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 think that she is somewhat unlikely to trouble the benefits system. A country as broke as this finds it hard to say no to people with money.
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.
They are. No-one ever suggested otherwise. The question was what figure to present for “total immigration” and how. Is it useful to lump together these different groups? Would it be clearer to the public to subdivide them, or present them differently?
I don’t know. But it is very clear that most of the public don’t understand the headline figures.
If there isn't any more to the Haigh story, it sets a very high standard for the rest of this administration's ministers. I suppose that would be admirable, but Starmer is going to have years of "well Haigh resigned for this, so why won't you sack..."
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.
Good morning
Yesterday's 'dire day for the Tories' turns into a cabinet minister's resignation this morning despite the amateur attempt to downplay the story
Never mind, with labour in free fall maybe every little helps in the mind of this poster
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
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.
Either skills or money are required. Doesn’t pretty much every country give you a resident visa if you buy a big enough house?
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 really hope we don't allow her to stay in the country.
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 really hope we don't allow her to stay in the country.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Yep - but that's what comes of not solving the problem of processing claims by employing staff. Instead the previous Government gave money to hotel owners as the time to process a claim went from x months to y years...
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
And this is an area where we need to give credit to the new government. They have actually stepped up the removal of those whose applications failed.
If there isn't any more to the Haigh story, it sets a very high standard for the rest of this administration's ministers. I suppose that would be admirable, but Starmer is going to have years of "well Haigh resigned for this, so why won't you sack..."
Does Louise Haigh like or hate Rachel Reeves? if its the latter that plays a part here...
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Yep - but that's what comes of not solving the problem of processing claims by employing staff. Instead the previous Government gave money to hotel owners as the time to process a claim went from x months to y years...
End the right to asylum and deport everyone instantly
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
The irony is restrictions on legal immigration will make looking after asylum seekers even more expensive, as the cost of labour increases.
And this is "processing" anyway - preventative spending to stop the overall costs of asylum seekers going up.
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?
I don't think asylum seekers tend to be particularly low skilled. Indeed many are middle class or university educated, and persecuted by the authorities in their native land for that reason. It's often the middle class political activists that oppressive regimes target, and they are also the ones with the financial and social capital to be able to fleeing long distances.
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 really hope we don't allow her to stay in the country.
Well, all I can say is that her departure has made Southern California a more attractive place to be.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Yep - but that's what comes of not solving the problem of processing claims by employing staff. Instead the previous Government gave money to hotel owners as the time to process a claim went from x months to y years...
End the right to asylum and deport everyone instantly
There. Sorted
That would massively increase processing costs, and you'd be back whining about it on here.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Yep - but that's what comes of not solving the problem of processing claims by employing staff. Instead the previous Government gave money to hotel owners as the time to process a claim went from x months to y years...
End the right to asylum and deport everyone instantly
There. Sorted
You do know that there are countries that have managed to largely solve the issue, without being total c*nts, right?
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Yep - but that's what comes of not solving the problem of processing claims by employing staff. Instead the previous Government gave money to hotel owners as the time to process a claim went from x months to y years...
End the right to asylum and deport everyone instantly
There. Sorted
That would massively increase processing costs, and you'd be back whining about it on here.
Don't worry, he'd simply suggest machine gunning them in the boats. (And he'd charge psychopaths for the pleasure, thus making it a revenue generator for the government.)
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
REFORM have been doing amazingly well in council by-election recently. Even in places they have normally been weak like Glasgow where they haven't won the seat but are getting share which is much more than all the other iterations of Reform
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 really hope we don't allow her to stay in the country.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
That does raise it's own question, though. Which is why the rate of acceptance is so much higher in the UK than in other countries?
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.
Either skills or money are required. Doesn’t pretty much every country give you a resident visa if you buy a big enough house?
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
The odd change has very occasionally happened, if not to the GLC/GLA area, then within it, such as here:
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
That does raise it's own question, though. Which is why the rate of acceptance is so much higher in the UK than in other countries?
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.
Fact check: they were 264,000 (assuming all the humanitarian BNO was Hong Kong)
@Leon was focused on the number being greater than 1.0 million
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Yep - but that's what comes of not solving the problem of processing claims by employing staff. Instead the previous Government gave money to hotel owners as the time to process a claim went from x months to y years...
End the right to asylum and deport everyone instantly
There. Sorted
That would massively increase processing costs, and you'd be back whining about it on here.
No he won't. Because he is much more worried about the cultural cost of immigration than the actual financial costs. For Leon I suspect it would be a price worth paying.
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 really hope we don't allow her to stay in the country.
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.
There are very big differences by country of origin though. 99% of Chinese return, but far fewer from the Middle East or Africa. These are also much more likely to bring spouses and dependents.
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?
I don't think asylum seekers tend to be particularly low skilled. Indeed many are middle class or university educated, and persecuted by the authorities in their native land for that reason. It's often the middle class political activists that oppressive regimes target, and they are also the ones with the financial and social capital to be able to fleeing long distances.
Do you really, honestly believe most asylum seekers are genuinely “persecuted gays” or “oppressed Arab Christians” etc etc? Rather than young men fleeing impoverished countries for better economic chances in a richer country? Who can’t get in any other way?
Really???
I mean, there’s credulity and then there’s idiocy. I’ll put you down as “well-meaning credulous”
For clarity, I don’t blame these young men. This is what young men have done through history. Go west, young man!
Trouble is we can no longer take these numbers and allowing them to stay makes a mockery of the system and is, inter alia, an insult to those who try to legally migrate, and go through all the hoops
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?
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Top tips:
Dont spend another £900m to find 4 volunteers to leave the country. Process claims quickly so we can use the intended accommodation we have for this purpose rather than chain hotels. Allow claimants waiting longer than a month to work and fund themselves.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
That does raise it's own question, though. Which is why the rate of acceptance is so much higher in the UK than in other countries?
We’re soft.
My wife is friends with Nadya Tolokonnikova, and there are clearly a number of people who are persecuted for their political beliefs, and it would be wrong to refuse them asylum.
But at the same time, it's hard to believe quite so many of them have fled persecution, rather than merely (and understandably) seeking better economic outcomes in the developed world.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Yep - but that's what comes of not solving the problem of processing claims by employing staff. Instead the previous Government gave money to hotel owners as the time to process a claim went from x months to y years...
End the right to asylum and deport everyone instantly
There. Sorted
You do know that there are countries that have managed to largely solve the issue, without being total c*nts, right?
I was being ironically provocative. Calm down and take a quaalude
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Top tips:
Dont spend another £900m to find 4 volunteers to leave the country. Process claims quickly so we can use the intended accommodation we have for this purpose rather than chain hotels. Allow claimants waiting longer than a month to work and fund themselves.
Unitarisation is nothing new. We were on the receiving end in Shropshire 15 or more years ago.
Has it worked? Hard to say. We get a fraction of the services we used to get at greater cost. The planners are clueless about the places they oversee.
Personally I would have kept the districts, greater accountability etc., and got rid of the Counties. What we really need at that level is Regional Government that can make strategic decisions on infrastructure.
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?
Also 500,000 of dependents.
We just need to be tougher on who we let in
Making it easier to immigrate dependents from the Indian subcontinent was precisely how Brexit was pitched to ethnic minority voters…
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
That does raise it's own question, though. Which is why the rate of acceptance is so much higher in the UK than in other countries?
Can we disentangle differences in decision making from differences in applicants?
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'm not particularly a fan, but Ms DeGeneres is clearly very capable at what she does, and media is a big industry.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Yep - but that's what comes of not solving the problem of processing claims by employing staff. Instead the previous Government gave money to hotel owners as the time to process a claim went from x months to y years...
End the right to asylum and deport everyone instantly
There. Sorted
You do know that there are countries that have managed to largely solve the issue, without being total c*nts, right?
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
That does raise it's own question, though. Which is why the rate of acceptance is so much higher in the UK than in other countries?
A lot of the cases come down to "I don't believe you." Our appellate courts have demanded reasons for that assessment based on the admittedly limited evidence available. Our first instance immigration judges have got the message and will reject claims where there is inconsistencies in the account but accept those which might be thought to be incredible. I don't know enough about other countries' systems to know if we are unusual in that but these increasing tendencies are driving up the success rate of applications.
REFORM have been doing amazingly well in council by-election recently. Even in places they have normally been weak like Glasgow where they haven't won the seat but are getting share which is much more than all the other iterations of Reform
Makes sense. Reform voters tend to have very low levels of education, low incomes, live in social housing, in their 50s and 60s. There are a lot of people like that in Glasgow.
Remember that Scotland's cities are much "whiter" than English ones, so you can't really make a comparison when it comes to ethnicity. Eg 81% white compared to 49% in Birmingham.
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
I think there is more to the story than is in the public domain
I want to stress any implication from the following is pure speculation on my part and may not be true. However there was a comment on Radio 4 this morning that Aviva (Haigh’s employer) only reported it to the police because multiple phones had been lost/stolen in unusual circumstances.
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 really hope we don't allow her to stay in the country.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
That does raise it's own question, though. Which is why the rate of acceptance is so much higher in the UK than in other countries?
Can we disentangle differences in decision making from differences in applicants?
Not easily.
And, of course, Britain has been a haven for many fleeing persecution in the past - whether French Huguenots. Kenyan Asians, or Eastern European Jews.
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
Taking the bins out for 200 people would definitely make the clerks stronger!
Unitarisation is nothing new. We were on the receiving end in Shropshire 15 or more years ago.
Has it worked? Hard to say. We get a fraction of the services we used to get at greater cost. The planners are clueless about the places they oversee.
Personally I would have kept the districts, greater accountability etc., and got rid of the Counties. What we really need at that level is Regional Government that can make strategic decisions on infrastructure.
And caps on earnings of executives.
The suggestions for unitary authorities in Staffordshire and Gloucestershire are so bad many of them are actually funny.*
But then you look at what happened in Cheshire and Shropshire and don’t feel like laughing.
*Both counties have of course already been partially unitarised, which makes things more complicated.
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'm not particularly a fan, but Ms DeGeneres is clearly very capable at what she does, and media is a big industry.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
That does raise it's own question, though. Which is why the rate of acceptance is so much higher in the UK than in other countries?
We’re soft.
My wife is friends with Nadya Tolokonnikova, and there are clearly a number of people who are persecuted for their political beliefs, and it would be wrong to refuse them asylum.
But at the same time, it's hard to believe quite so many of them have fled persecution, rather than merely (and understandably) seeking better economic outcomes in the developed world.
Is it believable that 62% of them warrant asylum and 38% of them are just seeking better economic outcomes? (Because 62% is the current initial acceptance rate.)
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Top tips:
Dont spend another £900m to find 4 volunteers to leave the country. Process claims quickly so we can use the intended accommodation we have for this purpose rather than chain hotels. Allow claimants waiting longer than a month to work and fund themselves.
Next.
Or just don't let them in.
If the country really wants that we have to leave various treaties. It is doable to an extent, some will always come, but it is not consistent with expecting to remain a major soft power which brings benefits economically, culturally and politically. Googling a list of countries that don't accept asylum would put us in the category of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, if that is your politics so be it.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Top tips:
Dont spend another £900m to find 4 volunteers to leave the country. Process claims quickly so we can use the intended accommodation we have for this purpose rather than chain hotels. Allow claimants waiting longer than a month to work and fund themselves.
Next.
Or just don't let them in.
How do you do that then once they've left France in a boat?
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
Assuming the decision was agreed, I think they got this one wrong, and it should have been treated as a nothing from the distant past. "Discharge, an oversight on her part, a nothhing sentence, now a spent offence, and she's doing moving forward on a critically important job,"
She is one Cabinet Minister who has hit the ground running; it's barely been 3 months of Parliamentary time since the Election and the bill to change the ownership of the Rail System received Royal Assent yesterday.
Plus we already have a Road Safety Review coming imminently, which was promised in 2014 with nothing happening since. Out first Transport Minister with a clue and a strategy for a lot of years, and we needed her - or somebody with strategy - in post for 3 or 4 years at least.
Politically I wonder if this indicates that Mr Starmer has a glass jaw when he should have faced this down. A precedent of feeding sausages to a whining wolf will not help him.
But I think she will be back in the not distant future.
I'll be interested to see what the panoramic (sorry: that's a bit strained) duo from the Rest is Politics say.
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
I think there is more to the story than is in the public domain
I want to stress any implication from the following is pure speculation on my part and may not be true. However there was a comment on Radio 4 this morning that Aviva (Haigh’s employer) only reported it to the police because multiple phones had been lost/stolen in unusual circumstances.
The age of the story though, the fact it's IN the public domain and the fact that dud diligence at Cabinet Appointment would have picked the "discharge" verdict up suggests they could have ridden out the storm quite easily
Starmer did say he would be tough on indiscretions and this is certainly TOUGH . It's certainly less of an indiscretion than Shapps for multiple ID and Hunt for conveniently forgetting he had multiple Houses when initially filling in his Tax Returns.
She can return surely at some point on that basis.
The could be a MASSIVE sting in the tail though for Tories with numerous issues for Members of the SHADOW Cabinet now likely to be revisited by morgan McSweeney and Labour supporting papers and lets not forget the BIGGEST possible scalp of all...the self confessed WEBSITE HACKER!.
Issues too aplenty for Reform with Anderson and the Essex MP and still ongoing allegations made by Anderson and Jenkyns that they were offer "payment to defect to Reform"
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
Assuming the decision was agreed, I think they got this one wrong, and it should have been treated as a nothing from the distant past. "Discharge, an oversight on her part, a nothhing sentence, now a spent offence, and she's doing moving forward on a critically important job,"
She is one Cabinet Minister who has hit the ground running; it's barely been 3 months of Parliamentary time since the Election and the bill to change the ownership of the Rail System received Royal Assent yesterday.
Plus we already have a Road Safety Review coming imminently, which was promised in 2014 with nothing happening since. Out first Transport Minister with a clue and a strategy for a lot of years, and we needed her - or somebody with strategy - in post for 3 or 4 years at least.
Politically I wonder if this indicates that Mr Starmer has a glass jaw when he should have faced this down. A precedent of feeding sausages to a whining wolf will not help him.
But I think she will be back in the not distant future.
I'll be interested to see what the panoramic (sorry: that's a bit strained) duo from the Rest is Politics say.
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?
Also 500,000 of dependents.
We just need to be tougher on who we let in
Making it easier to immigrate dependents from the Indian subcontinent was precisely how Brexit was pitched to ethnic minority voters…
Successfully too. I remember talking with a number of our Filipino nurses over the issue. They resented a prolonged and expensive visa process while Spanish and Portuguese took a week to get registration and no visa required.
All our new nursing recruits are from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kerala or the Phillipines, and many bring families. All our Spanish and Portuguese nurses have gone, except one who married an Englishman. Similarly our Greek, Italian, Belgian and Spanish junior doctors have gone, being replaced with Nigerians and Egyptians.
Brexit has brought tremendous cultural change to the country, making us less European, but wasn't that the point?
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?
Also 500,000 of dependents.
We just need to be tougher on who we let in
Making it easier to immigrate dependents from the Indian subcontinent was precisely how Brexit was pitched to ethnic minority voters…
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
Ferry likely.
A shame though, if so. She was quite right in what she said.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
That does raise it's own question, though. Which is why the rate of acceptance is so much higher in the UK than in other countries?
Can we disentangle differences in decision making from differences in applicants?
Not easily.
And, of course, Britain has been a haven for many fleeing persecution in the past - whether French Huguenots. Kenyan Asians, or Eastern European Jews.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
That does raise it's own question, though. Which is why the rate of acceptance is so much higher in the UK than in other countries?
Can we disentangle differences in decision making from differences in applicants?
Not easily.
And, of course, Britain has been a haven for many fleeing persecution in the past - whether French Huguenots. Kenyan Asians, or Eastern European Jews.
Although plenty of the public and in the press were opposed to the latter two.
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
Assuming the decision was agreed, I think they got this one wrong, and it should have been treated as a nothing from the distant past. "Discharge, an oversight on her part, a nothhing sentence, now a spent offence, and she's doing moving forward on a critically important job,"
She is one Cabinet Minister who has hit the ground running; it's barely been 3 months of Parliamentary time since the Election and the bill to change the ownership of the Rail System received Royal Assent yesterday.
Plus we already have a Road Safety Review coming imminently, which was promised in 2014 with nothing happening since. Out first Transport Minister with a clue and a strategy for a lot of years, and we needed her - or somebody with strategy - in post for 3 or 4 years at least.
Politically I wonder if this indicates that Mr Starmer has a glass jaw when he should have faced this down. A precedent of feeding sausages to a whining wolf will not help him.
But I think she will be back in the not distant future.
I'll be interested to see what the panoramic (sorry: that's a bit strained) duo from the Rest is Politics say.
When you say ‘sausages…’
I don't mean Greg McVegTalk.
Though had a lockjaw staffie been around to supply the appropriate remedy to the dancing sock, it may turn out to have helped him in the long term.
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
Ferry likely.
A shame though, if so. She was quite right in what she said.
Just a shame her ministerial career turned into roll on, roll off....
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?
Also 500,000 of dependents.
We just need to be tougher on who we let in
Making it easier to immigrate dependents from the Indian subcontinent was precisely how Brexit was pitched to ethnic minority voters…
Successfully too. I remember talking with a number of our Filipino nurses over the issue. They resented a prolonged and expensive visa process while Spanish and Portuguese took a week to get registration and no visa required.
All our new nursing recruits are from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kerala or the Phillipines, and many bring families. All our Spanish and Portuguese nurses have gone, except one who married an Englishman. Similarly our Greek, Italian, Belgian and Spanish junior doctors have gone, being replaced with Nigerians and Egyptians.
Brexit has brought tremendous cultural change to the country, making us less European, but wasn't that the point?
Brexit was a coalition of at least three or four parts. For the groups you mention and the Singapore on Thames free traders yes it was part of the plan. For those against immigration, on both the left and the right it was clearly not.
The incoherence of the Brexit plan has and will continue to cause far more damage to UK society than the Brexit concept itself.
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?
That’s why we spend so much time trying to estimate NAIRU - the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment
Essentially what is the right level of vacancies: the rule of thumb is below 3-4% unemployment suggests the economy is at risk of overheating
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
Ferry likely.
A shame though, if so. She was quite right in what she said.
Just a shame her ministerial career turned into roll on, roll off....
Better than sucking up to greedy twits like P&O and becoming the Herald of Free Enterprise.
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
Assuming the decision was agreed, I think they got this one wrong, and it should have been treated as a nothing from the distant past. "Discharge, an oversight on her part, a nothhing sentence, now a spent offence, and she's doing moving forward on a critically important job,"
She is one Cabinet Minister who has hit the ground running; it's barely been 3 months of Parliamentary time since the Election and the bill to change the ownership of the Rail System received Royal Assent yesterday.
Plus we already have a Road Safety Review coming imminently, which was promised in 2014 with nothing happening since. Out first Transport Minister with a clue and a strategy for a lot of years, and we needed her - or somebody with strategy - in post for 3 or 4 years at least.
Politically I wonder if this indicates that Mr Starmer has a glass jaw when he should have faced this down. A precedent of feeding sausages to a whining wolf will not help him.
But I think she will be back in the not distant future.
I'll be interested to see what the panoramic (sorry: that's a bit strained) duo from the Rest is Politics say.
Let's see what else comes out. It sounds like an insurance scam, and she was caught.
Pity, because I thought her a bright spark in a dull cabinet, a good communicator and an effective Transport Secretary of State. I even had a nibble on her as next leader.
I suspect there were political differences with the Starmerites too, and that she will be back in time.
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
Assuming the decision was agreed, I think they got this one wrong, and it should have been treated as a nothing from the distant past. "Discharge, an oversight on her part, a nothhing sentence, now a spent offence, and she's doing moving forward on a critically important job,"
She is one Cabinet Minister who has hit the ground running; it's barely been 3 months of Parliamentary time since the Election and the bill to change the ownership of the Rail System received Royal Assent yesterday.
Plus we already have a Road Safety Review coming imminently, which was promised in 2014 with nothing happening since. Out first Transport Minister with a clue and a strategy for a lot of years, and we needed her - or somebody with strategy - in post for 3 or 4 years at least.
Politically I wonder if this indicates that Mr Starmer has a glass jaw when he should have faced this down. A precedent of feeding sausages to a whining wolf will not help him.
But I think she will be back in the not distant future.
I'll be interested to see what the panoramic (sorry: that's a bit strained) duo from the Rest is Politics say.
When you say ‘sausages…’
I don't mean Greg McVegTalk.
Though had a lockjaw staffie been around to supply the appropriate remedy to the dancing sock, it may turn out to have helped him in the long term.
Salty meatballs .... yeah.
Can I be honest and say I have not the slightest idea what this comment is about?
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
The fact that Starmer apparently already knew all the details of the alleged offence, years back, puts him in a tight spot.
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
The fact that Starmer apparently already knew all the details of the alleged offence, years back, puts him in a tight spot.
Are you hinting this could Welby career ending for him?
The Haigh resignation was inevitable. She’s pulled the trigger now before it was pulled for her.
It doesn’t matter that this was a minor issue a long time ago. The X-wing shitstorm would have made hay for day after day until she had to go.
In going she does everyone a huge favour. The resignation bar is now absurdly close to the ground. And there are sooooo many shysters out there with closeted skeletons. The X- wing “media” should have been careful what they wished for as this now means open season on anyone. And there are so many Tory / FUK targets to aim at.
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
The fact that Starmer apparently already knew all the details of the alleged offence, years back, puts him in a tight spot.
Starmer will probably have looked on this as a DPP, who would think that she had served her time and the conviction is long expired, when he appointed her. That's his training in these matters.
He can't really think like a politician and he has no political judgement, not having served an apprenticeship on the backbenches and in junior ministerial office.
So I'm inclined to the cockup not conspiracy thinking on this one.
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
Assuming the decision was agreed, I think they got this one wrong, and it should have been treated as a nothing from the distant past. "Discharge, an oversight on her part, a nothhing sentence, now a spent offence, and she's doing moving forward on a critically important job,"
She is one Cabinet Minister who has hit the ground running; it's barely been 3 months of Parliamentary time since the Election and the bill to change the ownership of the Rail System received Royal Assent yesterday.
Plus we already have a Road Safety Review coming imminently, which was promised in 2014 with nothing happening since. Out first Transport Minister with a clue and a strategy for a lot of years, and we needed her - or somebody with strategy - in post for 3 or 4 years at least.
Politically I wonder if this indicates that Mr Starmer has a glass jaw when he should have faced this down. A precedent of feeding sausages to a whining wolf will not help him.
But I think she will be back in the not distant future.
I'll be interested to see what the panoramic (sorry: that's a bit strained) duo from the Rest is Politics say.
When you say ‘sausages…’
I don't mean Greg McVegTalk.
Though had a lockjaw staffie been around to supply the appropriate remedy to the dancing sock, it may turn out to have helped him in the long term.
Salty meatballs .... yeah.
Can I be honest and say I have not the slightest idea what this comment is about?
I'll explain the name, but for the rest you need to read more tabloids, and get to know a few staffies ... at arms length *.
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
Ferry likely.
A shame though, if so. She was quite right in what she said.
Just a shame her ministerial career turned into roll on, roll off....
Better than sucking up to greedy twits like P&O and becoming the Herald of Free Enterprise.
Yes, I suspect she was too Red, Funnel-ing trade union anger at Starmer cosying up to financial interests like Blackrock.
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?
That fact that it was before Govt is irrelevant.
It's not entirely - since she disclosed it to Starmer before government. Which is why this is a resignation and not a sacking.
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 really hope we don't allow her to stay in the country.
The incoherence of the Brexit plan has and will continue to cause far more damage to UK society than the Brexit concept itself.
The incoherence of the Brexit plan is indivisible from the Brexit concept.
There is no version of the concept that isn't entirely incoherent in delivery.
I disagree. It is just that if Singapore in Thames had been faithfully pitched the result would have been 70-30 against. If it had been anti immigration Little Englander it would have been 65-35 against. Corbynite marxist nirvane 75-25 against. Any of those were internally coherent, just not very popular.
The only way Brexit could win was by melding these groups together but it could never deliver what was promised in order to do so.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Top tips:
Dont spend another £900m to find 4 volunteers to leave the country. Process claims quickly so we can use the intended accommodation we have for this purpose rather than chain hotels. Allow claimants waiting longer than a month to work and fund themselves.
Next.
Or just don't let them in.
How do you do that then once they've left France in a boat?
Scweam and scweam until you’re sick?
We either find a pan-European solution or we have no solution. Tories pulled us out of everything including the ability to deport back to Europe. This is what they explicitly wanted - note the vast surge in numbers since they took back control. That isn’t accident or cock-up, it’s planned.
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
In large part, however, this is because our system is not funded or resourced to make decisions. Pretty much 80% of claims succeed but our major discouragement is that we make people wait, often for years, in a legal no man's land, unable to work, to enter into leases for their own accommodation, to have bank accounts etc etc in the hope they get fed up and leave. It seems more than a tad hypocritical to moan about the cost when that is the actual policy.
That does raise it's own question, though. Which is why the rate of acceptance is so much higher in the UK than in other countries?
We’re soft.
My wife is friends with Nadya Tolokonnikova, and there are clearly a number of people who are persecuted for their political beliefs, and it would be wrong to refuse them asylum.
But at the same time, it's hard to believe quite so many of them have fled persecution, rather than merely (and understandably) seeking better economic outcomes in the developed world.
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?
Also 500,000 of dependents.
We just need to be tougher on who we let in
Making it easier to immigrate dependents from the Indian subcontinent was precisely how Brexit was pitched to ethnic minority voters…
Buried in the poonami of migration stats is the fact that the bill for “processing” asylum seekers went from ~£3.5bn to ~£5.5bn in one single year. A rise of 38%. In one year
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
Yep - but that's what comes of not solving the problem of processing claims by employing staff. Instead the previous Government gave money to hotel owners as the time to process a claim went from x months to y years...
Where y was essentially a lifetime. The "send them all to Rwanda" mirage meant that the backlog in hotel limbo was just going to grow.
The previous government had just given up on everything.
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 really hope we don't allow her to stay in the country.
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?
Also 500,000 of dependents.
We just need to be tougher on who we let in
Making it easier to immigrate dependents from the Indian subcontinent was precisely how Brexit was pitched to ethnic minority voters…
Presumably, this was Haigh’s decision alone. I think she’s calculated that it’s best to resign now before it becomes a saga. A lot of people won’t even notice. She can come back in a year or two when it’s all forgotten.
If Starmer knew about this stuff when he put her in the shadow cabinet, then he had already made his decision.
As someone who has no interest in keeping up with the latest technology fashion, I think what she did is pretty bad, but appreciate plenty of others on here have sympathy with the trappings of tech fashion and white collar crime.
The Haigh resignation was inevitable. She’s pulled the trigger now before it was pulled for her.
It doesn’t matter that this was a minor issue a long time ago. The X-wing shitstorm would have made hay for day after day until she had to go.
In going she does everyone a huge favour. The resignation bar is now absurdly close to the ground. And there are sooooo many shysters out there with closeted skeletons. The X- wing “media” should have been careful what they wished for as this now means open season on anyone. And there are so many Tory / FUK targets to aim at.
Yes, but that may also include more Labour figures.
I think the Haigh timings are interesting. The 'mugging' happened in 2013, but she was sentenced in 2014. She was selected for her parliamentary seat in May 2014, and was elected in 2015. Did the sentencing happen before or after selection, and who knew about it?
As an aside, this conviction is exactly the sort of thing the electorate should know about a candidate. Not letting the electorate know about it is a little... shitty.
The Haigh resignation was inevitable. She’s pulled the trigger now before it was pulled for her.
It doesn’t matter that this was a minor issue a long time ago. The X-wing shitstorm would have made hay for day after day until she had to go.
In going she does everyone a huge favour. The resignation bar is now absurdly close to the ground. And there are sooooo many shysters out there with closeted skeletons. The X- wing “media” should have been careful what they wished for as this now means open season on anyone. And there are so many Tory / FUK targets to aim at.
And it's also admirably prompt. A reminder that the "trying to ride things out for weeks or months" thing of recent years was the aberration. Yes, Boris, I am calling you an aberration.
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
The fact that Starmer apparently already knew all the details of the alleged offence, years back, puts him in a tight spot.
Starmer will probably have looked on this as a DPP, who would think that she had served her time and the conviction is long expired, when he appointed her. That's his training in these matters.
He can't really think like a politician and he has no political judgement, not having served an apprenticeship on the backbenches and in junior ministerial office.
So I'm inclined to the cockup not conspiracy thinking on this one.
Does your line of reasoning also explain why Farage was fine with McMurdock’s past conviction for assault?
The Haigh resignation was inevitable. She’s pulled the trigger now before it was pulled for her.
It doesn’t matter that this was a minor issue a long time ago. The X-wing shitstorm would have made hay for day after day until she had to go.
In going she does everyone a huge favour. The resignation bar is now absurdly close to the ground. And there are sooooo many shysters out there with closeted skeletons. The X- wing “media” should have been careful what they wished for as this now means open season on anyone. And there are so many Tory / FUK targets to aim at.
Yes, but that may also include more Labour figures.
I think the Haigh timings are interesting. The 'mugging' happened in 2013, but she was sentenced in 2014. She was selected for her parliamentary seat in May 2014, and was elected in 2015. Did the sentencing happen before or after selection, and who knew about it?
As an aside, this conviction is exactly the sort of thing the electorate should know about a candidate. Not letting the electorate know about it is a little... shitty.
Convictions are public knowledge, aren’t they? Was anything hidden from the electorate?
The Haigh resignation was inevitable. She’s pulled the trigger now before it was pulled for her.
It doesn’t matter that this was a minor issue a long time ago. The X-wing shitstorm would have made hay for day after day until she had to go.
In going she does everyone a huge favour. The resignation bar is now absurdly close to the ground. And there are sooooo many shysters out there with closeted skeletons. The X- wing “media” should have been careful what they wished for as this now means open season on anyone. And there are so many Tory / FUK targets to aim at.
Yes, but that may also include more Labour figures.
I think the Haigh timings are interesting. The 'mugging' happened in 2013, but she was sentenced in 2014. She was selected for her parliamentary seat in May 2014, and was elected in 2015. Did the sentencing happen before or after selection, and who knew about it?
As an aside, this conviction is exactly the sort of thing the electorate should know about a candidate. Not letting the electorate know about it is a little... shitty.
Convictions are public knowledge, aren’t they? Was anything hidden from the electorate?
That should be easy to find out: how much her 2015 electoral and press material mentioned it...
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
It seems far more likely to me that she has been hung out to dry by Starmer for completely unrelated reasons. On what we know to date should could have survived this if there had been support from the PM but she seems to have got a resounding silence instead.
Maybe the story was leaked as a way of getting rid of her after the P&O embarrassment.
The fact that Starmer apparently already knew all the details of the alleged offence, years back, puts him in a tight spot.
Are you hinting this could Welby career ending for him?
Nope - it's showing that there is such a thing as rehabilitation...
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?
That fact that it was before Govt is irrelevant.
It's not entirely - since she disclosed it to Starmer before government. Which is why this is a resignation and not a sacking.
In a Sheffield by election last night Labour went from first to third and lost 60% of their voter base. Outside London and the Central Belt of Scotland Labour is becoming a toxic brand. Labour is starting to panic.
Sitting in Scotland I am more aware than the English that the Westminster elections are only one part of the jigsaw and does not give full power to any party. If Labour starts to lose its councils and mayors then it starts to become impotent in implementing its policies and Starmer ends up as a lame duck PM on the international circuit like Macron.
Comments
I don’t know. But it is very clear that most of the public don’t understand the headline figures.
Yesterday's 'dire day for the Tories' turns into a cabinet minister's resignation this morning despite the amateur attempt to downplay the story
Never mind, with labour in free fall maybe every little helps in the mind of this poster
That’s an awful lot of Marriot Hotels being block booked for months and if the surge continues we will go bankrupt
The USA ended up with Mr Sussex.
There. Sorted
And this is "processing" anyway - preventative spending to stop the overall costs of asylum seekers going up.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1993/1443/made
@Leon was focused on the number being greater than 1.0 million
Really???
I mean, there’s credulity and then there’s idiocy. I’ll put you down as “well-meaning credulous”
For clarity, I don’t blame these young men. This is what young men have done through history. Go west, young man!
Trouble is we can no longer take these numbers and allowing them to stay makes a mockery of the system and is, inter alia, an insult to those who try to legally migrate, and go through all the hoops
We just need to be tougher on who we let in
Dont spend another £900m to find 4 volunteers to leave the country.
Process claims quickly so we can use the intended accommodation we have for this purpose rather than chain hotels.
Allow claimants waiting longer than a month to work and fund themselves.
Next.
But at the same time, it's hard to believe quite so many of them have fled persecution, rather than merely (and understandably) seeking better economic outcomes in the developed world.
Has it worked? Hard to say. We get a fraction of the services we used to get at greater cost. The planners are clueless about the places they oversee.
Personally I would have kept the districts, greater accountability etc., and got rid of the Counties. What we really need at that level is Regional Government that can make strategic decisions on infrastructure.
And caps on earnings of executives.
Remember that Scotland's cities are much "whiter" than English ones, so you can't really make a comparison when it comes to ethnicity. Eg 81% white compared to 49% in Birmingham.
I want to stress any implication from the following is pure speculation on my part and may not be true. However there was a comment on Radio 4 this morning that Aviva (Haigh’s employer) only reported it to the police because multiple phones had been lost/stolen in unusual circumstances.
And, of course, Britain has been a haven for many fleeing persecution in the past - whether French Huguenots. Kenyan Asians, or Eastern European Jews.
But then you look at what happened in Cheshire and Shropshire and don’t feel like laughing.
*Both counties have of course already been partially unitarised, which makes things more complicated.
What does she do?
https://x.com/cjsnowdon/status/1862290845036134892?s=61
F1: pretty tempted by the 9, Ladbrokes special, on both Ferraris being top 4. That's happened in 3 of the last 4 races, I believe.
She is one Cabinet Minister who has hit the ground running; it's barely been 3 months of Parliamentary time since the Election and the bill to change the ownership of the Rail System received Royal Assent yesterday.
https://x.com/transportgovuk/status/1862143119988277743
Plus we already have a Road Safety Review coming imminently, which was promised in 2014 with nothing happening since. Out first Transport Minister with a clue and a strategy for a lot of years, and we needed her - or somebody with strategy - in post for 3 or 4 years at least.
Politically I wonder if this indicates that Mr Starmer has a glass jaw when he should have faced this down. A precedent of feeding sausages to a whining wolf will not help him.
But I think she will be back in the not distant future.
I'll be interested to see what the panoramic (sorry: that's a bit strained) duo from the Rest is Politics say.
Starmer did say he would be tough on indiscretions and this is certainly TOUGH . It's certainly less of an indiscretion than Shapps for multiple ID and Hunt for conveniently forgetting he had multiple Houses when initially filling in his Tax Returns.
She can return surely at some point on that basis.
The could be a MASSIVE sting in the tail though for Tories with numerous issues for Members of the SHADOW Cabinet now likely to be revisited by morgan McSweeney and Labour supporting papers and lets not forget the BIGGEST possible scalp of all...the self confessed WEBSITE HACKER!.
Issues too aplenty for Reform with Anderson and the Essex MP and still ongoing allegations made by Anderson and Jenkyns that they were offer "payment to defect to Reform"
All our new nursing recruits are from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kerala or the Phillipines, and many bring families. All our Spanish and Portuguese nurses have gone, except one who married an Englishman. Similarly our Greek, Italian, Belgian and Spanish junior doctors have gone, being replaced with Nigerians and Egyptians.
Brexit has brought tremendous cultural change to the country, making us less European, but wasn't that the point?
A shame though, if so. She was quite right in what she said.
Though had a lockjaw staffie been around to supply the appropriate remedy to the dancing sock, it may turn out to have helped him in the long term.
Salty meatballs .... yeah.
The incoherence of the Brexit plan has and will continue to cause far more damage to UK society than the Brexit concept itself.
Essentially what is the right level of vacancies: the rule of thumb is below 3-4% unemployment suggests the economy is at risk of overheating
Pity, because I thought her a bright spark in a dull cabinet, a good communicator and an effective Transport Secretary of State. I even had a nibble on her as next leader.
I suspect there were political differences with the Starmerites too, and that she will be back in time.
It doesn’t matter that this was a minor issue a long time ago. The X-wing shitstorm would have made hay for day after day until she had to go.
In going she does everyone a huge favour. The resignation bar is now absurdly close to the ground. And there are sooooo many shysters out there with closeted skeletons. The X- wing “media” should have been careful what they wished for as this now means open season on anyone. And there are so many Tory / FUK targets to aim at.
There is no version of the concept that isn't entirely incoherent in delivery.
He can't really think like a politician and he has no political judgement, not having served an apprenticeship on the backbenches and in junior ministerial office.
So I'm inclined to the cockup not conspiracy thinking on this one.
2002 Radio 4 was where he got his start with a phone in about cabbages:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p007b4j1
* Staffordshire Terrier Spot: What's got 4 legs and an arm?
Which is why this is a resignation and not a sacking.
The only way Brexit could win was by melding these groups together but it could never deliver what was promised in order to do so.
We either find a pan-European solution or we have no solution. Tories pulled us out of everything including the ability to deport back to Europe. This is what they explicitly wanted - note the vast surge in numbers since they took back control. That isn’t accident or cock-up, it’s planned.
The previous government had just given up on everything.
If Starmer knew about this stuff when he put her in the shadow cabinet, then he had already made his decision.
As someone who has no interest in keeping up with the latest technology fashion, I think what she did is pretty bad, but appreciate plenty of others on here have sympathy with the trappings of tech fashion and white collar crime.
I think the Haigh timings are interesting. The 'mugging' happened in 2013, but she was sentenced in 2014. She was selected for her parliamentary seat in May 2014, and was elected in 2015. Did the sentencing happen before or after selection, and who knew about it?
As an aside, this conviction is exactly the sort of thing the electorate should know about a candidate. Not letting the electorate know about it is a little... shitty.
NEW THREAD
Sitting in Scotland I am more aware than the English that the Westminster elections are only one part of the jigsaw and does not give full power to any party. If Labour starts to lose its councils and mayors then it starts to become impotent in implementing its policies and Starmer ends up as a lame duck PM on the international circuit like Macron.