Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
Fact check: they were a relatively small part of the total.
I have said it before and will say it again. Abolish all local Gvt. Everyone gets the same, run from Whitehall. Much more efficient.
I very much doubt that, but historically a big issue is all political parties saying they want to empower local government in some unspecified vague way, but in practice Whitehall would still like to dictate as much as possible, hence so many things councils have to compete against each other to bid for and one off funding added very late to prevent long term planning.
I don't think it's intentional, just that empowered local government is something that sounds right to MPs, but they have no actual interest in making it happen beyond gimmicks like mayors, so things don't really change as much as you'd think.
Like how people might decry centralisation, because its trendy, even as they centralise.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
Historians will write books about it.
It is kind of their job even if events are boring and mundane.
@BorisJohnson won the Brexit referendum by promising control of our borders. And then he did this
tbf, I thought Boris had been open about increasing non-EU migration. Is this perhaps an area where his supporters heard what they wanted to hear? (Something we shall probably see a great deal of in Trump-land next year.)
1) The Tories deliberately played the act of tough on migration, all whilst making policy decisions to massively increase migration. Rwanda was nothing more than a 'look over here's tactic to tackle a small percentage of the total.
2) Even as someone very pro migration, 900k per year is clearly an unsustainable pace of migration. Both economically, for infrastructure, and socially. There is a level at which we should ignore industry demands for new labour and let market prices for labour adjust. It's not like it's been a big economic success overall.
3) Labour have an easy win here. The Tories belatedly put the path on the course of reducing migrant numbers. Moderate things further and they can claim halving or more the net migration figures.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
Fact check: they were a relatively small part of the total.
So 665000 of these simply wouldn't have been counted before May changed the rules on counting students?
A recount of the votes cast in Sunday's first round of presidential elections in Romania has been ordered by the country's top court following allegations that social media platform TikTok gave "preferential treatment" to the surprise winner, Calin Georgescu.
The Constitutional Court also rejected claims filed by two of the losing candidates who accused Georgescu of illegal campaign financing.
Georgescu, a radical with no party of his own, campaigned mainly on TikTok.
The platform has categorically denied it favoured the far-right, pro-Russia candidate.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
Fact check: they were a relatively small part of the total.
So 665000 of these simply wouldn't have been counted before May changed the rules on counting students?
Which would be madness, because they certainly should count. That's people who are here.
One of the few rational things that May did.
If there's net 665k net extra people in this country then we should know about it in the data for the year that happened, not years later.
That's without getting into a value judgment of whether it is right or wrong to welcome those students into the country and their dependents, but simply that the data should be accurate.
Much ado about nothing isn't it? 10 years ago, facts are very unclear, sums involved trivial. Slightly underwhelming but not career ending unless Starmer is irritated by her anyway.
I have to agree, even as a Tory commenting about a story involving a Labour Minister this seems a non story. A relatively minor sentence given in a magistrates court for an offence done before election as an MP is not significant. Some MPs have served prison time in the past after all now and the President elect of the USA is a convicted criminal, as long as not a major offence done in office then move on
A recount of the votes cast in Sunday's first round of presidential elections in Romania has been ordered by the country's top court following allegations that social media platform TikTok gave "preferential treatment" to the surprise winner, Calin Georgescu.
The Constitutional Court also rejected claims filed by two of the losing candidates who accused Georgescu of illegal campaign financing.
Georgescu, a radical with no party of his own, campaigned mainly on TikTok.
The platform has categorically denied it favoured the far-right, pro-Russia candidate.
Much ado about nothing isn't it? 10 years ago, facts are very unclear, sums involved trivial. Slightly underwhelming but not career ending unless Starmer is irritated by her anyway.
I have to agree, even as a Tory this seems a non story. A relatively minor sentence given in a magistrates court for an offence done before election as an MP is not significant. Some MPs have served prison time in the past after all and the President elect of the USA is a convicted criminal, as long as not a major offence done in office then move on
I don't think the President of the USA being a convicted criminal is a reason for us to no longer be concerned by such things, when it is relevant, but whilst she can hardly be outraged that it makes for good political attacks, it doesn't feel like it's sparked into something terminal for her position. When I relayed the story to my non-political sounding board their response was confusion more than anything else.
May lead to a reduction in councillors but also could lead to less local links from councils. Voters who currently have a district council based in their town could instead end up with a Unitary authority based in a city or large town at the other end of the county if more counties see County and District councils merged into Unitaries.
Would therefore need to see stronger Parish and Town Councils too if the proposals are to work properly
Some parish councils have 200 inhabitants and a part-time clark. How would you make these stronger?
They could do bins for example and more planning work
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
May lead to a reduction in councillors but also could lead to less local links from councils. Voters who currently have a district council based in their town could instead end up with a Unitary authority based in a city or large town at the other end of the county if more counties see County and District councils merged into Unitaries.
Would therefore need to see stronger Parish and Town Councils too if the proposals are to work properly
Some parish councils have 200 inhabitants and a part-time clark. How would you make these stronger?
They could do bins for example and more planning work
Places with fewer than 200 inhabitants either don't care about planning at all, or care about it WAY too much.
I've literally seen a place (albeit a little larger than that) complaining about a 1 property proposal because it would bring young people into their village. In those exact terms.
Regardless, I think ClippP's point was about resources (most parishes that size have very low precept and by definition few people to pay it) and committment (most parishes that scale probably don't have contested elections even for ones at the minimum council size of 5), and are very dependent on a handful of individuals to get anything done (so can break down easily especially when factions develop, or there are technical legal issues to address).
It isn't as easy as just giving them more stuff to do is what I'm saying.
I've seen great parishes, including very small ones. But there are something like 10,000 of them, and most cannot achieve that, cannot even with current powers. Is it worth it for the handful or could?
Looks like a decent first step from the government to reform the completely and utterly bonkers ‘system’ of local authorities in this country. Now expand the boundaries around the likes of Nottingham, Newcastle and Manchester, which currently have parts of their city centre (or near enough) in other districts, so antiquated is the mapping. Sort it out,
Nice to see that the Russian Central Bank has taken the time tested method to stabilise the ruble of ..closing the domestic market in exchange, thus neatly putting its currency's shitty state in stasis.
A lot of the reported damage in the last lot of days has been tied to the US sanctions on Gazprombank, a major flow point for foreign currency into Russia as part of the gas trade, in particular with Europe. That inflow has been shut so there is a reduction of decent foreign currency coming in for the Central bank to spend prop up the ruble's value.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
Around a quarter of students transfer to other visas historically, so I think they should be in the figures. It varies by origin, with Chinese students having a very high return rate, some of the other originating countries much less so.
If they did all leave then the net would be quite low, but it isn't.
Does "transfer to other visas" include the two years post-degree when they can work by right, or only if they exceed that two years and need an employer to sponsor them?
I don't know.
I think the ONS figures are based on travel surveys at ports/airports not numbers and types of visas issued, so they probably don't know either.
We don't do exit immigration checks, so the numbers leaving may be way out. We dont know in which direction.
It seems obvious to me that we should stamp people out. How else can we know who has overstayed?
Again we did until Labour got rid of exit checks in 1998. The Coalition were going to reintroduce them in 2015 but I don"t think it ever happened.
So there is one very strong conclusion from that, at ~4% of the total migration numbers, small boat arrivals are close to irrelevant. The main culprit for the large number of immigrants into the UK are the businesses importing vast numbers of skilled workers on sponsored visas, short term work visas and business trip visas (e.g. Dyson wanting to employ engineers in Malaysia and fly them in to work in the UK office on rotation) so they can pay below the UK market rate. This has been the case for years, one place I contracted at 15 years ago, the Engineering Director actually held a department lunch meeting where he told us that his plan for the future was to employ professionals in Malaysia and fly them in on temporary business trip visas to work on projects because Clients would no longer accept their projects being f***ed up in "high value engineering centres" and wanted the work done in Europe.
Yep. Small boats are a complete irrelevance and the only reason we should be concerned about them is the number of people dying trying to get across.
We have chosen to import workers and successive Government's have then rung their hands over something that, since Brexit, has been entirely a matter of choice by the politicians.
I had hoped Starmer would have the foresight and the balls to make this explicit but he seems to be following he playbook of all previous PMs and wringing his hands over how terrible it all is and how he will be the one to stop it.
It may only be 4% of immigrants, but it's surely a rather higher percentage of immigrants that we don't want to have. Are we that bothered about high skilled immigration?
How do we know we don't want them. Given they are generally fleeing some pretty horrible regimes but may in teh past have been engineers, teachers or any manner of skilled professionals. The reason they are coming by boat via the asylum system rather than through the visa system for skilled workers is often because of the state ofthe country they are fleeing. I am not sure we have an active sklled worker visa scheme with Syria or Afghanistan at the moment.
"Two female Russian spies in a love triangle were to be used as "honeytraps" in a surveillance operation on targets across Europe, run from the UK, a court has been told.
Katrin Ivanova, 33, a lab assistant, and Vanya Gaberova, 30, a beautician, were intended to be "in direct contact" with targets "as sexual bait to capture more information", the Old Bailey heard."
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Hahaha. That would be why in September there were 831,000 job vacancies.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Hahaha. That would be why in September there were 831,000 job vacancies.
Job vacancies do not imply a labour shortage. It's pure propaganda to quote that figure with the implication that we are short of 831,000 workers.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Hahaha. That would be why in September there were 831,000 job vacancies.
There is currently between 8 and 10 million economically inactive people in the UK....The government thinks it can get 2 million of which to be in employment with a bit of support.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
Around a quarter of students transfer to other visas historically, so I think they should be in the figures. It varies by origin, with Chinese students having a very high return rate, some of the other originating countries much less so.
If they did all leave then the net would be quite low, but it isn't.
Does "transfer to other visas" include the two years post-degree when they can work by right, or only if they exceed that two years and need an employer to sponsor them?
I don't know.
I think the ONS figures are based on travel surveys at ports/airports not numbers and types of visas issued, so they probably don't know either.
We don't do exit immigration checks, so the numbers leaving may be way out. We dont know in which direction.
It seems obvious to me that we should stamp people out. How else can we know who has overstayed?
Again we did until Labour got rid of exit checks in 1998. The Coalition were going to reintroduce them in 2015 but I don"t think it ever happened.
So there is one very strong conclusion from that, at ~4% of the total migration numbers, small boat arrivals are close to irrelevant. The main culprit for the large number of immigrants into the UK are the businesses importing vast numbers of skilled workers on sponsored visas, short term work visas and business trip visas (e.g. Dyson wanting to employ engineers in Malaysia and fly them in to work in the UK office on rotation) so they can pay below the UK market rate. This has been the case for years, one place I contracted at 15 years ago, the Engineering Director actually held a department lunch meeting where he told us that his plan for the future was to employ professionals in Malaysia and fly them in on temporary business trip visas to work on projects because Clients would no longer accept their projects being f***ed up in "high value engineering centres" and wanted the work done in Europe.
Yep. Small boats are a complete irrelevance and the only reason we should be concerned about them is the number of people dying trying to get across.
We have chosen to import workers and successive Government's have then rung their hands over something that, since Brexit, has been entirely a matter of choice by the politicians.
I had hoped Starmer would have the foresight and the balls to make this explicit but he seems to be following he playbook of all previous PMs and wringing his hands over how terrible it all is and how he will be the one to stop it.
It may only be 4% of immigrants, but it's surely a rather higher percentage of immigrants that we don't want to have. Are we that bothered about high skilled immigration?
How do we know we don't want them. Given they are generally fleeing some pretty horrible regimes but may in teh past have been engineers, teachers or any manner of skilled professionals. The reason they are coming by boat via the asylum system rather than through the visa system for skilled workers is often because of the state ofthe country they are fleeing. I am not sure we have an active sklled worker visa scheme with Syria or Afghanistan at the moment.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Hahaha. That would be why in September there were 831,000 job vacancies.
There is currently between 8 and 10 million economically inactive people in the UK....
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Hahaha. That would be why in September there were 831,000 job vacancies.
Job vacancies do not imply a labour shortage. It's pure propaganda to quote that figure with the implication that we are short of 831,000 workers.
So all those companies who say they can't get workers are lying? Or do you think that somehow they are just imagining the staff shortages?
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Hahaha. That would be why in September there were 831,000 job vacancies.
Job vacancies do not imply a labour shortage. It's pure propaganda to quote that figure with the implication that we are short of 831,000 workers.
So all those companies who say they can't get workers are lying? Or do you think that somehow they are just imagining the staff shortages?
They are free to offer better pay and conditions to attract people from the pool of inactive people, or tempt people out of early retirement.
The basic point is that a vacany is not a shortage. If you resign from your job, you create a vacancy but not a shortage.
I wonder if the Village / Barking&Dagenham result for the Tories is the first evidence of a Kemi Badenoch effect? The ward has one of the highest percentages of people of African background in the country.
The LibDem candidate has just won the @SheffCouncil Woodhouse by-election, beating the Reform UK candidate by 10 votes after a recount. Labour came third."
Of course again nobody in any position of responsibility will have known nothing...for 25 years....just like they were totally shocked that Wusselly Brand was sex pest, who could have guessed. Nobody in showbiz gossips about who they work with to others....
Of course again nobody in any position of responsibility will have known nothing for 25 years....just like they were totally shocked that Wusselly Brand was sex pest, who could have guessed.
I wonder why is it coming out now?
For a long time I thought I was the only person who preferred the old "traditional" Masterchef programme with Lloyd Grossman which was on screens until 2003 when the new style with Wallace took over.
I have said it before and will say it again. Abolish all local Gvt. Everyone gets the same, run from Whitehall. Much more efficient.
I very much doubt that, but historically a big issue is all political parties saying they want to empower local government in some unspecified vague way, but in practice Whitehall would still like to dictate as much as possible, hence so many things councils have to compete against each other to bid for and one off funding added very late to prevent long term planning.
I don't think it's intentional, just that empowered local government is something that sounds right to MPs, but they have no actual interest in making it happen beyond gimmicks like mayors, so things don't really change as much as you'd think.
Like how people might decry centralisation, because its trendy, even as they centralise.
Politicians have often been local politicians. So they know them, and therefore don’t trust the buggers.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Hahaha. That would be why in September there were 831,000 job vacancies.
Job vacancies do not imply a labour shortage. It's pure propaganda to quote that figure with the implication that we are short of 831,000 workers.
So all those companies who say they can't get workers are lying? Or do you think that somehow they are just imagining the staff shortages?
They are free to offer better pay and conditions to attract people from the pool of inactive people, or tempt people out of early retirement.
The basic point is that a vacany is not a shortage. If you resign from your job, you create a vacancy but not a shortage.
It is a shortage if you can't get anyone to fill the position. Particularly if you are looking for high skill workers rather than just anyone off the streets. And bear in mind the criteria for these workers coming into the country was not minimum wage.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Hahaha. That would be why in September there were 831,000 job vacancies.
Job vacancies do not imply a labour shortage. It's pure propaganda to quote that figure with the implication that we are short of 831,000 workers.
So all those companies who say they can't get workers are lying? Or do you think that somehow they are just imagining the staff shortages?
Having vacancies is part of having a healthy economy. There should always be vacancies as part of natural churn.
That's without considering that any firms who struggle to fill a vacancy it might be because they offer poor terms and conditions.
Do you think it would ever be possible or desirable to have a situation where there are zero vacancies?
Much ado about nothing isn't it? 10 years ago, facts are very unclear, sums involved trivial. Slightly underwhelming but not career ending unless Starmer is irritated by her anyway.
I have to agree, even as a Tory commenting about a story involving a Labour Minister this seems a non story. A relatively minor sentence given in a magistrates court for an offence done before election as an MP is not significant. Some MPs have served prison time in the past after all now and the President elect of the USA is a convicted criminal, as long as not a major offence done in office then move on
The only relevant question is this: what are the rules for the civil servants and other public servants that work for her? If they wound be sacked or refused a job, she should either resign or change the rules for them. Otherwise it’s a none story. Only hypocrisy would annoy me.
Thing is, depending on the civil service job and security clearance requirements, I think it might make them unappointable.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Hahaha. That would be why in September there were 831,000 job vacancies.
Job vacancies do not imply a labour shortage. It's pure propaganda to quote that figure with the implication that we are short of 831,000 workers.
So all those companies who say they can't get workers are lying? Or do you think that somehow they are just imagining the staff shortages?
They are free to offer better pay and conditions to attract people from the pool of inactive people, or tempt people out of early retirement.
The basic point is that a vacany is not a shortage. If you resign from your job, you create a vacancy but not a shortage.
It is a shortage if you can't get anyone to fill the position. Particularly if you are looking for high skill workers rather than just anyone off the streets. And bear in mind the criteria for these workers coming into the country was not minimum wage.
It's still just a vacancy. The government is under no duty to import people to work in a particular job at a given rate just because an employer can't afford the people it needs in the domestic labour market.
I'd say Brexit absolutely brought EU migration under control, to zero or negative, but then we let rip on non-EU migration.
That was a choice.
For a brief period in 2020 we almost did get net migration down to the "tens of thousands".
There we have it, the solution is what we did in 2020, I look forward to the Conservatives making COVID LOCKDOWN the main policy of their next manifesto.
"Two female Russian spies in a love triangle were to be used as "honeytraps" in a surveillance operation on targets across Europe, run from the UK, a court has been told.
Katrin Ivanova, 33, a lab assistant, and Vanya Gaberova, 30, a beautician, were intended to be "in direct contact" with targets "as sexual bait to capture more information", the Old Bailey heard."
Much ado about nothing isn't it? 10 years ago, facts are very unclear, sums involved trivial. Slightly underwhelming but not career ending unless Starmer is irritated by her anyway.
I have to agree, even as a Tory commenting about a story involving a Labour Minister this seems a non story. A relatively minor sentence given in a magistrates court for an offence done before election as an MP is not significant. Some MPs have served prison time in the past after all now and the President elect of the USA is a convicted criminal, as long as not a major offence done in office then move on
The only relevant question is this: what are the rules for the civil servants and other public servants that work for her? If they wound be sacked or refused a job, she should either resign or change the rules for them. Otherwise it’s a none story. Only hypocrisy would annoy me.
Thing is, depending on the civil service job and security clearance requirements, I think it might make them unappointable.
In context it's a non story compared with multi alias Grant Shapps and his dodgy Education Certificates for sale and Jeremy "multi dwellings" Hunt conveniently forgetting to declare them to HMRC....time to move on!
1) The Tories deliberately played the act of tough on migration, all whilst making policy decisions to massively increase migration. Rwanda was nothing more than a 'look over here's tactic to tackle a small percentage of the total.
2) Even as someone very pro migration, 900k per year is clearly an unsustainable pace of migration. Both economically, for infrastructure, and socially. There is a level at which we should ignore industry demands for new labour and let market prices for labour adjust. It's not like it's been a big economic success overall.
3) Labour have an easy win here. The Tories belatedly put the path on the course of reducing migrant numbers. Moderate things further and they can claim halving or more the net migration figures.
Lets not forget to factor in that the are literally hundreds of thousands of Students on visas that will expire as Courses end in 2025 / 2026 / 2027. Just dropping those off the figures should really see a massive dent in those numbers.
Starmer the dedicated cruncher of numbers and expert of running big Departments will be fully aware that IF he can reduce still the number IN especially if he can prove it is skills based, then the number OUT will take care of itself. close the pipe at the top and let it flood out at the bottom
The 5% that are illegals and more determined by weather than any other single factor can be at least reduced by the numerous measures and traties he's signing across Europe and further afield allowing him to reduce the backlog in those here being processed which he is already doing at twice - three times the run rate the Tories ever did.
If he can reduce the headline figure to 200-250 k by mid 2027 - early 2028 and reduce the illegals to 10-15k and process them within 3 months and close the hotels etc....he can rightly claim to have done enough to convince all but the boneheads that he deserves a 2nd term on at least the immigration issue...
A similar progress on NHS waiting lists and a stabilised economy and he is looking at the sort of majority Blair had in 2005...
Nice to see that the Russian Central Bank has taken the time tested method to stabilise the ruble of ..closing the domestic market in exchange, thus neatly putting its currency's shitty state in stasis.
A lot of the reported damage in the last lot of days has been tied to the US sanctions on Gazprombank, a major flow point for foreign currency into Russia as part of the gas trade, in particular with Europe. That inflow has been shut so there is a reduction of decent foreign currency coming in for the Central bank to spend prop up the ruble's value.
Extending this a little further: it has come about because Russia was still providing a handful of European countries (*) with gas, using pipelines that ran through... Ukraine. Yes, Russia were paying Ukraine to transport gas through the country, even as they try to destroy Ukraine, and Europe was still paying Russia for gas even as it slaps sanctions onto it. Weird, eh?
Ukraine has said that it does not want to renew the deal when it runs out on January 1st, so AIUI Russia has thrown its toys out of its pram and stopped shipment early - in part because those countries stopped paying it early, due to Russia illegally cutting off supplies for a period in 2022 ("You didn't supply the gas; we'll not pay for some gas at the end of the contract.")
Since there is no gas being supplied, there is no reason for Gazprombank (who received the payments for the gas) to have an exemption to the sanctions.
And this may hurt Russia, as it is alleged that Gazprombank has been doing rather more business than usual, almost as if the Russians were using it to get around sanctions. ("Yes, Gazprom really need these aerosapce machine tools...")
Still, their closure of the domestic market (as they did for period last year) stops my watch-the-ruble-tumble game for the moment.
Much ado about nothing isn't it? 10 years ago, facts are very unclear, sums involved trivial. Slightly underwhelming but not career ending unless Starmer is irritated by her anyway.
I have to agree, even as a Tory commenting about a story involving a Labour Minister this seems a non story. A relatively minor sentence given in a magistrates court for an offence done before election as an MP is not significant. Some MPs have served prison time in the past after all now and the President elect of the USA is a convicted criminal, as long as not a major offence done in office then move on
The only relevant question is this: what are the rules for the civil servants and other public servants that work for her? If they wound be sacked or refused a job, she should either resign or change the rules for them. Otherwise it’s a none story. Only hypocrisy would annoy me.
Thing is, depending on the civil service job and security clearance requirements, I think it might make them unappointable.
In context it's a non story compared with multi alias Grant Shapps and his dodgy Education Certificates for sale and Jeremy "multi dwellings" Hunt conveniently forgetting to declare them to HMRC....time to move on!
A recount of the votes cast in Sunday's first round of presidential elections in Romania has been ordered by the country's top court following allegations that social media platform TikTok gave "preferential treatment" to the surprise winner, Calin Georgescu.
The Constitutional Court also rejected claims filed by two of the losing candidates who accused Georgescu of illegal campaign financing.
Georgescu, a radical with no party of his own, campaigned mainly on TikTok.
The platform has categorically denied it favoured the far-right, pro-Russia candidate.
I still find it hard to believe he could win the run off but if the establishment are seen to be engaging in a stitch up.....
Romania seriously matters. Large border with Ukraine, Moldova sandwiched between the two and the Black Sea coast.
Anyway in Syria it seems as though Assad is having trouble in Aleppo. Presumably support from Iran and Russia is waning.
Are the Syrian rebels the good guys, though, or just the enemy of our enemy?
I think they are a diverse and complex group. Some of them are more Islamist than the West might like, some of them represent ethnic minority groups in the region, some of them are pro-democracy, everyone is united by opposing Assad (and Putin) and they’re generally anti-ISIS.
Much ado about nothing isn't it? 10 years ago, facts are very unclear, sums involved trivial. Slightly underwhelming but not career ending unless Starmer is irritated by her anyway.
I have to agree, even as a Tory commenting about a story involving a Labour Minister this seems a non story. A relatively minor sentence given in a magistrates court for an offence done before election as an MP is not significant. Some MPs have served prison time in the past after all now and the President elect of the USA is a convicted criminal, as long as not a major offence done in office then move on
The only relevant question is this: what are the rules for the civil servants and other public servants that work for her? If they wound be sacked or refused a job, she should either resign or change the rules for them. Otherwise it’s a none story. Only hypocrisy would annoy me.
Thing is, depending on the civil service job and security clearance requirements, I think it might make them unappointable.
In context it's a non story compared with multi alias Grant Shapps and his dodgy Education Certificates for sale and Jeremy "multi dwellings" Hunt conveniently forgetting to declare them to HMRC....time to move on!
A rather poorly timed post, methinks.
But what we have here is another example of hypocrisy: Labour lies fine, Tory lies EVIL!!!!
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
Fact check: they were a relatively small part of the total.
So 665000 of these simply wouldn't have been counted before May changed the rules on counting students?
Which would be madness, because they certainly should count. That's people who are here.
One of the few rational things that May did.
If there's net 665k net extra people in this country then we should know about it in the data for the year that happened, not years later.
That's without getting into a value judgment of whether it is right or wrong to welcome those students into the country and their dependents, but simply that the data should be accurate.
The suggestion has never been not to count students or to have inaccurate numbers. It’s a question of how those numbers are presented.
One thing May did do, which subsequently turned out to be inaccurate, is overestimate how many students stay in the country.
I can't imagine many people who incorrectly list items stolen in a mugging get charged for making a false report, let alone taken all the way to court. Then lose your job on the back of it.
Newcastle University staff consider strike action against £35m of cuts there (out of a total income just over £600m). A sector in complete disarray. www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-e...
A recount of the votes cast in Sunday's first round of presidential elections in Romania has been ordered by the country's top court following allegations that social media platform TikTok gave "preferential treatment" to the surprise winner, Calin Georgescu.
The Constitutional Court also rejected claims filed by two of the losing candidates who accused Georgescu of illegal campaign financing.
Georgescu, a radical with no party of his own, campaigned mainly on TikTok.
The platform has categorically denied it favoured the far-right, pro-Russia candidate.
I still find it hard to believe he could win the run off but if the establishment are seen to be engaging in a stitch up.....
Romania seriously matters. Large border with Ukraine, Moldova sandwiched between the two and the Black Sea coast.
Anyway in Syria it seems as though Assad is having trouble in Aleppo. Presumably support from Iran and Russia is waning.
Are the Syrian rebels the good guys, though, or just the enemy of our enemy?
I think they are a diverse and complex group. Some of them are more Islamist than the West might like, some of them represent ethnic minority groups in the region, some of them are pro-democracy, everyone is united by opposing Assad (and Putin) and they’re generally anti-ISIS.
It's really complex. Take the Kurds: I'm generally pro-Kurd, and think they should have a homeland (something that is understandably unpopular with the Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi governments...). Turkey is trying to swat the Kurds in the areas in Syria that the Kurds control, and I don't like that.
But the terrorism conducted by Kurdish groups such as the PKK is condemnable (*). Are the Kurds in Syria the good guys, or the bad guys? Turks would say the latter; Kurds and Syrians against Assad might say the former.
Much ado about nothing isn't it? 10 years ago, facts are very unclear, sums involved trivial. Slightly underwhelming but not career ending unless Starmer is irritated by her anyway.
I have to agree, even as a Tory commenting about a story involving a Labour Minister this seems a non story. A relatively minor sentence given in a magistrates court for an offence done before election as an MP is not significant. Some MPs have served prison time in the past after all now and the President elect of the USA is a convicted criminal, as long as not a major offence done in office then move on
The only relevant question is this: what are the rules for the civil servants and other public servants that work for her? If they wound be sacked or refused a job, she should either resign or change the rules for them. Otherwise it’s a none story. Only hypocrisy would annoy me.
Thing is, depending on the civil service job and security clearance requirements, I think it might make them unappointable.
A past minor conviction is not a barrier to working in the Dept of Transport. So, no, I don’t think public servants working for her would be sacked.
Extraordinary reason for resigning... is there more to this than meets the eye....
Well the original sky piece had multiple sources that claims it wasn't a mistake at all, it was about getting a better phone and escalated from there. Hence why got the boot from her job.
Even if that version of events is true, still seems quite extraordinary to be actually criminally done in court for misreporting, rather than somewhere between letting it slide and warning from the plod.
And now all years later to resign. Something doesn't quite add up.
Somewhat perplexed by Haigh's resignation. On the face of it, the offence seems trivial as well as taking place before she entered parliament. There must be more to it than reported to date and who fed it to the press now and for what benefit?
Somewhat perplexed by Haigh's resignation. On the face of it, the offence seems trivial as well as taking place before she entered parliament. There must be more to it than reported to date and who fed it to the press now and for what benefit?
Did she lie to Starmer about it, perhaps a lie by omission? That’s the impression given from some of the reports.
Somewhat perplexed by Haigh's resignation. On the face of it, the offence seems trivial as well as taking place before she entered parliament. There must be more to it than reported to date and who fed it to the press now and for what benefit?
I have said it before and will say it again. Abolish all local Gvt. Everyone gets the same, run from Whitehall. Much more efficient.
I very much doubt that, but historically a big issue is all political parties saying they want to empower local government in some unspecified vague way, but in practice Whitehall would still like to dictate as much as possible, hence so many things councils have to compete against each other to bid for and one off funding added very late to prevent long term planning.
I don't think it's intentional, just that empowered local government is something that sounds right to MPs, but they have no actual interest in making it happen beyond gimmicks like mayors, so things don't really change as much as you'd think.
Like how people might decry centralisation, because its trendy, even as they centralise.
Yes, for sure. Made worse - or indeed made possible - by the absence of a written or codified constitution for our country, such that local government’s powers, funding and freedom to act - and indeed its mere existence - depends entirely on the whim of the elected national government at the time - and can be changed, or abolished, as that majority power-minority vote government might happen to decide, regardless of consensus or consultation.
In pretty much every other western democracy, making the sort of changes to local government that in the UK have been commonplace, with ceaseless meddling, controlling, instructing and reorganising, requires constitutional amendment, and with it lots of procedure and checks and balances that have the general effect of making it difficult or impossible, or at least exceedingly rare.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
Around a quarter of students transfer to other visas historically, so I think they should be in the figures. It varies by origin, with Chinese students having a very high return rate, some of the other originating countries much less so.
If they did all leave then the net would be quite low, but it isn't.
Does "transfer to other visas" include the two years post-degree when they can work by right, or only if they exceed that two years and need an employer to sponsor them?
I don't know.
I think the ONS figures are based on travel surveys at ports/airports not numbers and types of visas issued, so they probably don't know either.
We don't do exit immigration checks, so the numbers leaving may be way out. We dont know in which direction.
It seems obvious to me that we should stamp people out. How else can we know who has overstayed?
Again we did until Labour got rid of exit checks in 1998. The Coalition were going to reintroduce them in 2015 but I don"t think it ever happened.
So there is one very strong conclusion from that, at ~4% of the total migration numbers, small boat arrivals are close to irrelevant. The main culprit for the large number of immigrants into the UK are the businesses importing vast numbers of skilled workers on sponsored visas, short term work visas and business trip visas (e.g. Dyson wanting to employ engineers in Malaysia and fly them in to work in the UK office on rotation) so they can pay below the UK market rate. This has been the case for years, one place I contracted at 15 years ago, the Engineering Director actually held a department lunch meeting where he told us that his plan for the future was to employ professionals in Malaysia and fly them in on temporary business trip visas to work on projects because Clients would no longer accept their projects being f***ed up in "high value engineering centres" and wanted the work done in Europe.
Yep. Small boats are a complete irrelevance and the only reason we should be concerned about them is the number of people dying trying to get across.
We have chosen to import workers and successive Government's have then rung their hands over something that, since Brexit, has been entirely a matter of choice by the politicians.
I had hoped Starmer would have the foresight and the balls to make this explicit but he seems to be following he playbook of all previous PMs and wringing his hands over how terrible it all is and how he will be the one to stop it.
It may only be 4% of immigrants, but it's surely a rather higher percentage of immigrants that we don't want to have. Are we that bothered about high skilled immigration?
The fact that we're allowing Ellen Degeneres in is all the proof you need that the government doesn't care about immigrants having useful skills.
Including: "Louise Haigh is a former Special Constable, a volunteer police officer with full powers of arrest who served with the Metropolitan Police until 2011."
Two problems I think. One, what if she's lying now in her comments to the BBC and is disproven. Two, she says she disclosed to Starmer in 2020 before being appointed minister. What was he doing overlooking a conviction involving dishonesty, no matter how slight the punishment? Convictions involving dishonesty are special - courts will routinely tell juries about them, even when previous convictions are normally hidden, because it goes to credibility of testimony.
She probably gets away with hiding it from the Party, since the conviction happened 6 months before the 2015 election when she had presumably already been selected (but did the referral to police happen before selection?)
Drip drip drip on this I suspect.
The fuller Sky exclusive partially makes this look more of a genuine mistake.
No doubt some will seek to make a mountain out of a molehill.
It begs the question how long have Sky sat on this any why release it now.
On what has been a dire day for the Tories, new and old and ahead of a key debate tomorrow seems a strange time.
It's certainly not a Huhne or Pincher moment.
She would have been thoroughly vetted before going in to Full Cabinet and Sky suggest before going in to Shadow Cabinet too
It's been on public record and not hidden which is also in her favour.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
Around a quarter of students transfer to other visas historically, so I think they should be in the figures. It varies by origin, with Chinese students having a very high return rate, some of the other originating countries much less so.
If they did all leave then the net would be quite low, but it isn't.
Does "transfer to other visas" include the two years post-degree when they can work by right, or only if they exceed that two years and need an employer to sponsor them?
I don't know.
I think the ONS figures are based on travel surveys at ports/airports not numbers and types of visas issued, so they probably don't know either.
We don't do exit immigration checks, so the numbers leaving may be way out. We dont know in which direction.
It seems obvious to me that we should stamp people out. How else can we know who has overstayed?
Again we did until Labour got rid of exit checks in 1998. The Coalition were going to reintroduce them in 2015 but I don"t think it ever happened.
So there is one very strong conclusion from that, at ~4% of the total migration numbers, small boat arrivals are close to irrelevant. The main culprit for the large number of immigrants into the UK are the businesses importing vast numbers of skilled workers on sponsored visas, short term work visas and business trip visas (e.g. Dyson wanting to employ engineers in Malaysia and fly them in to work in the UK office on rotation) so they can pay below the UK market rate. This has been the case for years, one place I contracted at 15 years ago, the Engineering Director actually held a department lunch meeting where he told us that his plan for the future was to employ professionals in Malaysia and fly them in on temporary business trip visas to work on projects because Clients would no longer accept their projects being f***ed up in "high value engineering centres" and wanted the work done in Europe.
Yep. Small boats are a complete irrelevance and the only reason we should be concerned about them is the number of people dying trying to get across.
We have chosen to import workers and successive Government's have then rung their hands over something that, since Brexit, has been entirely a matter of choice by the politicians.
I had hoped Starmer would have the foresight and the balls to make this explicit but he seems to be following he playbook of all previous PMs and wringing his hands over how terrible it all is and how he will be the one to stop it.
It may only be 4% of immigrants, but it's surely a rather higher percentage of immigrants that we don't want to have. Are we that bothered about high skilled immigration?
The fact that we're allowing Ellen Degeneres in is all the proof you need that the government doesn't care about immigrants having useful skills.
I note LD won Beighton back in May so there's obviously some LD strength in the semi rural Sheffield outskirts. Excellent result for them, very good for Reform, poor for the Tories and awful for Labour
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
Fact check: they were a relatively small part of the total.
So 665000 of these simply wouldn't have been counted before May changed the rules on counting students?
Which would be madness, because they certainly should count. That's people who are here.
One of the few rational things that May did.
If there's net 665k net extra people in this country then we should know about it in the data for the year that happened, not years later.
That's without getting into a value judgment of whether it is right or wrong to welcome those students into the country and their dependents, but simply that the data should be accurate.
The suggestion has never been not to count students or to have inaccurate numbers. It’s a question of how those numbers are presented.
One thing May did do, which subsequently turned out to be inaccurate, is overestimate how many students stay in the country.
Yes, May did a lot of inaccurate things and bad things, I didn't respect her as a leader as she was a hateful xenophobe.
However it is moot whether people are going to stay or not, the accurate information is who has arrived and who has left.
If people arrive for a 3 year degree they should be classed as arriving. If they depart after it they should be classed as departing.
No different to someone who arrives on a 3 year work contract and 3 year work visa.
Including: "Louise Haigh is a former Special Constable, a volunteer police officer with full powers of arrest who served with the Metropolitan Police until 2011."
Two problems I think. One, what if she's lying now in her comments to the BBC and is disproven. Two, she says she disclosed to Starmer in 2020 before being appointed minister. What was he doing overlooking a conviction involving dishonesty, no matter how slight the punishment? Convictions involving dishonesty are special - courts will routinely tell juries about them, even when previous convictions are normally hidden, because it goes to credibility of testimony.
She probably gets away with hiding it from the Party, since the conviction happened 6 months before the 2015 election when she had presumably already been selected (but did the referral to police happen before selection?)
Drip drip drip on this I suspect.
The fuller Sky exclusive partially makes this look more of a genuine mistake.
No doubt some will seek to make a mountain out of a molehill.
It begs the question how long have Sky sat on this any why release it now.
On what has been a dire day for the Tories, new and old and ahead of a key debate tomorrow seems a strange time.
It's certainly not a Huhne or Pincher moment.
She would have been thoroughly vetted before going in to Full Cabinet and Sky suggest before going in to Shadow Cabinet too
It's been on public record and not hidden which is also in her favour.
We appear to have a Labour intern. Bless.
It's most likely tim.....he had an obsession with Grant Shapps. (See above)
Much ado about nothing isn't it? 10 years ago, facts are very unclear, sums involved trivial. Slightly underwhelming but not career ending unless Starmer is irritated by her anyway.
I have to agree, even as a Tory commenting about a story involving a Labour Minister this seems a non story. A relatively minor sentence given in a magistrates court for an offence done before election as an MP is not significant. Some MPs have served prison time in the past after all now and the President elect of the USA is a convicted criminal, as long as not a major offence done in office then move on
Maybe, maybe not.
The pretty clear suggestion in that story is that, working for a major company at the time, she was wanting the newest model of mobile that some of her colleagues had and - allegedly - may have sought to achieve this by fabricating and falsely reporting a crime.
If that version of events has any truth in it, it would hardly evidence a character that we should be wanting as one of our ministers of government.
Just no-one mention the still unsolved mystery of the burning down of a certain pet shop…
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
Fact check: they were a relatively small part of the total.
So 665000 of these simply wouldn't have been counted before May changed the rules on counting students?
Which would be madness, because they certainly should count. That's people who are here.
One of the few rational things that May did.
If there's net 665k net extra people in this country then we should know about it in the data for the year that happened, not years later.
That's without getting into a value judgment of whether it is right or wrong to welcome those students into the country and their dependents, but simply that the data should be accurate.
The suggestion has never been not to count students or to have inaccurate numbers. It’s a question of how those numbers are presented.
One thing May did do, which subsequently turned out to be inaccurate, is overestimate how many students stay in the country.
Yes, May did a lot of inaccurate things and bad things, I didn't respect her as a leader as she was a hateful xenophobe.
However it is moot whether people are going to stay or not, the accurate information is who has arrived and who has left.
If people arrive for a 3 year degree they should be classed as arriving. If they depart after it they should be classed as departing.
No different to someone who arrives on a 3 year work contract and 3 year work visa.
I posted statistics on this in the past, and the data was something like (it's Thanksgiving and I may have had a few glasses of wine, so forgive me for doing this from memory):
75% of students returned home 20% of students transferred to other visa types or recieved indefinite leave to remain (i.e. married a Brit) 5% we have no record
Some of the last category will have entered the informal labour market. Some will have gone home, and just weren't tagged.
Much ado about nothing isn't it? 10 years ago, facts are very unclear, sums involved trivial. Slightly underwhelming but not career ending unless Starmer is irritated by her anyway.
I have to agree, even as a Tory commenting about a story involving a Labour Minister this seems a non story. A relatively minor sentence given in a magistrates court for an offence done before election as an MP is not significant. Some MPs have served prison time in the past after all now and the President elect of the USA is a convicted criminal, as long as not a major offence done in office then move on
The only relevant question is this: what are the rules for the civil servants and other public servants that work for her? If they wound be sacked or refused a job, she should either resign or change the rules for them. Otherwise it’s a none story. Only hypocrisy would annoy me.
Thing is, depending on the civil service job and security clearance requirements, I think it might make them unappointable.
A past minor conviction is not a barrier to working in the Dept of Transport. So, no, I don’t think public servants working for her would be sacked.
Somewhat perplexed by Haigh's resignation. On the face of it, the offence seems trivial as well as taking place before she entered parliament. There must be more to it than reported to date and who fed it to the press now and for what benefit?
Did she lie to Starmer about it, perhaps a lie by omission? That’s the impression given from some of the reports.
@BorisJohnson won the Brexit referendum by promising control of our borders. And then he did this
tbf, I thought Boris had been open about increasing non-EU migration. Is this perhaps an area where his supporters heard what they wanted to hear? (Something we shall probably see a great deal of in Trump-land next year.)
“Open”, in the sense of delivering leaflets (only) in areas of major ethnic minority populations, promising them it?
One of things that Lab should do, but they may not be brave enough is to do a more general boundary review, particularly of the boundaries of the metropolitan areas, which haven't been reviewed for at least half a century. For example, the Greater London boundary makes no sense in a lot of places e;g. Worcester Park split between London and Surrey, places like Esher (which blends seamlessly into Surbiton) not in London, but North Ockendon, which is outside the M25 is in London. You could argue for adding new London Boroughs like Watford and Dartford.
A related problem is underbounding of urban areas. A classic example is Nottingham, where most of Broxtowe and Gedling boroughs really ought to be in with the city along with West Bridgford. Other examples that spring to mind are Bristol, Norwich and Reading. Conversely, Leeds is way too big and should lose Wetherby and outlying towns, while Birmingham is unwieldy and should be split into 2-3 councils
The third thing they should do is re-review the 90s unitaries as some of them were quite small. For example, in Berkshire they abolished the county and so we have 6 unitaries for 950k people when 2 would probably be enough.
Of course, the reason why Labour probably won't do this is it is likely to upset a lot of people, particularly if you start telling people in nice houses in places like Gedling that they have to go in with Nottingham
I'm not sure if they want to deal with the politics of it.
On two of those, people I know in Worcester Park very much enjoy being outside London as it avoids some of the extra taxes but they get some benefits. I'm not sure how to do that one, as the same issue will come up wherever the line is drawn.
For Nottingham, I think the Tories at County have been the ones demanding unitarisation, but putting places like Gedling, maybe Rushcliffe, the S end of Ashfield etc, could change the balance of county politics in some measure.
But OTOH Nottingham is a small city. For roads, Notts County is chaotic at best. And as for the Police and Complaints Commissioner.
That's why I'm not a supporter of reorganisation every two decades or so. It leads to investment in reorganisation, not investment in public service.
Nottinghamshire are halfway through building a new £20m (to be fair that's cheap compared to the costs of being the old one up to scratch) new headquarters, and I don't know what will happen to that. Though it's better that it's now towards the middle of the county, rather than in the southern flatlands.
Somewhat perplexed by Haigh's resignation. On the face of it, the offence seems trivial as well as taking place before she entered parliament. There must be more to it than reported to date and who fed it to the press now and for what benefit?
Yeah, it’s weird. Strongly suspect a deeper, darker story which she wants to bury, by swiftly resigning. Otherwise she is one of the most principled ministers in recent history, in which case: chapeau
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
The tens of thousands promise was achievable, as Sweden is now demonstrating. What they lacked was a credible plan. We now need to target negative net migration for a sustained period.
It wasn't achievable as long as we needed those workers. Moreover how is it achievable when around 600,000 of them are students and their dependents at a time when we are massively increasing overseas student numbers.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
We didn't need those workers. The idea of a labour shortage is a myth put about by people with vested interests.
Hahaha. That would be why in September there were 831,000 job vacancies.
Job vacancies do not imply a labour shortage. It's pure propaganda to quote that figure with the implication that we are short of 831,000 workers.
So all those companies who say they can't get workers are lying? Or do you think that somehow they are just imagining the staff shortages?
They are free to offer better pay and conditions to attract people from the pool of inactive people, or tempt people out of early retirement.
The basic point is that a vacany is not a shortage. If you resign from your job, you create a vacancy but not a shortage.
Hence the need for NHS and other public sector pay rises. We have a fair number of unfillable vacancies.
Incidentally, last week the GMC announced that the majority of British registered doctors were non-white. We have lots of British born amongst those numbers, but the rise in numbers of ethnic minority doctors from 2016 to 2023 was 78%, far exceeding the changes in medical school intake. General Practice is particularly affected, with 52% of GP Trainees being migrants.
If we want to manage without medical migration we need to continue to expand Medical Schools and retain skilled senior medical educators like myself, and give them enough time to teach.
Can we just note that the Tories allowed one MILLION migrants, net, in one year
For that alone they deserve to be sent to Hell, for eternal perdition, and Boris fucking "the FT will be my friend" Johnson should go to the 10th circle of Torment
That was the year which included Hong Kong passport holders fleeing the Chinese crack down on democracy and the Ukrainian women and children fleeing the a Russian invasion.
Which would you prefer to have sacrificed?
I don"t think that correct.
From the ONS release today:
"considering country of nationality, the top five non-EU+ nationalities for long-term immigration into the UK in YE June 2024 were:
Indian (240,000)
Nigerian (120,000)
Pakistani (101,000)
Chinese (78,000) *most of these were on Study visas so unlikely to be HK
Zimbabwean (36,000)"
"In YE June 2024, 417,000 non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK for work-related reasons. This is closely followed by study-related immigration (375,000 people). These estimates are consistent with Home Office data on visas granted to non-EU+ nationals.
Other reasons non-EU+ nationals came to live in the UK in YE June 2024 were:
So of the 1.2 million immigrants, asylum and humanitarian (which presumably includes the Ukranians and HK Chinese) were 150 000, including 30 000 small boat arrivals. there were 58 000 Brits immigrating too, which may include some of the HK people.
800 000 were either for work or study, the vast bulk of the non EU immigration.
116 000 EU immigrants came, 211 000 emigrated, so net emigration of 95 000 EU citizens
58 000 British passport holders immigrated, and 79 000 left, so net emigration of 21 000 Britons.
Around 100 000 students left, with 375 000 arriving, so around a quarter of the net immigration, around half of net immigration was on work visas.
Cameron was stupid making promises to reduce net migration to the 10s of thousands
May was stupid adding students to the numbers
Johnson, Truss and Sunak were stupid for maintaining the fiction of trying to reduce migration and blaming it all on boats in the Channel whilst rightly actively encouraging more necessary legal migration.
Starmer is stupid for continuing his narrative and using it to score chesp political points whilst knowing we need this migration and squandering a golden opportunity 4 years out from an election to try and change the whole narrative around migration.
They are all stupid.
Around a quarter of students transfer to other visas historically, so I think they should be in the figures. It varies by origin, with Chinese students having a very high return rate, some of the other originating countries much less so.
If they did all leave then the net would be quite low, but it isn't.
Does "transfer to other visas" include the two years post-degree when they can work by right, or only if they exceed that two years and need an employer to sponsor them?
I don't know.
I think the ONS figures are based on travel surveys at ports/airports not numbers and types of visas issued, so they probably don't know either.
We don't do exit immigration checks, so the numbers leaving may be way out. We dont know in which direction.
It seems obvious to me that we should stamp people out. How else can we know who has overstayed?
Again we did until Labour got rid of exit checks in 1998. The Coalition were going to reintroduce them in 2015 but I don"t think it ever happened.
So there is one very strong conclusion from that, at ~4% of the total migration numbers, small boat arrivals are close to irrelevant. The main culprit for the large number of immigrants into the UK are the businesses importing vast numbers of skilled workers on sponsored visas, short term work visas and business trip visas (e.g. Dyson wanting to employ engineers in Malaysia and fly them in to work in the UK office on rotation) so they can pay below the UK market rate. This has been the case for years, one place I contracted at 15 years ago, the Engineering Director actually held a department lunch meeting where he told us that his plan for the future was to employ professionals in Malaysia and fly them in on temporary business trip visas to work on projects because Clients would no longer accept their projects being f***ed up in "high value engineering centres" and wanted the work done in Europe.
Yep. Small boats are a complete irrelevance and the only reason we should be concerned about them is the number of people dying trying to get across.
We have chosen to import workers and successive Government's have then rung their hands over something that, since Brexit, has been entirely a matter of choice by the politicians.
I had hoped Starmer would have the foresight and the balls to make this explicit but he seems to be following he playbook of all previous PMs and wringing his hands over how terrible it all is and how he will be the one to stop it.
It may only be 4% of immigrants, but it's surely a rather higher percentage of immigrants that we don't want to have. Are we that bothered about high skilled immigration?
The fact that we're allowing Ellen Degeneres in is all the proof you need that the government doesn't care about immigrants having useful skills.
Maybe she gets in as a dependent of Portia de Rossi.
Somewhat perplexed by Haigh's resignation. On the face of it, the offence seems trivial as well as taking place before she entered parliament. There must be more to it than reported to date and who fed it to the press now and for what benefit?
Did she lie to Starmer about it, perhaps a lie by omission? That’s the impression given from some of the reports.
She had to go but I think it’s a pity as she seemed to have some good ideas and appeared quite competent. A rarity in this govt of mediocre non-entity ministers.
Comments
I don't think it's intentional, just that empowered local government is something that sounds right to MPs, but they have no actual interest in making it happen beyond gimmicks like mayors, so things don't really change as much as you'd think.
Like how people might decry centralisation, because its trendy, even as they centralise.
1) The Tories deliberately played the act of tough on migration, all whilst making policy decisions to massively increase migration. Rwanda was nothing more than a 'look over here's tactic to tackle a small percentage of the total.
2) Even as someone very pro migration, 900k per year is clearly an unsustainable pace of migration. Both economically, for infrastructure, and socially. There is a level at which we should ignore industry demands for new labour and let market prices for labour adjust. It's not like it's been a big economic success overall.
3) Labour have an easy win here. The Tories belatedly put the path on the course of reducing migrant numbers. Moderate things further and they can claim halving or more the net migration figures.
One of the few rational things that May did.
If there's net 665k net extra people in this country then we should know about it in the data for the year that happened, not years later.
That's without getting into a value judgment of whether it is right or wrong to welcome those students into the country and their dependents, but simply that the data should be accurate.
It was never a practical or desirable target because it would have wrought huge damage to the NHS, care services, universities and the UK economy as a whole.
Politicians knew this - or at least they bloody well should have known it - and so they simply lied.
I've literally seen a place (albeit a little larger than that) complaining about a 1 property proposal because it would bring young people into their village. In those exact terms.
Regardless, I think ClippP's point was about resources (most parishes that size have very low precept and by definition few people to pay it) and committment (most parishes that scale probably don't have contested elections even for ones at the minimum council size of 5), and are very dependent on a handful of individuals to get anything done (so can break down easily especially when factions develop, or there are technical legal issues to address).
It isn't as easy as just giving them more stuff to do is what I'm saying.
I've seen great parishes, including very small ones. But there are something like 10,000 of them, and most cannot achieve that, cannot even with current powers. Is it worth it for the handful or could?
A lot of the reported damage in the last lot of days has been tied to the US sanctions on Gazprombank, a major flow point for foreign currency into Russia as part of the gas trade, in particular with Europe. That inflow has been shut so there is a reduction of decent foreign currency coming in for the Central bank to spend prop up the ruble's value.
Katrin Ivanova, 33, a lab assistant, and Vanya Gaberova, 30, a beautician, were intended to be "in direct contact" with targets "as sexual bait to capture more information", the Old Bailey heard."
https://news.sky.com/story/russian-spies-in-love-triangle-were-to-be-used-in-honeytrap-operation-across-europe-court-hears-13262616
🌹 LAB: 51.1% (-27.2)
🌳 CON: 37.6% (+15.8)
🌍 GRN: 6.8% (New)
🔶 LDM: 4.6% (New)
Labour HOLD x2.
Changes w/ 2022.
https://www.gov.uk/skilled-worker-visa
Though I would imagine the bureaucratic process of applying whilst living in such a country is fraught.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/31988939/gregg-wallace-steps-down-masterchef-probe/
The basic point is that a vacany is not a shortage. If you resign from your job, you create a vacancy but not a shortage.
"Julia Armstrong
@JuliaAArmstrong
The LibDem candidate has just won the @SheffCouncil Woodhouse by-election, beating the Reform UK candidate by 10 votes after a recount. Labour came third."
https://x.com/JuliaAArmstrong/status/1862291568553607522
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdje0kp7zewo
Of course again nobody in any position of responsibility will have known nothing...for 25 years....just like they were totally shocked that Wusselly Brand was sex pest, who could have guessed. Nobody in showbiz gossips about who they work with to others....
I wonder why is it coming out now?
That's without considering that any firms who struggle to fill a vacancy it might be because they offer poor terms and conditions.
Do you think it would ever be possible or desirable to have a situation where there are zero vacancies?
Thing is, depending on the civil service job and security clearance requirements, I think it might make them unappointable.
LDM: 33.0% (+26.8)
RFM: 32.7% (New)
LAB: 21.1% (-36.8)
CON: 5.0% (-9.5)
GRN: 5.4% (-4.5)
TUSC: 1.8% (-1.0)
SDP: 1.1% (New)
31.8% swing LAB to LDs but the Reform vote is also SKS fans explanation material
Starmer the dedicated cruncher of numbers and expert of running big Departments will be fully aware that IF he can reduce still the number IN especially if he can prove it is skills based, then the number OUT will take care of itself. close the pipe at the top and let it flood out at the bottom
The 5% that are illegals and more determined by weather than any other single factor can be at least reduced by the numerous measures and traties he's signing across Europe and further afield allowing him to reduce the backlog in those here being processed which he is already doing at twice - three times the run rate the Tories ever did.
If he can reduce the headline figure to 200-250 k by mid 2027 - early 2028 and reduce the illegals to 10-15k and process them within 3 months and close the hotels etc....he can rightly claim to have done enough to convince all but the boneheads that he deserves a 2nd term on at least the immigration issue...
A similar progress on NHS waiting lists and a stabilised economy and he is looking at the sort of majority Blair had in 2005...
Ukraine has said that it does not want to renew the deal when it runs out on January 1st, so AIUI Russia has thrown its toys out of its pram and stopped shipment early - in part because those countries stopped paying it early, due to Russia illegally cutting off supplies for a period in 2022 ("You didn't supply the gas; we'll not pay for some gas at the end of the contract.")
Since there is no gas being supplied, there is no reason for Gazprombank (who received the payments for the gas) to have an exemption to the sanctions.
And this may hurt Russia, as it is alleged that Gazprombank has been doing rather more business than usual, almost as if the Russians were using it to get around sanctions. ("Yes, Gazprom really need these aerosapce machine tools...")
Still, their closure of the domestic market (as they did for period last year) stops my watch-the-ruble-tumble game for the moment.
(*) Hungary (obvs...), Austria, Slovakia
https://x.com/TRHLofficial/status/1862233320228089968
But what we have here is another example of hypocrisy: Labour lies fine, Tory lies EVIL!!!!
One thing May did do, which subsequently turned out to be inaccurate, is overestimate how many students stay in the country.
Have any of these people been anywhere close to a private-sector company not involved in public procurement?
But the terrorism conducted by Kurdish groups such as the PKK is condemnable (*). Are the Kurds in Syria the good guys, or the bad guys? Turks would say the latter; Kurds and Syrians against Assad might say the former.
(*) Interestingly, there have been some arrests in the UK this week:
https://news.met.police.uk/news/update-on-counter-terrorism-investigation-into-suspected-pkk-activity-491146
https://x.com/nigella_lawson/status/1862171211607757024?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Someone must have studied this.
Even if that version of events is true, still seems quite extraordinary to be actually criminally done in court for misreporting, rather than somewhere between letting it slide and warning from the plod.
And now all years later to resign. Something doesn't quite add up.
Which post 1945 Govt was the worst for resignations?
She has a massive majority but in the current conditions a by election could go anywhere
In pretty much every other western democracy, making the sort of changes to local government that in the UK have been commonplace, with ceaseless meddling, controlling, instructing and reorganising, requires constitutional amendment, and with it lots of procedure and checks and balances that have the general effect of making it difficult or impossible, or at least exceedingly rare.
However it is moot whether people are going to stay or not, the accurate information is who has arrived and who has left.
If people arrive for a 3 year degree they should be classed as arriving. If they depart after it they should be classed as departing.
No different to someone who arrives on a 3 year work contract and 3 year work visa.
The pretty clear suggestion in that story is that, working for a major company at the time, she was wanting the newest model of mobile that some of her colleagues had and - allegedly - may have sought to achieve this by fabricating and falsely reporting a crime.
If that version of events has any truth in it, it would hardly evidence a character that we should be wanting as one of our ministers of government.
Just no-one mention the still unsolved mystery of the burning down of a certain pet shop…
75% of students returned home
20% of students transferred to other visa types or recieved indefinite leave to remain (i.e. married a Brit)
5% we have no record
Some of the last category will have entered the informal labour market. Some will have gone home, and just weren't tagged.
"Closure of Ryanair customer service department could cost up to two jobs, say industry insiders."
On two of those, people I know in Worcester Park very much enjoy being outside London as it avoids some of the extra taxes but they get some benefits. I'm not sure how to do that one, as the same issue will come up wherever the line is drawn.
For Nottingham, I think the Tories at County have been the ones demanding unitarisation, but putting places like Gedling, maybe Rushcliffe, the S end of Ashfield etc, could change the balance of county politics in some measure.
But OTOH Nottingham is a small city. For roads, Notts County is chaotic at best. And as for the Police and Complaints Commissioner.
That's why I'm not a supporter of reorganisation every two decades or so. It leads to investment in reorganisation, not investment in public service.
Nottinghamshire are halfway through building a new £20m (to be fair that's cheap compared to the costs of being the old one up to scratch) new headquarters, and I don't know what will happen to that. Though it's better that it's now towards the middle of the county, rather than in the southern flatlands.
That’s a real shock.
Nobody ever suspected they had one.
Incidentally, last week the GMC announced that the majority of British registered doctors were non-white. We have lots of British born amongst those numbers, but the rise in numbers of ethnic minority doctors from 2016 to 2023 was 78%, far exceeding the changes in medical school intake. General Practice is particularly affected, with 52% of GP Trainees being migrants.
If we want to manage without medical migration we need to continue to expand Medical Schools and retain skilled senior medical educators like myself, and give them enough time to teach.