunately), those who whisper quietly in the dark are ignored but you can be sure they are the ones who need to be heard. Had social media existed in WW2, would we have countenanced anyone with a negative opinion against the Russians, our allies, the ones bleeding the Wehrmacht dry? Yet many knew of the horrors of the Stalinist state but if my enemy's enemy is my friend, so be it.
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
I remind you of my long-standing rant on this: specifically that free speech does not exists in the UK, has never existed, and the only task of the statistician is to measure what speech is repressed. This is why I invented the #PBfreespeech hashtag. The British are perfectly comfortable with people being arrested/jobs lost etc for their speech, only complaining when the wrong kind of people/speech is repressed. We are the country that put somebody in prison for saying something bad about Captain Tom. We have non-crime hate-speech registers. We're not a global embarrassment, we're a global bad example.
I don't really get the 'free speech absolutist' position - other than noting that many who claim it (like Musk) are merely virtue signalling and don't walk the walk when it comes to speech they don't like,
But leaving aside the hypocrisy, why should you be able to say absolutely anything you want regardless of the consequences? You can't *do* absolutely anything you want regardless of the consequences. So why a free pass for this thing called 'speech'?
Speech and action aren't fundamentally different beasts. Speech *is* an action. You have your mouth open emitting words, or you're writing or typing them. If that action leads to - and is designed to lead to - harm to others, why should this be outside the scope of the law?
Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The torment. The self-loathing.
I'm having a nice cup of tea before I turn to my flints and arrange my next eager escape, sorry, foreign trip. Trust me, I'm not mired in tormented self hatred
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
But if the dependents are children who will join the workforce later, surely it's a net gain?
Only if they'll be joining the workforce above median wages.
You're not thinking straight. Otherwise you could make the country richer by deporting all the cleaners, all the people in hospitality and food, all the young people at the start of their careers.
Getting rid of minimum wage jobs by automating them etc absolutely does make our country richer, yes.
Unskilled jobs do need doing, but extra people doing them for minimum wage deflates our GDP per capita it doesn't inflate it. Even the unskilled should be on a good wage and being as efficient and productive as possible and bringing in extra people so that firms don't need to invest in training or productivity doesn't boost our GDP per capita one iota.
Get rid of all children for a richer Britain!
You're bonkers.
I never said get rid of children.
But its GDP per capita that matters, not GDP.
If we added 80 million children to the country every one of them destined to do minimum wage work, then would we be "richer" as a result? No of course not.
We should be investing in our children to have a good education and have as many skilled jobs as possible. And ensuring that migrants we bring over are skilled too.
Unskilled jobs we can leave for our own unskilled children that for some reason can't or won't learn during school, which should be as few as possible. We shouldn't be aiming to not give skills to our kids while at school, nor should we be importing people without skills.
It's not even GDP per capita that matters. If you allow a load of poor people into the country to do menial work, then their lives have improved (or less they wouldn't be here) and the lives of those already here are also better (because they don't have to do shit work). So everyone's personally better off even though GDP per capita may have fallen. People sometimes find this hard to grasp.
That's nonsense that's why.
The solution to menial work is to ensure that menial work is paid well, so that those who are doing it are rewarded for doing it.
Not importing unskilled people to do it. We have enough people in this country already who can do menial work and those doing it should be paid appropriately.
Importing unskilled people to be paid less to do menial work both deflates our skills, upending what we should be doing, making us poorer, and means that those who are doing menial work are paid less for it as the minimum wage becomes a floor so they're worse off.
Import skills, not unskilled.
It's simply an unintuitive but correct mathematical fact. It's possible to have migration than makes every individual better off but reduces overall GDP per capita. Whether it's a good idea or not is a different question.
Lowering GDP per capita means we're poorer per capita, not richer.
Especially since investment in infrastructure (which is needed for population growth) is capital-heavy so needs outsized funding.
Migration needs to significantly boost GDP per capita to pay its way. It absolutely can and should happen, but it can and should happen via skilled migration, not unskilled.
Oh FFS, you're simply not reading what I'm writing are you?
I am reading it - and disagreeing fundamentally with it.
Do you agree that lowering the wages of those who are doing menial work is bad for those doing menial work?
Do you agree that investment needs to match population growth?
Do you agree that being richer or poorer needs to happen per capita?
Your notion that we can just outsource menial work is just patent nonsense. The overwhelming majority of people doing menial work in this country were born in this country. They're not aided by suppressing their wages down to minimum wage.
No, you're completely ignoring what I'm writing. I'm not making any sort of suggestion at all. I'm merely pointing out that it is mathematically possible for migration to give an outcome in which every person is better off but GDP per capita is lower. I'm not suggesting that this is good or bad. It's a subtle point, but any sort of subtlety is clearly lost on you. You just keep on banging your drum.
If you're making a cylindrical chicken in a vacuum argument then yes that's theoretically possible.
However its also moot as its not true and not happening in the real world and won't happen either.
I'd rather discuss reality than abstract theoreticals.
But it does happen, most obviously in Middle Eastern countries where Indians all the work and the Arabs live the life of Riley. It happens here too, but less obviously. The natives have better standard of living because the immigrants do most of the crap work, most evidently in the care sector. You may quite rationally argue that this is not a good thing for society, but there's no getting away from the fact that somebody has to do the work, and if natives are to do it, then they'll need paying, and that will make the rest of the natives poorer. Your banging on about GDP per capita completely misses these points.
Not in general a massive fan of the "If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" line, but do we have examples of someone being convicted of an online hate crime that wasn't a clear example of incitement?
I would say Mark Meechan, the nazi dog guy. On balance I think that more on the very stupid than clear incitement.
Though wasn't convicted of incitement, but rather for being grossly offensive. I think people should be allowed to be grossly offensive - Leon wears gillets, for example.
Inciting hatred is an older law and came in under Thatcher.
Not in general a massive fan of the "If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" line, but do we have examples of someone being convicted of an online hate crime that wasn't a clear example of incitement?
I would say Mark Meechan, the nazi dog guy. On balance I think that more on the very stupid than clear incitement.
Good call. Getting your dog to do a Nazi salute on YouTube in response to "gas the Jews!" is in that gray area between incitement and objectionable commentary.
Not in general a massive fan of the "If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" line, but do we have examples of someone being convicted of an online hate crime that wasn't a clear example of incitement?
I would say Mark Meechan, the nazi dog guy. On balance I think that more on the very stupid than clear incitement.
Good call. Getting your dog to do a Nazi salute on YouTube in response to "gas the Jews!" is in that gray area between incitement and objectionable commentary.
A lot of that grey area is on reach - if you post something on Facebook to about ten friends and family, it's a bit different to posting on X if you have over hundred thousand followers.
For example for Douglas Murray to say that if the army doesn't send immigrants back the public will have to do it is clear incitement to a wide audience to which he is an voice of authority. In my opinion he's inciting violence on British streets while he's sitting safely in the United States.
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
Hatred is an emotion. Incitement to hatred is open to wide interpretation, as well as the views of the alleged victims. One may be very confident that one's social media post is not an incitement to violence, but considerably less so that controversial concepts or passionate debate will not fall into somebody's definition of inciting hatred. That's why the latter has a chilling effect on freedom of speech of a far greater magnitude - I would say a gulf in magnitude, than the former.
"incitement to racial hatred" has been a criminal offence since 1976
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
Personally, I think that's wishful thinking.
But it does seem incredulous that Sunak didn't do this a year earlier, soon after he took office, because if he'd gone into the election with this story he'd have saved dozens and dozens of seats from Reform.
How did it happen that in one year overseas students were suddenly allowed to bring their families with them, a couple of hundred thousand extra people requiring housing and public services?
At the time I think there was a desperation for H&SC workers.
But, yes, astonishingly naïve since it's a huge and obvious backdoor migration route to the UK.
As I might have said dozens of times, if they want to recruit H&SC workers all they need to do is set up a recruitment centre in Manila. They’d have tens of thousands of young ladies, without dependents, queuing around the block to sign up.
Conversely, you could increase UK wages until enough UK workers volunteered to do it. People are not fuses to be thrown away if cheaper ones can be imported.
How do you increase UK wages in the social care sector?
Pay more money.
Same as any other sector ever.
Obvs.
But where is the money to come from?
Reeves isn't handing any over. She's just pulled the reforms carefully prepared and voted on several times since Cameron in 2010.
Nothing is going to change now for years.
Good that she pulled the reforms, the reforms were awful introducing a cap on costs. There is no cap, it costs what it costs.
Finding the money is the final step, not the first. Care homes need to charge whatever they need to charge to fill their vacancies, no more and no less, then the money will have to be found. You can't find the money first then offer it, that's not supply and demand.
Supply and demand is a simplistic model here given how much one customer dominates, in terms of how central government effectively controls spend.
Except one customer doesn't dominate the labour market and I'm talking supply and demand of labour.
That's kind of the point, people in the labour market have many possible employers (customers) to go to and if being offered minimum wage plus tips to wait on tables, or minimum wage to wipe bums, not many people are going to choose to wipe bums.
Even within the sector each employer is separate, not a monopsony.
Yes at the other end of the market Councils pay a lot of the funding, but they're legally obliged to.
The home is obliged to have staff - if they don't, the CQC will safeguard them. The Council is obliged to pay for funding.
Neither the Council nor families will like paying the market rate for staff. Tough.
1) there is a moral right to staff paid exactly minimum wage. 2) there is a moral right to a living wage 3) anyone who thinks that there is a contradiction is evil.
Someone shared a video of a police officer stamping on and kicking a man in the head that lead to serious disorder in Rochdale. It was completely without the full context of the situation and designed to be incendiary. And we're not just talking about something that went viral, we're talking about a number one news item on the TV. Even if they hadn't filmed the whole altercation they might have pointed out it was only a partial reflection of what had happened.
How do they feel about the consequences of it. Are they sorry? Apologetic? What was their motive? Has anyone asked any questions of them?
Sharing something that actually happened is one thing. Posting on a forum the completely false information that someone had been stabbed by Muslims in Stoke recklessly is quite another.
For example the Reform Councillor that shared the Ali name claimed to have been told that name from eye-witnesses to the stabbing. That gave it the aura of authority which we now know to have been entirely false. Elon Musk sharing the Falkland Island internment story should have thought about checking if it was true before stirring the pot to his 193m followers. Some of the 2m that read that tweet when it was up will still believe that the UK is going to send the right wing to a Falkland Island gulag. That's a problem.
You wouldn't question the motive of the person who did it? And isn't it strange that no-one has thus far wanted to do that?
I can't imagine what would lead someone to go to a dance class full of young girls and stab as many of them as possible. I don't feel the need to speculate on what that motive might be and even if I did, there's no benefit to anyone else to hear what uninformed ideas I might come up with.
So if someone posted a brief video of a muslim man kicking and stamping on a white man's head that incited serious disorder in a town only for it later to emerge that the white men had assaulted the muslims first, you wouldn't question the motive of the individual sharer? Fair enough. But I suspect many in our media would. They like to talk about motive a lot. Particularly if they think it is racism.
As I posted upthread there were false claims of an acid attack on a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough which were repeated by people who should really know better and there was alot of trouble in Middlesbrough at the time.
I cannot recall on the news, local or national, anyone having their collars felt for it from our single tier Police force.
So unless the police can nick 100% of people committing a crime they aren't allowed to nick anyone?
Clearly not what I said. But why should they cherry pick who they act against too. They police by consent.
In a time of heightened tensions where the evidence is clearly there then one has to wonder why not in this case It is, after all, misinformation that would have helped inflame tensions. I Would rather question why in this case than just doff my cap to authority. I also think the woman arrested over the Southport tweet deserved her collar feeling based on the law.
The police have to cherry pick who they act against though. There'll be a different response if you nick a can of soup from Asda than if you nick a Turner from the National Gallery.
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
I remind you of my long-standing rant on this: specifically that free speech does not exists in the UK, has never existed, and the only task of the statistician is to measure what speech is repressed. This is why I invented the #PBfreespeech hashtag. The British are perfectly comfortable with people being arrested/jobs lost etc for their speech, only complaining when the wrong kind of people/speech is repressed. We are the country that put somebody in prison for saying something bad about Captain Tom. We have non-crime hate-speech registers. We're not a global embarrassment, we're a global bad example.
I don't really get the 'free speech absolutist' position - other than noting that many who claim it (like Musk) are merely virtue signalling and don't walk the walk when it comes to speech they don't like,
But leaving aside the hypocrisy, why should you be able to say absolutely anything you want regardless of the consequences? You can't *do* absolutely anything you want regardless of the consequences. So why a free pass for this thing called 'speech'?
Speech and action aren't fundamentally different beasts. Speech *is* an action. You have your mouth open emitting words, or you're writing or typing them. If that action leads to - and is designed to lead to - harm to others, why should this be outside the scope of the law?
(Points to the sign saying "...the only task of the statistician is to measure what speech is repressed...")
Not in general a massive fan of the "If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" line, but do we have examples of someone being convicted of an online hate crime that wasn't a clear example of incitement?
I would say Mark Meechan, the nazi dog guy. On balance I think that more on the very stupid than clear incitement.
Though wasn't convicted of incitement, but rather for being grossly offensive. I think people should be allowed to be grossly offensive - Leon wears gillets, for example.
Inciting hatred is an older law and came in under Thatcher.
Inciting violence has been around pretty much forever.
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
If you just look at the number of dependent visas for students and care workers, it was something like 300,000 last year. Which is quite astonishing. That's the same - on its own - as the annual net migration numbers to the UK from 2004 to 2016.
I also suspect that - when people bring their wife and kids over - they are much more likely to want to stay long term. So, you probably have fewer people wanting to return home at the end of their period of study or work. Now, whether that is positive or negative is up for debate, but it certainly has an impact on long-term net migration numbers.
It’s not surprising, when we are letting firms sell visas.
It’s not even surprising that we can’t fill the vacancies - it’s not in the interest of the firms selling visas to fill vacancies!
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
People should take the traditional and consequence free route of becoming a columnist for the Spectator.
Sunder Katwala @sundersays "The public will have to go in, & the public will have to sort this out themselves, & it'll be very, very brutal. I don't want them here. I don't want them to live here. They came under false pretences" - Douglas Murray widespread violence
...The FTSE 100 owner of the Drax power plant made profits of £500m over the first half of this year, helped by biomass subsidies of almost £400m over this period. It handed its shareholders a windfall of £300m for the first half of the year...
There's a potential spending cut, right there.
..The government is considering the company’s request for billpayers to foot the cost of supporting its power plant beyond the subsidy scheme’s deadline in 2027 so it can keep burning wood for power until the end of the decade...
Just no.
Drax's clever switch to American wood pellets (which I deplore in principle) is the only thing that has allowed it to stay open, and by extension keep the UK's lights on. Condemning it is remarkably stupid.
Biomass amount to about 6% of UK generation. It's eminently replaceable.
Subsidising dead end tech - and outsize profits to its owners - is remarkably stupid.
It is a subsidy that happens to support reliable power that isn't wind, season, sun, or time of day reliant - that's immensely valuable to the grid for anyone who isn't a crazed loon.
At this point, who hasn’t actively considered emigration?
Just as a matter of style, I'm not sure Big Brother is the most persuasive comparison. I'd go for Russia or a similar quasi-dictatorship. Actually it might be interesting to compare prosecutions for TwiX posts in Britain and Russia, not least because the KGB does not always use the court system.
Someone has made the comparison
"In the last five years; arrests for social media posts:
Putin’s Russia - 400
UK (since the Communication Act 2003) - 3,300
The English invented the concept of free speech and decrying the governing orthodoxy - now we’re a global embarrassment."
I remind you of my long-standing rant on this: specifically that free speech does not exists in the UK, has never existed, and the only task of the statistician is to measure what speech is repressed. This is why I invented the #PBfreespeech hashtag. The British are perfectly comfortable with people being arrested/jobs lost etc for their speech, only complaining when the wrong kind of people/speech is repressed. We are the country that put somebody in prison for saying something bad about Captain Tom. We have non-crime hate-speech registers. We're not a global embarrassment, we're a global bad example.
I don't really get the 'free speech absolutist' position - other than noting that many who claim it (like Musk) are merely virtue signalling and don't walk the walk when it comes to speech they don't like,
But leaving aside the hypocrisy, why should you be able to say absolutely anything you want regardless of the consequences? You can't *do* absolutely anything you want regardless of the consequences. So why a free pass for this thing called 'speech'?
Speech and action aren't fundamentally different beasts. Speech *is* an action. You have your mouth open emitting words, or you're writing or typing them. If that action leads to - and is designed to lead to - harm to others, why should this be outside the scope of the law?
There's a pretty poor understanding of the 1st Amendment in the US, too. It's only the result of what the US right would call 'judicial activism' that the right to free speech is as strongly protected as it is now.
And even then, it's far from a free for all. Try, for example, posting something even moderately threatening against the President...
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
But if the dependents are children who will join the workforce later, surely it's a net gain?
Only if they'll be joining the workforce above median wages.
You're not thinking straight. Otherwise you could make the country richer by deporting all the cleaners, all the people in hospitality and food, all the young people at the start of their careers.
Getting rid of minimum wage jobs by automating them etc absolutely does make our country richer, yes.
Unskilled jobs do need doing, but extra people doing them for minimum wage deflates our GDP per capita it doesn't inflate it. Even the unskilled should be on a good wage and being as efficient and productive as possible and bringing in extra people so that firms don't need to invest in training or productivity doesn't boost our GDP per capita one iota.
Get rid of all children for a richer Britain!
You're bonkers.
I never said get rid of children.
But its GDP per capita that matters, not GDP.
If we added 80 million children to the country every one of them destined to do minimum wage work, then would we be "richer" as a result? No of course not.
We should be investing in our children to have a good education and have as many skilled jobs as possible. And ensuring that migrants we bring over are skilled too.
Unskilled jobs we can leave for our own unskilled children that for some reason can't or won't learn during school, which should be as few as possible. We shouldn't be aiming to not give skills to our kids while at school, nor should we be importing people without skills.
It's not even GDP per capita that matters. If you allow a load of poor people into the country to do menial work, then their lives have improved (or less they wouldn't be here) and the lives of those already here are also better (because they don't have to do shit work). So everyone's personally better off even though GDP per capita may have fallen. People sometimes find this hard to grasp.
That's nonsense that's why.
The solution to menial work is to ensure that menial work is paid well, so that those who are doing it are rewarded for doing it.
Not importing unskilled people to do it. We have enough people in this country already who can do menial work and those doing it should be paid appropriately.
Importing unskilled people to be paid less to do menial work both deflates our skills, upending what we should be doing, making us poorer, and means that those who are doing menial work are paid less for it as the minimum wage becomes a floor so they're worse off.
Import skills, not unskilled.
It's simply an unintuitive but correct mathematical fact. It's possible to have migration than makes every individual better off but reduces overall GDP per capita. Whether it's a good idea or not is a different question.
Lowering GDP per capita means we're poorer per capita, not richer.
Especially since investment in infrastructure (which is needed for population growth) is capital-heavy so needs outsized funding.
Migration needs to significantly boost GDP per capita to pay its way. It absolutely can and should happen, but it can and should happen via skilled migration, not unskilled.
Oh FFS, you're simply not reading what I'm writing are you?
I am reading it - and disagreeing fundamentally with it.
Do you agree that lowering the wages of those who are doing menial work is bad for those doing menial work?
Do you agree that investment needs to match population growth?
Do you agree that being richer or poorer needs to happen per capita?
Your notion that we can just outsource menial work is just patent nonsense. The overwhelming majority of people doing menial work in this country were born in this country. They're not aided by suppressing their wages down to minimum wage.
No, you're completely ignoring what I'm writing. I'm not making any sort of suggestion at all. I'm merely pointing out that it is mathematically possible for migration to give an outcome in which every person is better off but GDP per capita is lower. I'm not suggesting that this is good or bad. It's a subtle point, but any sort of subtlety is clearly lost on you. You just keep on banging your drum.
If you're making a cylindrical chicken in a vacuum argument then yes that's theoretically possible.
However its also moot as its not true and not happening in the real world and won't happen either.
I'd rather discuss reality than abstract theoreticals.
But it does happen, most obviously in Middle Eastern countries where Indians all the work and the Arabs live the life of Riley. It happens here too, but less obviously. The natives have better standard of living because the immigrants do most of the crap work, most evidently in the care sector. You may quite rationally argue that this is not a good thing for society, but there's no getting away from the fact that somebody has to do the work, and if natives are to do it, then they'll need paying, and that will make the rest of the natives poorer. Your banging on about GDP per capita completely misses these points.
The wealthy in Arab countries live the life of Riley, mainly funded by oil wealth, the ordinary citizens not so much.
And it doesn't happen here, that is bullshit. The care sector is not "most evidently" filled by people from overseas - the overwhelming majority of care workers in this country are British citizens. Suppressing those citizens wages makes them poorer.
Paying them more may as you say make other, wealthier, Britons poorer by meaning they have to pay their compatriots more, but it does not make everyone in Britain poorer, quite the opposite.
Suppressing poor people's wages is a very regressive policy.
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
Hatred is an emotion. Incitement to hatred is open to wide interpretation, as well as the views of the alleged victims. One may be very confident that one's social media post is not an incitement to violence, but considerably less so that controversial concepts or passionate debate will not fall into somebody's definition of inciting hatred. That's why the latter has a chilling effect on freedom of speech of a far greater magnitude - I would say a gulf in magnitude, than the former.
Well if there's a chilling effect on freedom of speech and at the same time we're knee deep in racist drivel, one dreads to think how it would be if the cork was popped.
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
Hatred is an emotion. Incitement to hatred is open to wide interpretation, as well as the views of the alleged victims. One may be very confident that one's social media post is not an incitement to violence, but considerably less so that controversial concepts or passionate debate will not fall into somebody's definition of inciting hatred. That's why the latter has a chilling effect on freedom of speech of a far greater magnitude - I would say a gulf in magnitude, than the former.
"incitement to racial hatred" has been a criminal offence since 1976
The Tweet doesn’t mention incitement to "racial" hatred, just "hatred" - perhaps you SKS fans should consider if you actually support the Tweet, given both posts above defending it have had to misrepresent the contents to do so.
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
If you just look at the number of dependent visas for students and care workers, it was something like 300,000 last year. Which is quite astonishing. That's the same - on its own - as the annual net migration numbers to the UK from 2004 to 2016.
I also suspect that - when people bring their wife and kids over - they are much more likely to want to stay long term. So, you probably have fewer people wanting to return home at the end of their period of study or work. Now, whether that is positive or negative is up for debate, but it certainly has an impact on long-term net migration numbers.
It’s not surprising, when we are letting firms sell visas.
It’s not even surprising that we can’t fill the vacancies - it’s not in the interest of the firms selling visas to fill vacancies!
How the f*** are UK companies allowed to sell visas?
This got outlawed in the sandpit a decade ago, because it inevitably leads to massive human rights abuses.
...The FTSE 100 owner of the Drax power plant made profits of £500m over the first half of this year, helped by biomass subsidies of almost £400m over this period. It handed its shareholders a windfall of £300m for the first half of the year...
There's a potential spending cut, right there.
..The government is considering the company’s request for billpayers to foot the cost of supporting its power plant beyond the subsidy scheme’s deadline in 2027 so it can keep burning wood for power until the end of the decade...
Just no.
Drax's clever switch to American wood pellets (which I deplore in principle) is the only thing that has allowed it to stay open, and by extension keep the UK's lights on. Condemning it is remarkably stupid.
Biomass amount to about 6% of UK generation. It's eminently replaceable.
Subsidising dead end tech - and outsize profits to its owners - is remarkably stupid.
It is a subsidy that happens to support reliable power that isn't wind, season, sun, or time of day reliant - that's immensely valuable to the grid for anyone who isn't a crazed loon.
And available, without subsidy, via gas. Which is your constant argument in favour of fossil fuel.
Utterly OT: but apparently there's a Cosmere RPG set in Brandson Sanderson's Stormlight Archives universe. If I weren't running the session zero for DC20 tomorrow I'd've checked it out, but some fantasy/TTRPG fans might be interested in that. It's currently in beta, I think.
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
Hatred is an emotion. Incitement to hatred is open to wide interpretation, as well as the views of the alleged victims. One may be very confident that one's social media post is not an incitement to violence, but considerably less so that controversial concepts or passionate debate will not fall into somebody's definition of inciting hatred. That's why the latter has a chilling effect on freedom of speech of a far greater magnitude - I would say a gulf in magnitude, than the former.
Well if there's a chilling effect on freedom of speech and at the same time we're knee deep in racist drivel, one dreads to think how it would be if the cork was popped.
How are you 'knee deep' in anything? Nobody forced you to glue your bonce to Twitter.
This is Russian commentary on the convoy of Russian reinforcements hit in Kursk.
"Just watched a video from the scene. 13 military Urals and KAMAZ covered trucks with infantry. Many dead, some of the vehicles burned to the ground. It looks like the entire column was carrying infantry. They were armed, most likely a platoon per vehicle. 3-4 companies - an entire battalion was destroyed. Judging by the appearance of the column, about half were killed. This is one of the bloodiest and most massive strikes (most likely HIMARS) in the entire war."
Also reports that the Ukrainians are digging in to defend the gains they've made. Looks like they've decided they can cause more damage to the Russian army in a fight in Kursk, than in defending longer-established frontlines in Donetsk.
It does seem as though the Ukrainian advantage in training is used most when the battlefield is more fluid, while a largely static frontline favours the Russian advantage in artillery.
We might see the Ukrainians withdraw after a period of causing mayhem to Russian efforts to bring up artillery and other reinforcements to Kursk.
Clearly this move into Kursk has got the Russians worried. However without wanting to put a dampner on things there is concern about the Ukrainian frontline in the east. Switching their resources to the north is a somewhat risky strategy.
Yes, there are risks to every strategy, and there are a few different ways in which the Kursk offensive could become a monumental disaster for Ukraine. Right now, with large numbers of Russians taken prisoner, heavy casualties inflicted on the Russians, and the propaganda win of occupying Russian territory, it looks like a net positive.
Maybe finish off with a fighting retreat, as the Russians throw everything into retaking the land.
Then launch another offensive into Russia from somewhere else.
That way the Russians will carry on grinding their forces down. But doing it to win back their own territory.
Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The torment. The self-loathing.
Not taking it well, are they. The Leons, the AlanBrookes, the Casinos.
And yes with Leon there's the added (and very singular) factor that he voted for this decade of national renewal under a changed Labour Party that is back in the service of working people.
I suppose it's the dashed hope that is stinging. They say it's the hope that kills you, don't they.
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
If you just look at the number of dependent visas for students and care workers, it was something like 300,000 last year. Which is quite astonishing. That's the same - on its own - as the annual net migration numbers to the UK from 2004 to 2016.
I also suspect that - when people bring their wife and kids over - they are much more likely to want to stay long term. So, you probably have fewer people wanting to return home at the end of their period of study or work. Now, whether that is positive or negative is up for debate, but it certainly has an impact on long-term net migration numbers.
It’s not surprising, when we are letting firms sell visas.
It’s not even surprising that we can’t fill the vacancies - it’s not in the interest of the firms selling visas to fill vacancies!
How the f*** are UK companies allowed to sell visas?
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
To be honest, those complaining about a security surveillance state in 2024 must have been asleep for the better part of 50 years. The Prevention of Terrorism Act, more accurately the Reaction to Terrorism Act (passed with huge acclaim in the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings) is as repressive as anything Orwell could have imagined giving the Police huge powers if they "suspect terrorism".
Stretch that 50 years and an afternoon at the bingo becomes the precursor for terrorism.
Every outrage since 1974 has triggered some form of response from the Home Secretary and the Security Services, as fine an example of shutting the stable door after the horse has cleared over the horizon as you could wish.
When a terrible event happens, there's an immediate clamour to "do something" and politicians are too scared of public opinion not to be seen to be "doing something" however stupid or repressive that "something" is. We know people will happily surrender their freedoms, rights and even their right to vote in a democratic society just to feel "safe". Normally sensible people just go silly when it comes to notions of security and stability - I've heard people call for the mass deportation of Britain's Islamic community - what next, some form of identification to mark out Muslims from the rest of society?
There's the more positive side of surveillance - lower level crime prevention, it's irrefutable evidence of wrongdoing (to a point). Surveillance and other video can be used to bring offenders to justice but if abused and edited maliciously, it can also promote injustice as we've seen.
Finally, we have the old chestnut of ID cards - let's not go there.
Re ID cards, couldn't agree more.
In an age where we can just implant people with ID chips, they are completely outdated.
Implanting ID chips is wasting an opportunity.
Small explosive charges so the government can do retroactive abortion…
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
Hatred is an emotion. Incitement to hatred is open to wide interpretation, as well as the views of the alleged victims. One may be very confident that one's social media post is not an incitement to violence, but considerably less so that controversial concepts or passionate debate will not fall into somebody's definition of inciting hatred. That's why the latter has a chilling effect on freedom of speech of a far greater magnitude - I would say a gulf in magnitude, than the former.
Well if there's a chilling effect on freedom of speech and at the same time we're knee deep in racist drivel, one dreads to think how it would be if the cork was popped.
How are you 'knee deep' in anything? Nobody forced you to glue your bonce to Twitter.
I do try and minimise my exposure, believe me. But it seeps. Esp these last few days.
Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The torment. The self-loathing.
Not taking it well, are they. The Leons, the AlanBrookes, the Casinos.
And yes with Leon there's the added (and very singular) factor that he voted for this decade of national renewal under a changed Labour Party that is back in the service of working people.
I suppose it's the dashed hope that is stinging. They say it's the hope that kills you, don't they.
The only consolation about the dire state of the government I foolishly elected is that I only spend 15% of the year suffering its dreary inanities and national self harm, whereas the rest of you are near 100%. Oh well. Sorry about that
@FeersumEnjineeya your entire logic has been predicated upon a theory that if we import people to do menial work (such as care) then Britons no longer need to do that and can do other work instead.
But that's not only not how it works, either here or elsewhere, it can't be.
You complain that care workers wages would go up if we couldn't import unskilled people to do it - which means you are deliberately advocating a policy of suppressing the wages of that 81% - and doing so under the guises that it makes "everyone" better off.
Everyone includes the 81% of care workers that are British does it not?
Suppressing the wages of our poorest is not a moral thing to do. Nor is it economically sound when it devalues our GDP/capita either.
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
But if the dependents are children who will join the workforce later, surely it's a net gain?
Only if they'll be joining the workforce above median wages.
You're not thinking straight. Otherwise you could make the country richer by deporting all the cleaners, all the people in hospitality and food, all the young people at the start of their careers.
Getting rid of minimum wage jobs by automating them etc absolutely does make our country richer, yes.
Unskilled jobs do need doing, but extra people doing them for minimum wage deflates our GDP per capita it doesn't inflate it. Even the unskilled should be on a good wage and being as efficient and productive as possible and bringing in extra people so that firms don't need to invest in training or productivity doesn't boost our GDP per capita one iota.
Get rid of all children for a richer Britain!
You're bonkers.
I never said get rid of children.
But its GDP per capita that matters, not GDP.
If we added 80 million children to the country every one of them destined to do minimum wage work, then would we be "richer" as a result? No of course not.
We should be investing in our children to have a good education and have as many skilled jobs as possible. And ensuring that migrants we bring over are skilled too.
Unskilled jobs we can leave for our own unskilled children that for some reason can't or won't learn during school, which should be as few as possible. We shouldn't be aiming to not give skills to our kids while at school, nor should we be importing people without skills.
It's not even GDP per capita that matters. If you allow a load of poor people into the country to do menial work, then their lives have improved (or less they wouldn't be here) and the lives of those already here are also better (because they don't have to do shit work). So everyone's personally better off even though GDP per capita may have fallen. People sometimes find this hard to grasp.
That's nonsense that's why.
The solution to menial work is to ensure that menial work is paid well, so that those who are doing it are rewarded for doing it.
Not importing unskilled people to do it. We have enough people in this country already who can do menial work and those doing it should be paid appropriately.
Importing unskilled people to be paid less to do menial work both deflates our skills, upending what we should be doing, making us poorer, and means that those who are doing menial work are paid less for it as the minimum wage becomes a floor so they're worse off.
Import skills, not unskilled.
It's simply an unintuitive but correct mathematical fact. It's possible to have migration than makes every individual better off but reduces overall GDP per capita. Whether it's a good idea or not is a different question.
Lowering GDP per capita means we're poorer per capita, not richer.
Especially since investment in infrastructure (which is needed for population growth) is capital-heavy so needs outsized funding.
Migration needs to significantly boost GDP per capita to pay its way. It absolutely can and should happen, but it can and should happen via skilled migration, not unskilled.
Oh FFS, you're simply not reading what I'm writing are you?
I am reading it - and disagreeing fundamentally with it.
Do you agree that lowering the wages of those who are doing menial work is bad for those doing menial work?
Do you agree that investment needs to match population growth?
Do you agree that being richer or poorer needs to happen per capita?
Your notion that we can just outsource menial work is just patent nonsense. The overwhelming majority of people doing menial work in this country were born in this country. They're not aided by suppressing their wages down to minimum wage.
IIRC 80% of the “arse wipers” in this country are U.K. residents.
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
Hatred is an emotion. Incitement to hatred is open to wide interpretation, as well as the views of the alleged victims. One may be very confident that one's social media post is not an incitement to violence, but considerably less so that controversial concepts or passionate debate will not fall into somebody's definition of inciting hatred.inciting hatred. That's why the latter has a chilling effect on freedom of speech of a far greater magnitude - I would say a gulf in magnitude, than the former.
"incitement to racial hatred" has been a criminal offence since 1976
The Tweet doesn’t mention incitement to "racial" hatred, just "hatred" - perhaps you SKS fans should consider if you actually support the Tweet, given both posts above defending it have had to misrepresent the contents to do so.
"Content that incites violence or hatred isn't just harmful - it can be illegal."
Is a statement of the law which amounts to
"Inciting hatred
In England and Wales it can be an offence to stir up hatred on the grounds of:
Race Religion Sexual Orientation"
I really can't see any problem with the tweet whatsoever. If you disagree with the law, then say so and why.
Also when have I ever mentioned SKS? Sure sign you know you've lost the argument when you start making things up about the people you disagree with.
LOL, they have no way of actually getting their money back, and the ridiculous six-figure pension for life isn’t going anywhere either.
There do seem to be conflicting accounts from the top of the BBC about whether Huw Edwards had kept them in the picture. £200,000 is not even a rounding error in the BBC's accounts so this looks like cheap theatre to keep Lisa Nandy and the tabloids at bay.
Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The torment. The self-loathing.
Not taking it well, are they. The Leons, the AlanBrookes, the Casinos.
And yes with Leon there's the added (and very singular) factor that he voted for this decade of national renewal under a changed Labour Party that is back in the service of working people.
I suppose it's the dashed hope that is stinging. They say it's the hope that kills you, don't they.
The only consolation about the dire state of the government I foolishly elected is that I only spend 15% of the year suffering its dreary inanities and national self harm, whereas the rest of you are near 100%. Oh well. Sorry about that
Only 15%? You mean you hate Britain that much? SHAME ON YOU!
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
But if the dependents are children who will join the workforce later, surely it's a net gain?
Only if they'll be joining the workforce above median wages.
You're not thinking straight. Otherwise you could make the country richer by deporting all the cleaners, all the people in hospitality and food, all the young people at the start of their careers.
Getting rid of minimum wage jobs by automating them etc absolutely does make our country richer, yes.
Unskilled jobs do need doing, but extra people doing them for minimum wage deflates our GDP per capita it doesn't inflate it. Even the unskilled should be on a good wage and being as efficient and productive as possible and bringing in extra people so that firms don't need to invest in training or productivity doesn't boost our GDP per capita one iota.
Get rid of all children for a richer Britain!
You're bonkers.
I never said get rid of children.
But its GDP per capita that matters, not GDP.
If we added 80 million children to the country every one of them destined to do minimum wage work, then would we be "richer" as a result? No of course not.
We should be investing in our children to have a good education and have as many skilled jobs as possible. And ensuring that migrants we bring over are skilled too.
Unskilled jobs we can leave for our own unskilled children that for some reason can't or won't learn during school, which should be as few as possible. We shouldn't be aiming to not give skills to our kids while at school, nor should we be importing people without skills.
It's not even GDP per capita that matters. If you allow a load of poor people into the country to do menial work, then their lives have improved (or less they wouldn't be here) and the lives of those already here are also better (because they don't have to do shit work). So everyone's personally better off even though GDP per capita may have fallen. People sometimes find this hard to grasp.
That's nonsense that's why.
The solution to menial work is to ensure that menial work is paid well, so that those who are doing it are rewarded for doing it.
Not importing unskilled people to do it. We have enough people in this country already who can do menial work and those doing it should be paid appropriately.
Importing unskilled people to be paid less to do menial work both deflates our skills, upending what we should be doing, making us poorer, and means that those who are doing menial work are paid less for it as the minimum wage becomes a floor so they're worse off.
Import skills, not unskilled.
It's simply an unintuitive but correct mathematical fact. It's possible to have migration than makes every individual better off but reduces overall GDP per capita. Whether it's a good idea or not is a different question.
Lowering GDP per capita means we're poorer per capita, not richer.
Especially since investment in infrastructure (which is needed for population growth) is capital-heavy so needs outsized funding.
Migration needs to significantly boost GDP per capita to pay its way. It absolutely can and should happen, but it can and should happen via skilled migration, not unskilled.
Oh FFS, you're simply not reading what I'm writing are you?
I am reading it - and disagreeing fundamentally with it.
Do you agree that lowering the wages of those who are doing menial work is bad for those doing menial work?
Do you agree that investment needs to match population growth?
Do you agree that being richer or poorer needs to happen per capita?
Your notion that we can just outsource menial work is just patent nonsense. The overwhelming majority of people doing menial work in this country were born in this country. They're not aided by suppressing their wages down to minimum wage.
IIRC 80% of the “arse wipers” in this country are U.K. residents.
Pedantic Betting: I suspect 100% are UK residents.
But yes approximately 80% (actually 81%) are UK citizens.
Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The torment. The self-loathing.
It's remarkable how quick people were to forget what a Labour government is actually LIKE, so blinded were they by intense loathing for the Tories. I remember it always being brought back to that when I raised any of it before the election. But, absolutely none of it should come as any surprise. This is what they do.
We had all of it 14 years ago, and they should all have remembered that - were they thinking clearly - to make a rational and balanced choice based on the two realistic options before them.
Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The torment. The self-loathing.
It's remarkable how quick people were to forget what a Labour government is actually LIKE, so blinded were they by intense loathing for the Tories. I remember it always being brought back to that when I raised any of it before the election. But, absolutely none of it should come as any surprise. This is what they do.
We had all of it 14 years ago, and they should all have remembered that - were they thinking clearly - to make a rational and balanced choice based on the two realistic options before them.
Yes, and still voting for Starmer's Labour was a better option than Sunak's Tories. Even for this right-winger.
Which says more about Sunak's Tories than Starmer's Labour.
Hopefully now the Tories can sort themselves out in opposition, don't become a Farage tribute act, and become worthy of voting for again.
Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The torment. The self-loathing.
It's remarkable how quick people were to forget what a Labour government is actually LIKE, so blinded were they by intense loathing for the Tories. I remember it always being brought back to that when I raised any of it before the election. But, absolutely none of it should come as any surprise. This is what they do.
We had all of it 14 years ago, and they should all have remembered that - were they thinking clearly - to make a rational and balanced choice based on the two realistic options before them.
Joking aside, I honestly did not expect them to be THIS bad, THIS fast
eg the total lack of economic ideas, apart from bad ones. The terrible authoritarian Wokeness right from the get go. Wow
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
Violence and milk?
Yep, vast gulf there. Big as the Grand Canyon.
Do you like Beethoven?
Ah right. That's a film and book I've deliberately avoided tbh. I've had a few close shaves but thus far not succumbed.
To be honest, those complaining about a security surveillance state in 2024 must have been asleep for the better part of 50 years. The Prevention of Terrorism Act, more accurately the Reaction to Terrorism Act (passed with huge acclaim in the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings) is as repressive as anything Orwell could have imagined giving the Police huge powers if they "suspect terrorism".
Stretch that 50 years and an afternoon at the bingo becomes the precursor for terrorism.
Every outrage since 1974 has triggered some form of response from the Home Secretary and the Security Services, as fine an example of shutting the stable door after the horse has cleared over the horizon as you could wish.
When a terrible event happens, there's an immediate clamour to "do something" and politicians are too scared of public opinion not to be seen to be "doing something" however stupid or repressive that "something" is. We know people will happily surrender their freedoms, rights and even their right to vote in a democratic society just to feel "safe". Normally sensible people just go silly when it comes to notions of security and stability - I've heard people call for the mass deportation of Britain's Islamic community - what next, some form of identification to mark out Muslims from the rest of society?
There's the more positive side of surveillance - lower level crime prevention, it's irrefutable evidence of wrongdoing (to a point). Surveillance and other video can be used to bring offenders to justice but if abused and edited maliciously, it can also promote injustice as we've seen.
Finally, we have the old chestnut of ID cards - let's not go there.
Re ID cards, couldn't agree more.
In an age where we can just implant people with ID chips, they are completely outdated.
Implanting ID chips is wasting an opportunity.
Small explosive charges so the government can do retroactive abortion…
{Bud from The Diamond Age has entered the chat}
I think it's the only book of his I can read and re-read. It was first published in 1996. Twenty-eight years ago...
41,000 replies, all bitterly mocking the UK Government. This is hugely damaging to our international image. They are now trying to stop people replying
Have you seen the kinds of people doing the replying? They're mostly Qanon obsessed American nutters who don't have a positive view of anyone who's surname isn't Trump.
lol. They have now removed the ability to reply
What a triumph for Gov.UK. Write a tweet to really send a message, then realise the tweet is so madly offensive and unpopular it gets bitterly mocked, worldwide, and now the government is actively trying to hide the tweet. They’ll probably end up deleting it. Brilliant way to send the message. Gold star for PR
Farcical morons
Its not offensive to write what the law is.
Getting mocked by trolls online is irrelevant.
David Cameron was right when he said that Twitter isn't Britain. Foreign trolls on Twitter are even less Britain.
But the UKG govt clearly does care about Twitter, hence the hysterical calls to ban it or restrict it
What does the devastatingly bad tweet actually say? (I'm not on Twatter)
It says if you incite violence on Twitter you'll get your collar felt.
It says if you incite violence or hatred on Twitter you get your collar felt. The second concept is a vast gulf away from the first, so I'm puzzled you didn’t feel it worthy of mention.
Violence and hatred aren't the same but there's hardly a 'vast gulf' between them.
Something like 'violence and cornflakes' - there'd be a vast gulf there.
Hatred is an emotion. Incitement to hatred is open to wide interpretation, as well as the views of the alleged victims. One may be very confident that one's social media post is not an incitement to violence, but considerably less so that controversial concepts or passionate debate will not fall into somebody's definition of inciting hatred.inciting hatred. That's why the latter has a chilling effect on freedom of speech of a far greater magnitude - I would say a gulf in magnitude, than the former.
"incitement to racial hatred" has been a criminal offence since 1976
The Tweet doesn’t mention incitement to "racial" hatred, just "hatred" - perhaps you SKS fans should consider if you actually support the Tweet, given both posts above defending it have had to misrepresent the contents to do so.
"Content that incites violence or hatred isn't just harmful - it can be illegal."
Is a statement of the law which amounts to
"Inciting hatred
In England and Wales it can be an offence to stir up hatred on the grounds of:
Race Religion Sexual Orientation"
I really can't see any problem with the tweet whatsoever. If you disagree with the law, then say so and why.
Also when have I ever mentioned SKS? Sure sign you know you've lost the argument when you start making things up about the people you disagree with.
My issue with this publicity campaign is that in an era where some crimes (fraud, burglary, cannabis-use, shoplifting) that have devastating impacts on businesses, individuals, and health, have been virtually decriminalised, and others (as serious as rape) receive derisory sentences, apparently due to lack of resource in the system, it is discouraging to see the Government and the CPS thinking a crackdown on free speech on Twitter is any sort of priority. It feels like a sloppy, easy target to quell dissent amongst the law abiding rather than using shoe leather to impede the work of muggers and theives.
And if you're not an SKS fan, apologies, clearly you have better taste than I credited you with.
Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The torment. The self-loathing.
Not taking it well, are they. The Leons, the AlanBrookes, the Casinos.
And yes with Leon there's the added (and very singular) factor that he voted for this decade of national renewal under a changed Labour Party that is back in the service of working people.
I suppose it's the dashed hope that is stinging. They say it's the hope that kills you, don't they.
The only consolation about the dire state of the government I foolishly elected is that I only spend 15% of the year suffering its dreary inanities and national self harm, whereas the rest of you are near 100%. Oh well. Sorry about that
The Migration Observatory suggesting that the annual run rate for net migration will drop to under 200k by the end of the year. I really wouldn't be surprised if next year we get net emigration because the arrivals from student visas are much lower than the students + dependents leaving at the end of their freebie 2 years and new care worker visa arrivals not getting dependant rights as the previous batch going home on the old scheme which did have them.
So are the care workers who come here, bringing multiple economically inactive dependents, only short term ?
I've posted the numbers before, but care workers are a relatively small share of the total number of work visas issued in a year. And with the removal of dependent rights, it will cut it even further.
Yep: the significant diminution of the right of health and social care visas holders to bring in dependents will have a really significant impact on visa numbers: I think it'll probably knock about 100k off annual immigration numbers on its own.
But it's the student numbers that will be the biggest single swing factor in 2024 and 2025, I reckon. Lots leaving, and far fewer coming: it's likely to be a net negative over the next two years, rather than merely a diminished positive.
The Guardian reckons net immigration will come down to around 350,000 a year by 2030
Like this is some major achievement. 350,000 is still an insane and almost unprecedented number, it’s just that the Tories managed to triple it “by accident”
It still means rapid transformation. It still means incredible strains on society. On top of what we already have. Then add in the boat people…
It’s not good
The guardian is wrong and they don't know how to do simple maths. The number of people applying for visas currently is down by something like 80% compared to 2022 and the students that arrived in 2022 are all having to find jobs at £39k or go home which means most of them (and their dependents) are going home over the next year because companies aren't going to hire them for that kind of salary. I think 2025 and 2026 will see a period of net emigration. And then it will stabilise in 2027.
If it does happen it means Labour will get the credit for it and, perversely, that will help keep them in office despite them having no real interest in controlling immigration.
It makes Sunak's choices pre-election unfathomable.
The person most to blame in Johnson, because he was PM when the initial post Brexit visa regulations were put in place. But it was then ignored by Truss and Sunak, until it was too late.
Yes, I agree
There is a lot of blame to go around. The OBR will castrate anyone's growth forecasts who says they will being immigration down, leaving no headroom in budgets. That prevented Truss doing anything, and Sunak would never have got his NI cut etc. past them if he'd pledged to get it down to 10s of 000s or anything like.
But it's the dependents issue that has made immigration a problem for the Tories, changing those rules make no difference to GDP because dependents are economically inactive and overall a net drain.
But if the dependents are children who will join the workforce later, surely it's a net gain?
Only if they'll be joining the workforce above median wages.
You're not thinking straight. Otherwise you could make the country richer by deporting all the cleaners, all the people in hospitality and food, all the young people at the start of their careers.
Getting rid of minimum wage jobs by automating them etc absolutely does make our country richer, yes.
Unskilled jobs do need doing, but extra people doing them for minimum wage deflates our GDP per capita it doesn't inflate it. Even the unskilled should be on a good wage and being as efficient and productive as possible and bringing in extra people so that firms don't need to invest in training or productivity doesn't boost our GDP per capita one iota.
Get rid of all children for a richer Britain!
You're bonkers.
I never said get rid of children.
But its GDP per capita that matters, not GDP.
If we added 80 million children to the country every one of them destined to do minimum wage work, then would we be "richer" as a result? No of course not.
We should be investing in our children to have a good education and have as many skilled jobs as possible. And ensuring that migrants we bring over are skilled too.
Unskilled jobs we can leave for our own unskilled children that for some reason can't or won't learn during school, which should be as few as possible. We shouldn't be aiming to not give skills to our kids while at school, nor should we be importing people without skills.
It's not even GDP per capita that matters. If you allow a load of poor people into the country to do menial work, then their lives have improved (or less they wouldn't be here) and the lives of those already here are also better (because they don't have to do shit work). So everyone's personally better off even though GDP per capita may have fallen. People sometimes find this hard to grasp.
That's nonsense that's why.
The solution to menial work is to ensure that menial work is paid well, so that those who are doing it are rewarded for doing it.
Not importing unskilled people to do it. We have enough people in this country already who can do menial work and those doing it should be paid appropriately.
Importing unskilled people to be paid less to do menial work both deflates our skills, upending what we should be doing, making us poorer, and means that those who are doing menial work are paid less for it as the minimum wage becomes a floor so they're worse off.
Import skills, not unskilled.
It's simply an unintuitive but correct mathematical fact. It's possible to have migration than makes every individual better off but reduces overall GDP per capita. Whether it's a good idea or not is a different question.
Lowering GDP per capita means we're poorer per capita, not richer.
Especially since investment in infrastructure (which is needed for population growth) is capital-heavy so needs outsized funding.
Migration needs to significantly boost GDP per capita to pay its way. It absolutely can and should happen, but it can and should happen via skilled migration, not unskilled.
Oh FFS, you're simply not reading what I'm writing are you?
I am reading it - and disagreeing fundamentally with it.
Do you agree that lowering the wages of those who are doing menial work is bad for those doing menial work?
Do you agree that investment needs to match population growth?
Do you agree that being richer or poorer needs to happen per capita?
Your notion that we can just outsource menial work is just patent nonsense. The overwhelming majority of people doing menial work in this country were born in this country. They're not aided by suppressing their wages down to minimum wage.
IIRC 80% of the “arse wipers” in this country are U.K. residents.
Pedantic Betting: I suspect 100% are UK residents.
But yes approximately 80% (actually 81%) are UK citizens.
There’s a bizarre semi-racist idea that UK Head Count are lazy, and Furrriners are better. Because you can get the Furrin to work for shit wages.
Having actually seen how that kind of employment works, it’s entirely rational not to want to do it.
Live with multiple adults per room in a dump in the shitiest part of London (say) - so you can shovel dirt on basements…. Save up to go home to Romania with some hundreds of pounds…
Who wouldn’t want to be an Amazon driver, on more money, driving clean van in the sunshine. With a max weight on the parcels of about 10Kg…
Do you really NEED that thought? Is it an *acceptable* thought? Might your unspoken and silent opinion cause offence to someone with a protected characteristic anywhere in the world, or anyone else, in history, ever? Or could your time be better spent not thinking at all, and let US do the thinking for you?
Tell us YOUR half-formed thoughts first, here at the Home Office, before you think them
THINK BEFORE YOU THINK
36 days since Leon voted for Labour and here we are folks.
The torment. The self-loathing.
It's remarkable how quick people were to forget what a Labour government is actually LIKE, so blinded were they by intense loathing for the Tories. I remember it always being brought back to that when I raised any of it before the election. But, absolutely none of it should come as any surprise. This is what they do.
We had all of it 14 years ago, and they should all have remembered that - were they thinking clearly - to make a rational and balanced choice based on the two realistic options before them.
I clearly remember the Labour government 1997-2010 and I think it was pretty good. It wasn't perfect, got derailed by Iraq and was clearly running out of steam by the end but overall the best government of my lifetime.
Comments
The torment. The self-loathing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0rlnqk5jyo
Big Brother is watching everyone except West Mercia Police's domestic violence hotline for nine months.
Racism is deeply embedded in all of them.
Do you agree that lowering the wages of those who are doing menial work is bad for those doing menial work?
Do you agree that investment needs to match population growth?
Do you agree that being richer or poorer needs to happen per capita?
Your notion that we can just outsource menial work is just patent nonsense. The overwhelming majority of people doing menial work in this country were born in this country. They're not aided by suppressing their wages down to minimum wage.
That's a repeat of a claim made previously with made up data - for example the 400 figure for Russia was convictions not arrests.
Here is the similar claim, fact-checked and debunked. It's exactly the sort of thing throbbers like to put out for stirring purposes.
https://pa.media/blogs/fact-check/russia-has-far-more-restrictions-on-social-media-use-than-the-uk/
"The report discussed by Newsweek – authored by Agora, a Russian human rights group – found that 411 criminal cases were brought against internet users in Russia in 2017. The article does not give a figure for arrests.
In 2017 The Times made a Freedom of Information request which found 3,395 arrests had been made by 29 UK police forces for “section 127” offences, which is used for cases of online abuse. According to the article, 1,696 people were subsequently charged. Section 127 offences cover harassment that takes place via an “electronic communications network”, and is not limited to social media posts – harassment via email or other forms of online communication can also fall under this definition."
It's eminently replaceable.
Subsidising dead end tech - and outsize profits to its owners - is remarkably stupid.
In a time of heightened tensions where the evidence is clearly there then one has to wonder why not in this case It is, after all, misinformation that would have helped inflame tensions. I Would rather question why in this case than just doff my cap to authority. I also think the woman arrested over the Southport tweet deserved her collar feeling based on the law.
However its also moot as its not true and not happening in the real world and won't happen either.
I'd rather discuss reality than abstract theoreticals.
Trump says that Biden stepping aside and endorsing Harris "seems to me actually unconstitutional. Perhaps it's not."
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1821617456848199760
The fellow is puddled.
Anyway, now I really must work!
It shows how far we have come - the first conviction for a 3rd party report of a traffic offence was August 2012 by Cyclegaz near the Oval - afaics the first inkling of cammers being treated as witnesses not victims, which became the critical resource-saving insight. How far we've some since then in many places.
There's also an insightful little story from Anne Ramsay (Cycle Granny, also a professional bus driver at one time) about how a London Bus Driver breezed into Belfast for his new job, and went back to London at record speed once his bus was hijacked and blown up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Brown_(climber)
Wonder how that discussion will go.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/bbc-asks-huw-edwards-to-return-more-than-200-000-from-salary/ar-AA1ovYtj?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=bfc46edb36674503bfcddf7a67d984d7&ei=10
THEY'VE PUT A GUN ON A ROBOT DOG
ARMED. ROBOT. DOG.
"Robot Dog With Gun Turret For Hunting Aerial Drones Being Tested By Army. Growing U.S. military interest in armed robot dogs now extends to potentially using them to help shield friendly forces from drone threats." Joseph Trevithick, The War Zone, Posted on Aug 7, 2024. See https://www.twz.com/land/robot-dog-with-gun-turret-for-hunting-aerial-drones-being-tested-by-army
Free Speech is one thing - Fair Speech is another. Too many voices are never heard and too few voices are heard all the time. Social media empowers radical speech as a way of getting "noticed" (followers). They shout and they type and they cancel as someone recently said.
The echo chamber is comforting and reassuring and makes people happy. Being confronted continuously with views and opinions isn't easy and it's easier to shut up and run away or just fall in line with the majority who are, of course, the largest number of people wrong about any given topic at any given time.
Those who shout loudest get heard (unfortunately), those who whisper quietly in the dark are ignored but you can be sure they are the ones who need to be heard. Had social media existed in WW2, would we have countenanced anyone with a negative opinion against the Russians, our allies, the ones bleeding the Wehrmacht dry? Yet many knew of the horrors of the Stalinist state but if my enemy's enemy is my friend, so be it.
But leaving aside the hypocrisy, why should you be able to say absolutely anything you want regardless of the consequences? You can't *do* absolutely anything you want regardless of the consequences. So why a free pass for this thing called 'speech'?
Speech and action aren't fundamentally different beasts. Speech *is* an action. You have your mouth open emitting words, or you're writing or typing them. If that action leads to - and is designed to lead to - harm to others, why should this be outside the scope of the law?
Always believe in your soul
You've got the power to know
You're indestructible...
Inciting hatred is an older law and came in under Thatcher.
For example for Douglas Murray to say that if the army doesn't send immigrants back the public will have to do it is clear incitement to a wide audience to which he is an voice of authority. In my opinion he's inciting violence on British streets while he's sitting safely in the United States.
2) there is a moral right to a living wage
3) anyone who thinks that there is a contradiction is evil.
It’s not even surprising that we can’t fill the vacancies - it’s not in the interest of the firms selling visas to fill vacancies!
And even then, it's far from a free for all. Try, for example, posting something even moderately threatening against the President...
And it doesn't happen here, that is bullshit. The care sector is not "most evidently" filled by people from overseas - the overwhelming majority of care workers in this country are British citizens. Suppressing those citizens wages makes them poorer.
Paying them more may as you say make other, wealthier, Britons poorer by meaning they have to pay their compatriots more, but it does not make everyone in Britain poorer, quite the opposite.
Suppressing poor people's wages is a very regressive policy.
And I was wearing one earlier.
FOUR!!!! Hahahahahah fuck off gilet-haters, I am protected by the little-known 739th Amendment guaranteeing me the right to wear poncey clothes
*One for our older viewers.
https://x.com/TheDailyShow/status/1821667760792916209
This got outlawed in the sandpit a decade ago, because it inevitably leads to massive human rights abuses.
Which is your constant argument in favour of fossil fuel.
Be consistent.
Anyway, I'm off. Play nicely, everyone.
Then launch another offensive into Russia from somewhere else.
That way the Russians will carry on grinding their forces down. But doing it to win back their own territory.
And yes with Leon there's the added (and very singular) factor that he voted for this decade of national renewal under a changed Labour Party that is back in the service of working people.
I suppose it's the dashed hope that is stinging. They say it's the hope that kills you, don't they.
Capitalism at its finest.
EDIT: (sorry, viewcode did it)
Small explosive charges so the government can do retroactive abortion…
{Bud from The Diamond Age has entered the chat}
But that's not only not how it works, either here or elsewhere, it can't be.
81% of care workers in the UK are British: https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/Adult-Social-Care-Workforce-Data/Workforce-intelligence/documents/State-of-the-adult-social-care-sector/The-State-of-the-Adult-Social-Care-Sector-and-Workforce-2023.pdf#page=87
You complain that care workers wages would go up if we couldn't import unskilled people to do it - which means you are deliberately advocating a policy of suppressing the wages of that 81% - and doing so under the guises that it makes "everyone" better off.
Everyone includes the 81% of care workers that are British does it not?
Suppressing the wages of our poorest is not a moral thing to do. Nor is it economically sound when it devalues our GDP/capita either.
https://www.mountainwarehouse.com/alder-mens-gilet-p8693.aspx/jet-black/
"Content that incites violence or hatred isn't just harmful - it can be illegal."
Is a statement of the law which amounts to
"Inciting hatred
In England and Wales it can be an offence to stir up hatred on the grounds of:
Race
Religion
Sexual Orientation"
I really can't see any problem with the tweet whatsoever. If you disagree with the law, then say so and why.
Also when have I ever mentioned SKS? Sure sign you know you've lost the argument when you start making things up about the people you disagree with.
But yes approximately 80% (actually 81%) are UK citizens.
We had all of it 14 years ago, and they should all have remembered that - were they thinking clearly - to make a rational and balanced choice based on the two realistic options before them.
Which says more about Sunak's Tories than Starmer's Labour.
Hopefully now the Tories can sort themselves out in opposition, don't become a Farage tribute act, and become worthy of voting for again.
eg the total lack of economic ideas, apart from bad ones. The terrible authoritarian Wokeness right from the get go. Wow
And if you're not an SKS fan, apologies, clearly you have better taste than I credited you with.
Having actually seen how that kind of employment works, it’s entirely rational not to want to do it.
Live with multiple adults per room in a dump in the shitiest part of London (say) - so you can shovel dirt on basements…. Save up to go home to Romania with some hundreds of pounds…
Who wouldn’t want to be an Amazon driver, on more money, driving clean van in the sunshine. With a max weight on the parcels of about 10Kg…