I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
The vast majority of home schoolers are decent parents, does not mean social services and the police cannot keep a tab on parents if issues arise
They don't even have a list of them so how they can keep them safe?
There should be a register and the threshold for stopping home schooling if any safety concerns should be low. And it needs to be resourced properly of course otherwise what the law says isn't going to protect in reality.
Yes. The huge growth in home schooling in recent years is a real concern. In reality, there is virtually no oversight of whether a) the kids are actually being schooled, or b) whether the kids are safe.
It's far too easy for parents just to announce that they're going to stop their kids going to school and have them at home instead.
Not a comment on this sickening case but I really dislike the idea of home schooling. School is a counterpoint to parental influence. If you remove it so it becomes all parents that's not good.
Kemi's a dud. As was bleeding obvious to anyone who followed her dismal absenteeism as a business secretary. I quite like her on a quasi-personal level but, she is hopeless, as many of us said from the start.
And this Nigeria stuff is beyond ridiculous. She could pick a fight in an empty room.
I fear she is not up to snuff. But let’s give her a few more months. She may yet learn
She's a thinker/bit of a wonk, slightly lazy, and has a very clear comfort zone.
Not enough for LOTO. She's getting outgunned by Farage.
Any opposition leader who, six months into a five year parliament, doesn't think they have time for lunch, is out to lunch. Or terminally thick.
On the sandwich score, dining on random stuff from the fridge, discovered the cheese and basil sandwich. Toasted sourdough, buttered, plus cheese, and a whole pack of basil. Yum.
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
When I was teaching in a private school in Oxfordshire we were told by the county social services that they weren't interested in any allegations for a child in a private school. It seems that councils only have powers if the children are in a state school.
This is entirely incorrect. Social services have not only a right but a duty to investigate relevant matters. The issue of schools - whether private or home schooling - is legally irrelevant. Though of course when a child is at school there is an extra layer of supervision.
(It's worth noting that state schools - and private as well I am sure, but I have no knowledge - are a massive safety net system with constant vigilance and interaction. When it works, of course, no-one notices because there is nothing to notice).
You may think it is incorrect, but (not mentioning names etc) it did happen. it was in the 2010s as well. Step Dad was a Doctor as well.
Morgan McSweeney is also beginning to tighten and focus Labour Comms.
Immediate action to highlight any pupil suddenly choosing "home schooling" in case of hiding abuse.
We must do something; this is something; and so on as per Yes Minister.
In Sara's case it was not home schooling that hid abuse but her sudden adoption of the hijab which covered her bruises, and no-one wants to strip search every girl who turns up in that particular garment, or who switches from skirt to trousers, for an example that avoids religion.
Home schooling is more likely to indicate mum has been persuaded by American alt-right and religious sites rather than physical abuse.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
The vast majority of home schoolers are decent parents, does not mean social services and the police cannot keep a tab on parents if issues arise
They don't even have a list of them so how they can keep them safe?
There should be a register and the threshold for stopping home schooling if any safety concerns should be low. And it needs to be resourced properly of course otherwise what the law says isn't going to protect in reality.
Yes. The huge growth in home schooling in recent years is a real concern. In reality, there is virtually no oversight of whether a) the kids are actually being schooled, or b) whether the kids are safe.
It's far too easy for parents just to announce that they're going to stop their kids going to school and have them at home instead.
Not a comment on this sickening case but I really dislike the idea of home schooling. School is a counterpoint to parental influence. If you remove it so it becomes all parents that's not good.
A lot of homeschooling nowadays is online though. Outschool is the largest company providing it but there are many others. Allschool, LessonsWise, Sherpa, Varsity off the top of my head. Plus many private schools offer it as a sort of adjunct with specialist online centres for internationals that can include domestic children too.
I'm not saying whether this is a good or bad thing, just that people on here seem to have an idea of 'home schooling' that's rather out of date.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
Robert Jenrick will be Conservative leader inside 18 months if this continues.
And the decline will then be even greater.
I don’t think so - he would at least do the very important job of flushing CCHQ of the toxic ancien regime that Kemi has maintained.
Responding to William's point earlier, there's still a space for the Tory Party as Labour becomes more unpopular - there are some people, Clarkson types, who won't ever vote Reform. However I don’t think Jeremy Hunt is the answer. Kemi's actual positioning isn't bad, it makes sense. But her execution, conviction, and the people she has surrounded herself with are seriously lacking.
And sadly she doesn't really have anyone looking out for her; she was installed by the Goveites, who even if Nadine's theories are 99. 9% false, are a predatory bunch. If she steps out of their favoured lines or tries to sack any of their people, the briefings will start.
Jenrick is just the Reform gorilla in a suit. Plus he has the personal appeal of a salted slug. The idea he can turn round the Tory party is laughable.
Meh. I think people are moving beyond 'optics'. Being telegenic, having a great back story, being of an ethnic background that means you can't be condemned as racist - these are qualities for good times. What voters want to know in these times is what you're going to do. What are you proposing and how likely is it you'll deliver? We have no idea what Kemi is proposing, let alone having any confidence in her delivering anything. Hardly surprising she's flailing.
Reform aren't gorillas. I think you're seeing things through the lens of the past.
Robert Jenrick will be Conservative leader inside 18 months if this continues.
And the decline will then be even greater.
I don’t think so - he would at least do the very important job of flushing CCHQ of the toxic ancien regime that Kemi has maintained.
Responding to William's point earlier, there's still a space for the Tory Party as Labour becomes more unpopular - there are some people, Clarkson types, who won't ever vote Reform. However I don’t think Jeremy Hunt is the answer. Kemi's actual positioning isn't bad, it makes sense. But her execution, conviction, and the people she has surrounded herself with are seriously lacking.
And sadly she doesn't really have anyone looking out for her; she was installed by the Goveites, who even if Nadine's theories are 99. 9% false, are a predatory bunch. If she steps out of their favoured lines or tries to sack any of their people, the briefings will start.
Jenrick is just the Reform gorilla in a suit. Plus he has the personal appeal of a salted slug. The idea he can turn round the Tory party is laughable.
Meh. I think people are moving beyond 'optics'. Being telegenic, having a great back story, being of an ethnic background that means you can't be condemned as racist - these are qualities for good times. What voters want to know in these times is what you're going to do. What are you proposing and how likely is it you'll deliver? We have no idea what Kemi is proposing, let alone having any confidence in her delivering anything. Hardly surprising she's flailing.
Reform aren't gorillas. I think you're seeing things through the lens of the past.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
CCS is the homeopathy of the push for zero carbon.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
It really is. Why do we always go for the more expensive, less productive option? It makes me scream.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
The vast majority of home schoolers are decent parents, does not mean social services and the police cannot keep a tab on parents if issues arise
They don't even have a list of them so how they can keep them safe?
There should be a register and the threshold for stopping home schooling if any safety concerns should be low. And it needs to be resourced properly of course otherwise what the law says isn't going to protect in reality.
Yes. The huge growth in home schooling in recent years is a real concern. In reality, there is virtually no oversight of whether a) the kids are actually being schooled, or b) whether the kids are safe.
It's far too easy for parents just to announce that they're going to stop their kids going to school and have them at home instead.
Not a comment on this sickening case but I really dislike the idea of home schooling. School is a counterpoint to parental influence. If you remove it so it becomes all parents that's not good.
There is clearly a place for it for some kids with disabilities or suffering persistent bullying. Less supportive if a parental lifestyle choice.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
Devil's advocate on solar:
1) It already makes sense for most homeowners to do it anyway. Breakeven can be less than 10 years, even in Scotland.
2) Lots of power when we don't really need it (looking 20 years ahead)
3) Generally, government subsidy should be used to stimulate a market or technology that hasn't got onto its own two feet yet. Solar is flying already.
So mad, uncertain new technologies like CCS are probably the best place to put that cash. Alternatively, £20 billion buys you 20,000 miles of segregated cycle lane, which would have a much more certain return on your investment in terms of emissions (and indeed other stuff like obesity).
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
It really is. Why do we always go for the more expensive, less productive option? It makes me scream.
If it's a cheap no-brainer, does govt need to get involved? People will just do it anyway.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
It really is. Why do we always go for the more expensive, less productive option? It makes me scream.
If it's a cheap no-brainer, does govt need to get involved? People will just do it anyway.
A great many people would benefit.
*if* they could find the money to put them in to start with.
What about somebody who doesn't have that cash handy? Borrowing doesn't make economic sense as the interest wipes out your savings. Leasing is a poor substitute (if it's even still available).
Just think what free solar panels would do for people on low incomes. Especially pensioners who are at home all day, but also single parents, shift workers...
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
When I was teaching in a private school in Oxfordshire we were told by the county social services that they weren't interested in any allegations for a child in a private school. It seems that councils only have powers if the children are in a state school.
This is entirely incorrect. Social services have not only a right but a duty to investigate relevant matters. The issue of schools - whether private or home schooling - is legally irrelevant. Though of course when a child is at school there is an extra layer of supervision.
(It's worth noting that state schools - and private as well I am sure, but I have no knowledge - are a massive safety net system with constant vigilance and interaction. When it works, of course, no-one notices because there is nothing to notice).
It depends on the school. The schools I sent my daughter to, I checked. Training for staff. Lessons for students on what is and isn’t appropriate. Advice to parents. Lots of posters - “call this number for anonymous reporting”. Couple of minor incidents handled promptly and well.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
It really is. Why do we always go for the more expensive, less productive option? It makes me scream.
If it's a cheap no-brainer, does govt need to get involved? People will just do it anyway.
A little incentivisation can go a long way and get people trying to get things done within a budget thinking outside the box. This is where we get the multiplier effect for public money. Not making electricity produced from gas more expensive.
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
The vast majority of home schoolers are decent parents, does not mean social services and the police cannot keep a tab on parents if issues arise
They don't even have a list of them so how they can keep them safe?
There should be a register and the threshold for stopping home schooling if any safety concerns should be low. And it needs to be resourced properly of course otherwise what the law says isn't going to protect in reality.
Yes. The huge growth in home schooling in recent years is a real concern. In reality, there is virtually no oversight of whether a) the kids are actually being schooled, or b) whether the kids are safe.
It's far too easy for parents just to announce that they're going to stop their kids going to school and have them at home instead.
Not a comment on this sickening case but I really dislike the idea of home schooling. School is a counterpoint to parental influence. If you remove it so it becomes all parents that's not good.
There is clearly a place for it for some kids with disabilities or suffering persistent bullying. Less supportive if a parental lifestyle choice.
I guess so. If there's no other viable way. But otherwise, no.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
It really is. Why do we always go for the more expensive, less productive option? It makes me scream.
If it's a cheap no-brainer, does govt need to get involved? People will just do it anyway.
A great many people would benefit.
*if* they could find the money to put them in to start with.
What about somebody who doesn't have that cash handy? Borrowing doesn't make economic sense as the interest wipes out your savings. Leasing is a poor substitute (if it's even still available).
Just think what free solar panels would do for people on low incomes. Especially pensioners who are at home all day, but also single parents, shift workers...
Not sure if PB has discussed the standing charge changes? I think people will be much more responsive to that than we might expect, with significant reductions in energy demand.
Kemi's a dud. As was bleeding obvious to anyone who followed her dismal absenteeism as a business secretary. I quite like her on a quasi-personal level but, she is hopeless, as many of us said from the start.
And this Nigeria stuff is beyond ridiculous. She could pick a fight in an empty room.
Dudness is an interesting measure for a political leader. Badenoch is a dud. Sunak was a dud. May started out not a dud but became one. Starmer might become a dud but isn't yet. Johnson was never a dud, even if he was completely unsuitable for the post. Truss wasn't a dud - her incompetence was too spectacularly lurid for that
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
It really is. Why do we always go for the more expensive, less productive option? It makes me scream.
If it's a cheap no-brainer, does govt need to get involved? People will just do it anyway.
A great many people would benefit.
*if* they could find the money to put them in to start with.
What about somebody who doesn't have that cash handy? Borrowing doesn't make economic sense as the interest wipes out your savings. Leasing is a poor substitute (if it's even still available).
Just think what free solar panels would do for people on low incomes. Especially pensioners who are at home all day, but also single parents, shift workers...
I thought PB felt we gave too many freebies to pensioners?
I'm not against "give poor people stuff", but you can just give poor people more money. But the electorate don't seem that keen on increasing benefits.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
It really is. Why do we always go for the more expensive, less productive option? It makes me scream.
If it's a cheap no-brainer, does govt need to get involved? People will just do it anyway.
A great many people would benefit.
*if* they could find the money to put them in to start with.
What about somebody who doesn't have that cash handy? Borrowing doesn't make economic sense as the interest wipes out your savings. Leasing is a poor substitute (if it's even still available).
Just think what free solar panels would do for people on low incomes. Especially pensioners who are at home all day, but also single parents, shift workers...
I thought PB felt we gave too many freebies to pensioners?
I'm not against "give poor people stuff", but you can just give poor people more money. But the electorate don't seem that keen on increasing benefits.
This would effectively keep giving them more - progressively more, as prices rise - money for years.
Kudos to the other @MaxPB for prompting an honest discussion last night about the healthcare CEO killed in USA.
I don't agree with his assessment that he wasn't sorry it happened, although I have to fight quite hard against an instinctive agreement.
Mainly, though, it reaffirms for me what a valuable place this site is for discussions of politics. The fact that Max can defend a position that essentially advocates murder as a response to societal failure is free speech at its best imo, and is a credit to him, this site and the state of free speech in UK despite the naysayers.
Thanks, and while agree that PB is one of the few places where we can have a robust discussion and disagree with each other I don't think it reflects more widely in UK society. I'm sure there are plenty of occasions where a poster on PB has erred on the side of a door knock from the police to get a non-crime hate incident report written up on them. It's just that everyone here is grown up enough not to make reports and @rcs1000 is forgiving enough to let it all slide.
Free speech in the UK is fundamentally in danger and I think we need a first amendment style of law to protect it now which overrides any and all other restrictions that have been placed on free speech other than incitement to violence or panic. There should be no right for someone's offence to override my freedom of expression.
I quite agree with you but the current government is going to be a very poor defender of free speech I'm afraid. See Starmer's pathetic response to an MP wanting a blasphemy law.
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
It really is. Why do we always go for the more expensive, less productive option? It makes me scream.
If it's a cheap no-brainer, does govt need to get involved? People will just do it anyway.
A great many people would benefit.
*if* they could find the money to put them in to start with.
What about somebody who doesn't have that cash handy? Borrowing doesn't make economic sense as the interest wipes out your savings. Leasing is a poor substitute (if it's even still available).
Just think what free solar panels would do for people on low incomes. Especially pensioners who are at home all day, but also single parents, shift workers...
Not sure if PB has discussed the standing charge changes? I think people will be much more responsive to that than we might expect, with significant reductions in energy demand.
That's brilliant for me as a low energy user. I've been absolutely shafted on the standing charge as it soared over the last two years and I hate it.
How much it will help others, I don't know.
If, of course, they have solar panels so don't need to buy as much electricity...
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
When I was teaching in a private school in Oxfordshire we were told by the county social services that they weren't interested in any allegations for a child in a private school. It seems that councils only have powers if the children are in a state school.
This is entirely incorrect. Social services have not only a right but a duty to investigate relevant matters. The issue of schools - whether private or home schooling - is legally irrelevant. Though of course when a child is at school there is an extra layer of supervision.
(It's worth noting that state schools - and private as well I am sure, but I have no knowledge - are a massive safety net system with constant vigilance and interaction. When it works, of course, no-one notices because there is nothing to notice).
It depends on the school. The schools I sent my daughter to, I checked. Training for staff. Lessons for students on what is and isn’t appropriate. Advice to parents. Lots of posters - “call this number for anonymous reporting”. Couple of minor incidents handled promptly and well.
I think most schools are like that now. It's not the school though, it's the referral on and up.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
I've been betrayed somewhat by vanilla's drafting system - this was a half-baked thought. But the regulation/tax/grant system should be encouraging developers to use land as efficiently as possible, whether that's with tenements for housing people, solar panels for roofs, or better public transport rather than one more lane bro.
I cannot, literally cannot, comprehend why Miliband is blowing zillions on CCS which won't work rather than putting free solar panels on every rooftop that wasn't personally designed and hand built by Christopher Wren.
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
Devil's advocate on solar:
1) It already makes sense for most homeowners to do it anyway. Breakeven can be less than 10 years, even in Scotland.
2) Lots of power when we don't really need it (looking 20 years ahead)
3) Generally, government subsidy should be used to stimulate a market or technology that hasn't got onto its own two feet yet. Solar is flying already.
So mad, uncertain new technologies like CCS are probably the best place to put that cash. Alternatively, £20 billion buys you 20,000 miles of segregated cycle lane, which would have a much more certain return on your investment in terms of emissions (and indeed other stuff like obesity).
I still like Count Binface's policy on giving everyone in the UK a free bike. A) Reduce obesity, drastically reduce bike thefts.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
It’s a bit like building.
Cheapest to do on green field (import migrants, ready skilled, cheap wages initially - when they want more, get more migrants)
Most expensive on industrial sites that need remediation (long term unemployed, need careful coaxing and training to get them into work)
So we stack up the sick and not seeking work, while importing people to do the jobs.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
When I was teaching in a private school in Oxfordshire we were told by the county social services that they weren't interested in any allegations for a child in a private school. It seems that councils only have powers if the children are in a state school.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
Iain Martin @iainmartin1 · 1h Trump is about to demand as high as 5% of GDP on defence and settle for 3.5%, is the word. Yet something v strange is happening in British politics. The Treasury and politics are going on as though this big thing isn’t about to happen. Have written my latest newsletter on it…
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
The number of hand car washes has dropped by 20% since 2019 and are a tiny proportion of the economy, employing only about 15,000 people. Yet is the obsession of the pb nationalists.
We are better off because the crisis in NHS and care is partially mitigated by the hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
This sounds like an excellent fully fleshed-out plan.
1) Wait 2) Get millions into jobs 3) Use AI.
A short manifesto, admittedly. But then you could also play the green card and claim to be saving Gaia by using less paper.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Most would do a better job than the woke lazy useless whinging youth of today
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
Kemi's a dud. As was bleeding obvious to anyone who followed her dismal absenteeism as a business secretary. I quite like her on a quasi-personal level but, she is hopeless, as many of us said from the start.
And this Nigeria stuff is beyond ridiculous. She could pick a fight in an empty room.
Dudness is an interesting measure for a political leader. Badenoch is a dud. Sunak was a dud. May started out not a dud but became one. Starmer might become a dud but isn't yet. Johnson was never a dud, even if he was completely unsuitable for the post. Truss wasn't a dud - her incompetence was too spectacularly lurid for that
The pick a fight in an empty room stuff might come in useful. I think Beibherli commented that leaching people to Reform might present an opportunity for the Tories, in her terms a pivot to the centre.
But Kemi's likely instinctive reaction to a trickle of people to Reform might be the correct one. "State publicly in the next 5 days that you'll never join Reform or you're losing the whip" might be a good reaction to that. An exodus of the kind of imbeciles that helped sink the Tory ship in the first place might be helpful.
Tacking to the centre is optional. Having an MP base such that the choice of tacking to the centre or tacking to the realistic right are both genuine options available and both wings would be able to lead the party would be an absolute boon.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
Because they operated such a loose labour market so there was little incentive for anyone to opt back into it.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
Iain Martin @iainmartin1 · 1h Trump is about to demand as high as 5% of GDP on defence and settle for 3.5%, is the word. Yet something v strange is happening in British politics. The Treasury and politics are going on as though this big thing isn’t about to happen. Have written my latest newsletter on it…
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
Because they operated such a loose labour market so there was little incentive for anyone to opt back into it.
Minimum wage has increased very rapidly over that period.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
People vote with their wallet.
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
The number of hand car washes has dropped by 20% since 2019 and are a tiny proportion of the economy, employing only about 15,000 people. Yet is the obsession of the pb nationalists.
We are better off because the crisis in NHS and care is partially mitigated by the hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
People vote with their wallet.
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
Robert Jenrick will be Conservative leader inside 18 months if this continues.
And the decline will then be even greater.
I don’t think so - he would at least do the very important job of flushing CCHQ of the toxic ancien regime that Kemi has maintained.
Responding to William's point earlier, there's still a space for the Tory Party as Labour becomes more unpopular - there are some people, Clarkson types, who won't ever vote Reform. However I don’t think Jeremy Hunt is the answer. Kemi's actual positioning isn't bad, it makes sense. But her execution, conviction, and the people she has surrounded herself with are seriously lacking.
And sadly she doesn't really have anyone looking out for her; she was installed by the Goveites, who even if Nadine's theories are 99. 9% false, are a predatory bunch. If she steps out of their favoured lines or tries to sack any of their people, the briefings will start.
Jenrick is just the Reform gorilla in a suit. Plus he has the personal appeal of a salted slug. The idea he can turn round the Tory party is laughable.
Meh. I think people are moving beyond 'optics'. Being telegenic, having a great back story, being of an ethnic background that means you can't be condemned as racist - these are qualities for good times. What voters want to know in these times is what you're going to do. What are you proposing and how likely is it you'll deliver? We have no idea what Kemi is proposing, let alone having any confidence in her delivering anything. Hardly surprising she's flailing.
Reform aren't gorillas. I think you're seeing things through the lens of the past.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
People vote with their wallet.
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
Who are you to deny them their choice?
I’m a voter. You believe in democracy, don’t you?
I thought you said that the extending of the franchise to idiots was a mistake?
If working in the public sector is so lucrative and such a piece of piss to do, why don't you all quit your shit finance/legal/consulting/management/self publishing author jobs and get on the gravy train?
Who said it was easy?
I will say, though, that the supremely high level of job security sounds nice, given a mix of AI and tech giant algorithm fiddling has rather shafted me this year.
Oh, and on 'easy': getting pay rises certainly become that way under Starmer.
Genuinely, what would you pay a nurse? What should the person giving you CPR in the back of an ambulance be on an hour? How much is it worth to you to get dragged out of your burning house at 3 in the morning? Why shouldn't train drivers earn a good wage? Is emptying bins not worthy of a decent pay packet? What about the office staff who keep all the plates spinning in the background? You won't do these jobs, but don't want to pay the people who will do them. Why?
What is a decent pay packet? Genuine question - how can we define that?
It doesn't look like anyone has had a go at this yet. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that for someone in mid-career in a job with some responsibility or skill required, it ought to be possible to earn enough to house and feed a family.
SO, for someone where I live that means per month: Rent 1600 Other bills 400 Food and groceries 800 Kids clothing activities etc 500 Car 250 Personal clothes etc x 2 200 Total after tax £3750 - what's that as a Gross salary, about £60k?
Note - no allowance for leisure spending or holidays.
Also note: my wife (when I had one) would have far exceeded the £200 per month joint personal allowance on her own. But she did work part time to fit around childcare as many mothers so supported herself and I think that's a reasonable assumption to make, but £100 doesn't make a lot of difference
This is based very much on my own historic records, for most of the time when my children were younger money was tight and I had to budget to the penny to work out what was unavoidable. You can quibble on the odd 50 or hundred maybe but that's my ballpark.
The other thing I would note is that housing costs are roughly 50% of that - if property wasn't so ridiculously expensive then a lot of people would be a lot better off.
Build, build, build.
Then build some more!
It really is the Housing Theory of Everything at this point, there’s still way too many people chasing way too few houses.
Scene : Malmesbury's Britain
Husband: Disaster! Wife: What? Husband: Daisy won a house - the coupon was in her cereal box! Wife: Oh God. We have 17 houses already. What's this one worth? Husband: 5 bedroom in Cornwall. I checked. Someone might give us 99p on eBay. I asked the tramp outside Tesco - he has 8 houses already. Bloody housing surplus.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that as soon as someone actually acquires a property they rapidly lose interest in cheaper house prices. No-one wants to see their £500k 'investment' reduced overnight to £300k because all the adjacent fields have been built on. Human nature, innit?
Fortunately for these newly-enfranchised home owners, developers are unlikely to increase their building rate because (a) it would drive up the cost of labour and materials while (b) reducing the selling price. Sooner or later they will be operating at a loss. Sooner is my guess. In fact, developers already own vast tracts of near-urban farmland with outline planning permission (their infamous land bank) and the reason they're not in a hurry to build is simple economics of the kind @BartholomewRoberts frequently espouses. It's nothing to do with a sclerotic planning system.
Houses cost money to build and to maintain. The theory behind the postwar social housing boom was that the hard-working occupants would eventually cover the building cost out of their wages and even use their artisanal skills to do a bit of maintenance from time to time. This simple equation doesn't work with an indigent population dependent on benefits for their rent and without any spare cash (or inclination) to paint the door, unblock the drain or fix a broken window. The corollary of 'build build build' is 'tax tax tax'.
Except its only because of the planning system that the developers have a monopoly on developing. Since they're the only ones with permission to build.
Prior to the disastrous 1948 planning act, in the 1930s we were building more homes per annum than were ever built post-war . . . even though post-war there was Council etc construction too and rebuilding from the war, none of that matched what came pre-war and pre-planning act.
Because in the 1930s anyone who wanted to build a home could do so, within reason. Which is what we should go back to. Rather than saying Barratt have permission to build a hundred but everyone else can't do squat.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
People vote with their wallet.
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
Who are you to deny them their choice?
I go to a hand wash because they clean the inside - the shitty exterior job an automatic car wash does would be acceptable were it not for that omission. I choose one which takes cards to try and minimize the illegality.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Net immigration was falling when Rishi left office and universal credit helped ensure work paid without losing all benefits.
Farage is going further though with deportations of illegals and proposals to slash immigration. Starmer too is going harder on welfare so you lose your benefits if not applying for jobs or turning down job offers
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
People vote with their wallet.
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
Who are you to deny them their choice?
I’m a voter. You believe in democracy, don’t you?
I thought you said that the extending of the franchise to idiots was a mistake?
So you’ve now seen the wisdom of my argument? The burgeoning professional class needs protection from the voters to ensure it can continue to import a caste of service workers to “do the jobs Brits won’t do (at a price I am willing to pay)”.
Kemi's a dud. As was bleeding obvious to anyone who followed her dismal absenteeism as a business secretary. I quite like her on a quasi-personal level but, she is hopeless, as many of us said from the start.
And this Nigeria stuff is beyond ridiculous. She could pick a fight in an empty room.
I fear she is not up to snuff. But let’s give her a few more months. She may yet learn
She's a thinker/bit of a wonk, slightly lazy, and has a very clear comfort zone.
Not enough for LOTO. She's getting outgunned by Farage.
Any opposition leader who, six months into a five year parliament, doesn't think they have time for lunch, is out to lunch. Or terminally thick.
On the sandwich score, dining on random stuff from the fridge, discovered the cheese and basil sandwich. Toasted sourdough, buttered, plus cheese, and a whole pack of basil. Yum.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Net immigration was falling when Rishi left office and universal credit helped ensure work paid without losing all benefits.
Farage is going further though with deportations of illegals and proposals to slash immigration. Starmer too is going harder on welfare so you lose your benefits if not applying for jobs or turning down job offers
Every government since at least Thatcher has deported illegal migrants and linked benefits to applying for work. Neither shift the dial much.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Osborne got employment levels to record highs, over and above low unemployment. Partly due to benefits cuts, which were opposed tirelessly by the opposition.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
People vote with their wallet.
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
Who are you to deny them their choice?
People have a right to choose, and if prices change people have a right to change their choices based upon price pressures.
Personally I can get a Costa Coffee for £3.40 made by a barista, or a Costa Coffee made by a machine in Tesco's opposite it, as part of a meal deal, for £3.60
When that's the price choice, I'm quite content to pay the extra 20p and get a meal and a snack with my coffee and forfeit the barista, though they don't have many meals suitable for my diet unfortunately.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
People vote with their wallet.
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
Who are you to deny them their choice?
I’m a voter. You believe in democracy, don’t you?
I thought you said that the extending of the franchise to idiots was a mistake?
So you’ve now seen the wisdom of my argument? The burgeoning professional class needs protection from the voters to ensure it can continue to import a caste of service workers to “do the jobs Brits won’t do (at a price I am willing to pay)”.
I'm sorry, I'm just being silly. I don't think you're an idiot.
And I do think that voters should be allowed to vote and decide, because we live in a democracy.
What I think the government should avoid doing is trying to micromanage the economy, because they will (almost always) be shit at it.
If the voters decide they only want high skilled immigration, or indeed no immigration at all, they should get it. And the Conservative government certainly fucked up on the income thresholds (further evidence, for what it's worth, that politicians aren't very good at micromanaging the economy).
What we should all be clear about, though, is that decisions have consequences. One only has to look at Japan - a place I love - to see what happens to a country where both the birth rate and immigration are low.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Osborne got employment levels to record highs, over and above low unemployment. Partly due to benefits cuts, which were opposed tirelessly by the opposition.
And mostly due to high net migration, which was opposed relentlessly by the government backbenchers and the schizophrenic frontbenchers at times too.
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
When I was teaching in a private school in Oxfordshire we were told by the county social services that they weren't interested in any allegations for a child in a private school. It seems that councils only have powers if the children are in a state school.
This is entirely incorrect. Social services have not only a right but a duty to investigate relevant matters. The issue of schools - whether private or home schooling - is legally irrelevant. Though of course when a child is at school there is an extra layer of supervision.
(It's worth noting that state schools - and private as well I am sure, but I have no knowledge - are a massive safety net system with constant vigilance and interaction. When it works, of course, no-one notices because there is nothing to notice).
You may think it is incorrect, but (not mentioning names etc) it did happen. it was in the 2010s as well. Step Dad was a Doctor as well.
Indeed I am not of course suggesting you are incorrect as to what happened, but that it is incorrect for local authority social services to say they don't have powers and duties towards particular childtren in their area. Sorry for any accidental misrepresentation!
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
The Amazon warehouse here has a roof of ... checks GIS ... 10ha, that's 0.1 sq km just on its own.
And, yes, no solar panels.
I wonder what the area of supermarket car parks is.
Does anyone else think covering up farmland with solar panels is completely crazy? I appreciate that putting them on top of new buildings adds some expense, but it should be compulsory with a 100% grant from government to cover the costs.
Is there anyone on here thinks that it *isn't* completely crazy?
Installing and maintaining at height costs money.
Solar panels is one of the few things you are allowed to do with farm land. Farming has tight margins - see the supermarkets. Solar panels + sheep = a better life.
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
When I was teaching in a private school in Oxfordshire we were told by the county social services that they weren't interested in any allegations for a child in a private school. It seems that councils only have powers if the children are in a state school.
This is entirely incorrect. Social services have not only a right but a duty to investigate relevant matters. The issue of schools - whether private or home schooling - is legally irrelevant. Though of course when a child is at school there is an extra layer of supervision.
(It's worth noting that state schools - and private as well I am sure, but I have no knowledge - are a massive safety net system with constant vigilance and interaction. When it works, of course, no-one notices because there is nothing to notice).
You may think it is incorrect, but (not mentioning names etc) it did happen. it was in the 2010s as well. Step Dad was a Doctor as well.
Indeed I am not of course suggesting you are incorrect as to what happened, but that it is incorrect for local authority social services to say they don't have powers and duties towards particular childtren in their area. Sorry for any accidental misrepresentation!
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Net immigration was falling when Rishi left office and universal credit helped ensure work paid without losing all benefits.
Farage is going further though with deportations of illegals and proposals to slash immigration. Starmer too is going harder on welfare so you lose your benefits if not applying for jobs or turning down job offers
Every government since at least Thatcher has deported illegal migrants and linked benefits to applying for work. Neither shift the dial much.
Farage has also talked in the past of having only contributions based benefits. So if you have not contributed enough in national insurance you get no benefits at all
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Osborne got employment levels to record highs, over and above low unemployment. Partly due to benefits cuts, which were opposed tirelessly by the opposition.
And mostly due to high net migration, which was opposed relentlessly by the government backbenchers and the schizophrenic frontbenchers at times too.
Again, employment levels. I.e percentage of the population working. Immigrants don't move the dial much on that I wouldn't think - especially with non-working dependents. But it would be interesting to see the data.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
It is possible to have both an underclass of economically 'inactive' people and a ready supply of migrant labour. Some employers might even see this as beneficial in that it restricts low-end wage growth and reduces the need for technical training. The NHS benefits in this regard.
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
When I was teaching in a private school in Oxfordshire we were told by the county social services that they weren't interested in any allegations for a child in a private school. It seems that councils only have powers if the children are in a state school.
This is entirely incorrect. Social services have not only a right but a duty to investigate relevant matters. The issue of schools - whether private or home schooling - is legally irrelevant. Though of course when a child is at school there is an extra layer of supervision.
(It's worth noting that state schools - and private as well I am sure, but I have no knowledge - are a massive safety net system with constant vigilance and interaction. When it works, of course, no-one notices because there is nothing to notice).
You may think it is incorrect, but (not mentioning names etc) it did happen. it was in the 2010s as well. Step Dad was a Doctor as well.
Indeed I am not of course suggesting you are incorrect as to what happened, but that it is incorrect for local authority social services to say they don't have powers and duties towards particular childtren in their area. Sorry for any accidental misrepresentation!
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Net immigration was falling when Rishi left office and universal credit helped ensure work paid without losing all benefits.
Farage is going further though with deportations of illegals and proposals to slash immigration. Starmer too is going harder on welfare so you lose your benefits if not applying for jobs or turning down job offers
Every government since at least Thatcher has deported illegal migrants and linked benefits to applying for work. Neither shift the dial much.
Farage has also talked in the past of having only contributions based benefits. So if you have not contributed enough in national insurance you get no benefits at all
In which case lets hope he at least funds the police and prisions.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
People vote with their wallet.
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
Who are you to deny them their choice?
I’m a voter. You believe in democracy, don’t you?
I thought you said that the extending of the franchise to idiots was a mistake?
So you’ve now seen the wisdom of my argument? The burgeoning professional class needs protection from the voters to ensure it can continue to import a caste of service workers to “do the jobs Brits won’t do (at a price I am willing to pay)”.
I'm sorry, I'm just being silly. I don't think you're an idiot.
And I do think that voters should be allowed to vote and decide, because we live in a democracy.
What I think the government should avoid doing is trying to micromanage the economy, because they will (almost always) be shit at it.
If the voters decide they only want high skilled immigration, or indeed no immigration at all, they should get it. And the Conservative government certainly fucked up on the income thresholds (further evidence, for what it's worth, that politicians aren't very good at micromanaging the economy).
What we should all be clear about, though, is that decisions have consequences. One only has to look at Japan - a place I love - to see what happens to a country where both the birth rate and immigration are low.
Are you referring to the great news for them that their house prices have halved in real terms since the 1990s, or the fact they have one of the highest life expectancies in the world?
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Net immigration was falling when Rishi left office and universal credit helped ensure work paid without losing all benefits.
Farage is going further though with deportations of illegals and proposals to slash immigration. Starmer too is going harder on welfare so you lose your benefits if not applying for jobs or turning down job offers
Every government since at least Thatcher has deported illegal migrants and linked benefits to applying for work. Neither shift the dial much.
Farage has also talked in the past of having only contributions based benefits. So if you have not contributed enough in national insurance you get no benefits at all
In which case lets hope he at least funds the police and prisions.
Reform’s manifesto included US style time limited welfare and a proposal to withdraw all unemployment benefits after three months of unemployment.
On immigration Reform would also withdraw from the ECHR to make it easier to deport illegal immigrants and adopt a ‘one in’ new immigrant means ‘one out’ so another immigrant would have to have left first before a new immigrant could come in
I'm staggered that the top 20% of UK warehouses have a surface area of just 75 square kilometers.
I guess it's a very tight definition of warehouse, that ignores warehouse like buildings such as factories and out of town supermarkets.
I agree, but I came across that on a planning blog from a major legal practice (Denton's, 80 countries).
And they are essentially arguing a business case to try and get it started, using 20% of area not of count of warehouses.
I have previously done ballpark numbers suggesting that the warehouse roof space from published numbers is more like 700 sqkm available, and that does not cover other things such as shopping centres.
Plus of course solar panels can be put over lightweight structures over car parks can so on - solar car ports over garages and dealers are a thing. I have looked at those myself for my own planned veranda as the entire roof structure, but no one is really in the domestic sector as demand is so high elsewhere.
Plus the useful of a warehouse roof by % solar panel area should be perhaps 2x that of a solar farm.
Reducing the impact of Green Belt needed for new housing sounds like a killer argument to me, or a strong objection in writing of a local plan - BUT "what about the huge retail park or industrial park which is being built?". I can see that having weight with the Planning Inspectorate.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
It is possible to have both an underclass of economically 'inactive' people and a ready supply of migrant labour. Some employers might even see this as beneficial.
The problem is no-one on the right is making any plausible proposals of how to get the underclass of economically active people into work.
Surestart = cancelled Community and youth clubs = cut Probation service = cut Prison service = cut
If we had two or three decades of investment in these areas you would gradually reduce the size of the underclass, a bit. You can't do it by rehashing schemes like linking benefits to job searching which have been repeatedly championed by every government I can remember. If that worked we wouldn't still be talking about it.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Osborne got employment levels to record highs, over and above low unemployment. Partly due to benefits cuts, which were opposed tirelessly by the opposition.
And mostly due to high net migration, which was opposed relentlessly by the government backbenchers and the schizophrenic frontbenchers at times too.
And yet the general perception of the Osborne years was not that it was a golden age. The strategy of “creating jobs” to create prosperity has been tested to destruction.
Removed from school after teachers reported abuse. It's happened to me. That's what the "parental rights" mantra ultimately leads to. High time for children's rights. And a crackdown on "home schooling".
The vast majority of home schoolers are decent parents, does not mean social services and the police cannot keep a tab on parents if issues arise
They don't even have a list of them so how they can keep them safe?
There should be a register and the threshold for stopping home schooling if any safety concerns should be low. And it needs to be resourced properly of course otherwise what the law says isn't going to protect in reality.
The resourcing is the true crime in respect of this in my view. Watching from fairly close to the care system, obviously dangerous decisions are made because of inadequate resources. It is common for any other than the highest risk families to be left alone without support or oversight for years at a time.
Sara Sharif's story is an utterly unsurprising consequence of this.
COVID put an enormous strain on the police, with constant home visits required for vulnerable kids who would normally be checked on at school. My partner is getting a lot of training on this as well as a GP trainee.
I hope nurses get the same, and I am sure they do.
One thing I learnt from Diabetes care very quickly is that the specialist nurses have the extra face to face time with the patients they deal with to have a far better handle than Doctors on the real detail, because Drs are the scarce resource who's contact time is much more rationed.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
People vote with their wallet.
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
Who are you to deny them their choice?
I’m a voter. You believe in democracy, don’t you?
I thought you said that the extending of the franchise to idiots was a mistake?
So you’ve now seen the wisdom of my argument? The burgeoning professional class needs protection from the voters to ensure it can continue to import a caste of service workers to “do the jobs Brits won’t do (at a price I am willing to pay)”.
I'm sorry, I'm just being silly. I don't think you're an idiot.
And I do think that voters should be allowed to vote and decide, because we live in a democracy.
What I think the government should avoid doing is trying to micromanage the economy, because they will (almost always) be shit at it.
If the voters decide they only want high skilled immigration, or indeed no immigration at all, they should get it. And the Conservative government certainly fucked up on the income thresholds (further evidence, for what it's worth, that politicians aren't very good at micromanaging the economy).
What we should all be clear about, though, is that decisions have consequences. One only has to look at Japan - a place I love - to see what happens to a country where both the birth rate and immigration are low.
Are you referring to the great news for them that their house prices have halved in real terms since the 1990s, or the fact they have one of the highest life expectancies in the world?
There is obviously more than one way to skin a cat* (or measure a country's economic success), but in the past 30 years, Japan's GDP per capita has gone from around 3x that of Spain, to the same level as it. At the same time, the government has gone from barely any debt to debt-to-GDP of something like 300%.
* Weird analogy: how many ways are there to skin a cat?
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
It is possible to have both an underclass of economically 'inactive' people and a ready supply of migrant labour. Some employers might even see this as beneficial.
The problem is no-one on the right is making any plausible proposals of how to get the underclass of economically active people into work.
Surestart = cancelled Community and youth clubs = cut Probation service = cut Prison service = cut
If we had two or three decades of investment in these areas you would gradually reduce the size of the underclass, a bit. You can't do it by rehashing schemes like linking benefits to job searching which have been repeatedly championed by every government I can remember. If that worked we wouldn't still be talking about it.
I agree. Our society is so poor at dealing with people who fall the the cracks. So much opportunity cost in closing down the night schools and shafting the Open University. In my area you can do a bit of basic computing or a bookkeeping course else you need to go to the online providers.
I do see an argument that making migrant labour integral to employers has reduced opportunity for those who need upskilling or some experience. Maybe that C.V gap would be overlooked if the labour market was a bit tighter.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
We have long had policies designed to "create jobs" rather than to create wealth or foster innovation. It's a mistake to see the result of this policy as inevitable. We could get by perfectly well without Deliveroo and the myriad of other low-value, labour intensive functions that have sprung up.
Sure we could get by, worse off but functional. But if we have net immigration it is precisely to take the new jobs the economy creates, so it really should be no surprise that most of the new jobs go to immigrants.
Are we really better off, for example, because someone decides to open a hand car wash and imports some cheap labour, in the process making it uneconomical to invest in machines to do the job?
People vote with their wallet.
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
Who are you to deny them their choice?
I’m a voter. You believe in democracy, don’t you?
I thought you said that the extending of the franchise to idiots was a mistake?
So you’ve now seen the wisdom of my argument? The burgeoning professional class needs protection from the voters to ensure it can continue to import a caste of service workers to “do the jobs Brits won’t do (at a price I am willing to pay)”.
I'm sorry, I'm just being silly. I don't think you're an idiot.
And I do think that voters should be allowed to vote and decide, because we live in a democracy.
What I think the government should avoid doing is trying to micromanage the economy, because they will (almost always) be shit at it.
If the voters decide they only want high skilled immigration, or indeed no immigration at all, they should get it. And the Conservative government certainly fucked up on the income thresholds (further evidence, for what it's worth, that politicians aren't very good at micromanaging the economy).
What we should all be clear about, though, is that decisions have consequences. One only has to look at Japan - a place I love - to see what happens to a country where both the birth rate and immigration are low.
Are you referring to the great news for them that their house prices have halved in real terms since the 1990s, or the fact they have one of the highest life expectancies in the world?
There is obviously more than one way to skin a cat* (or measure a country's economic success), but in the past 30 years, Japan's GDP per capita has gone from around 3x that of Spain, to the same level as it. At the same time, the government has gone from barely any debt to debt-to-GDP of something like 300%.
* Weird analogy: how many ways are there to skin a cat?
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Net immigration was falling when Rishi left office and universal credit helped ensure work paid without losing all benefits.
Farage is going further though with deportations of illegals and proposals to slash immigration. Starmer too is going harder on welfare so you lose your benefits if not applying for jobs or turning down job offers
Every government since at least Thatcher has deported illegal migrants and linked benefits to applying for work. Neither shift the dial much.
Farage has also talked in the past of having only contributions based benefits. So if you have not contributed enough in national insurance you get no benefits at all
Has he also said what will happen to those who don't get benefits. Streets full of homeless, huge increase in crime are two obvious consequences.
On topic. “Under FPTP with three parties within in 3% of each other could see utter carnage in the number of seats won.”
No. That is the complete opposite of the lesson we should be drawing.
under FPTP if voters from other parties chose you when their 1st preference can’t win, you go up just 0.6% from last election yet go from 11 to 72 seats, up just 1.6% and add 211 seats - alternatively get 14.3% of votes for just 5 seats because you are second preference of no one.
Mike Smithson has been saying this to us for years and years: second and third preferences do matter loads in FPTP.
look at Stodge’s NZ roundup in this thread, that he boiled down not into parties but blocks. We should look at UK polling not as parties, but as blocs. The psephological stats from last UK GE in para 2 is the result of blocs with 1st 2nd 3rd preferences in play.
The last election result defines for us the current blocs in UK politics.
And we have the political term for policies and governing which brings the 2nd and 3rd prefs of your voting block into play for you, fishes for and puts those votes in your net as one metaphor - spectral-syncretic politics. Or this is gardening/cultivating your bloc to use another metaphor.
And a note for HY: Conservatives and Reform are 100% not in the same voting block. Both Conservative Party and Reform are in their own separate blocks. They are in cannibal deathmatch with each other. The first and second preferences of last election result is 100% proof of this. Block 1 Lab 33.7% - 412 seats; LibDem 12.2% - 72 seats; Green 6.7% - 4 seats. Block 2 Conservatives 23.7% - 121 seats. Block 3 Reform 14.3% - 5 seats.
Labour and Libdems can 100% poll higher than that for less seats, if helping each other wasn’t happening. %s produce these seats from blocs working together, or blocs fighting each other in cannibalism deathmatch.
Despite spectral-syncretics from the Labour government, still the most powerful glue for Bloc 1 voters sticking together for maximum impact, would be bloc 2 and 3 cosying up.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
This is just special pleading. Retirees are importing workers to hold down the cost of the services they consume while dispossessing their own children.
Nothing to do with pleading. I am not either in charge nor advocating, just explaining to people who can't see the bleeding obvious. If we had mass unemployment we wouldn't have big net migration.
It is possible to have both an underclass of economically 'inactive' people and a ready supply of migrant labour. Some employers might even see this as beneficial.
The problem is no-one on the right is making any plausible proposals of how to get the underclass of economically active people into work.
Surestart = cancelled Community and youth clubs = cut Probation service = cut Prison service = cut
If we had two or three decades of investment in these areas you would gradually reduce the size of the underclass, a bit. You can't do it by rehashing schemes like linking benefits to job searching which have been repeatedly championed by every government I can remember. If that worked we wouldn't still be talking about it.
I agree. Our society is so poor at dealing with people who fall the the cracks. So much opportunity cost in closing down the night schools and shafting the Open University. In my area you can do a bit of basic computing or a bookkeeping course else you need to go to the online providers.
I do see an argument that making migrant labour integral to employers has reduced opportunity for those who need upskilling or some experience. Maybe that C.V gap would be overlooked if the labour market was a bit tighter.
If we are talking about the inactive underclass then the vast majority of employers are not going to be suited to bringing them in to the fold, nor could they sensibly restructure to do so.
It is how people are treated as kids and at key crisis incidents as adults around housing, criminality, poverty that matter, and that is the job of the state. Some will say it is the job of parents, but by the nature of the underclass and despite many, many great parents within that group, too many parents will fail, so the state has to be the fallback if we want to change anything.
It is because migration is so complex and contentious that those who highlight the possible downsides of migration need to have their voices heard. As the case of Steve Fothergill shows, this is not always easy. Back in October, Fothergill, an economics professor at Sheffield Hallam University, sent me a paper on the impact of migration on the labour markets of the old industrial heartlands of England and Wales.
Fothergill has spent most of his career studying what has happened to those parts of the UK at the sharp end of the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. It would be hard to think of an economist who knows more about what is really going on in what were once thriving pit villages than he does. The paper looked at what had happened to employment in the old industrial communities between 2011 and 2021 and found that on average 40% of the new jobs had gone to non-UK citizens.
Fothergill provided some suggestions as to why employers might prefer to employ non-UK workers and said the fact that only 60% of the net new jobs were going to locally born people was not a great return on the regeneration efforts of recent years. Which it clearly isn’t. My view was that the research was a serious piece of work and interesting enough to be the subject of a column, yet within days of the piece appearing, Fothergill was told his part-time contract was being terminated. He sees the decision as an attempt to gag him and says the university was less interested in objective research than in “peddling acceptable messages”. The university says the decision was taken to help ease financial pressures. “Sheffield Hallam University takes its responsibility to protect and promote both free speech and academic freedom seriously. At no point was there any attempt to suppress the research project or its findings,” it said in a statement.
Yet Fothergill has been at the university since it was founded in 1992 and his work has brought in millions of pounds for the institution over more than three decades. His report was run past some eminent experts in his field. If the university didn’t want to hear this, then that would be both wrong and plain daft. Academia is absolutely the right place to have a measured debate about the pros and cons of migration. That debate needs to start with a basic premise: not everyone worried about the level of migration is a bigot.
And yet Rayner claims there is no problem with housing supply and even if there is, it’s not affected by mass immigration
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
David Cameron's 2015 manifesto contained this startling fact, and yet look at the record of the Tories on immigration since then...
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
We have immigration because the domestic workforce isn't big enough to support the number of retirees. People are also retiring earlier. Of course new jobs are going to go mostly to immigrants.
As well as planning to slash the number of immigrants the UK takes in and deport illegal immigrants, Farage also said he wants to increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
Lets assume he is successful in increasing the birthrate, against consistent global trends, that starts to have a small impact from about 2050. Not much of a plan for the 2030s or 2040s is there?
Not all the globe has low birthrates, Africa certainly doesn’t which is why so many of our immigrants now come from there.
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
The biggest group living on welfare are pensioners. Is it Tory policy to recall them for national service?
Pensioners have done their working lives and soon won’t be able to claim the state pension until 68 anyway
So who are these millions you are going to magically get back to work? Why werent you able to make a dent over the last 14 years?
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
It wasn’t the Tories proposing this immigration slashing it was Farage, keep up.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
The Tories repeatedly promised immigration in the tens of thousands and to get inactive people off benefits into work. Failed on both, repeatedly. Indeed both have gone in the opposite direction.
Net immigration was falling when Rishi left office and universal credit helped ensure work paid without losing all benefits.
Farage is going further though with deportations of illegals and proposals to slash immigration. Starmer too is going harder on welfare so you lose your benefits if not applying for jobs or turning down job offers
Every government since at least Thatcher has deported illegal migrants and linked benefits to applying for work. Neither shift the dial much.
Farage has also talked in the past of having only contributions based benefits. So if you have not contributed enough in national insurance you get no benefits at all
Has he also said what will happen to those who don't get benefits. Streets full of homeless, huge increase in crime are two obvious consequences.
I don't necessarily disagree but a number of developed nations have such a system with unemployment benefits only given to those with sufficient insurance contributions, including the US, Canada, Poland and Italy, Japan and Singapore
Kemi's a dud. As was bleeding obvious to anyone who followed her dismal absenteeism as a business secretary. I quite like her on a quasi-personal level but, she is hopeless, as many of us said from the start.
And this Nigeria stuff is beyond ridiculous. She could pick a fight in an empty room.
I fear she is not up to snuff. But let’s give her a few more months. She may yet learn
She's a thinker/bit of a wonk, slightly lazy, and has a very clear comfort zone.
Not enough for LOTO. She's getting outgunned by Farage.
Any opposition leader who, six months into a five year parliament, doesn't think they have time for lunch, is out to lunch. Or terminally thick.
On the sandwich score, dining on random stuff from the fridge, discovered the cheese and basil sandwich. Toasted sourdough, buttered, plus cheese, and a whole pack of basil. Yum.
Cheese, basil AND tomato ...
I'm with Kemi on this. Tomato doesn't belong in sandwiches. They make the bread soggy and also do not allow a clean bite, so pull out of the filling. A BLT is just about acceptable as you can put the T between layers and seperate it from the bread. Otherwise it is like pineapple on pizza.
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On the sandwich score, dining on random stuff from the fridge, discovered the cheese and basil sandwich.
Toasted sourdough, buttered, plus cheese, and a whole pack of basil. Yum.
In Sara's case it was not home schooling that hid abuse but her sudden adoption of the hijab which covered her bruises, and no-one wants to strip search every girl who turns up in that particular garment, or who switches from skirt to trousers, for an example that avoids religion.
Home schooling is more likely to indicate mum has been persuaded by American alt-right and religious sites rather than physical abuse.
I'm not saying whether this is a good or bad thing, just that people on here seem to have an idea of 'home schooling' that's rather out of date.
This is just one reason I believe we’re staring at a one term government
It seems to me an absolute no-brainer.
That is a wicked slur on gorillas.
Between 1997 and 2009, under the last Labour Government, we had the largest influx of people Britain had ever seen. Their open borders policy, combined with their failure to reform welfare, meant that for years over 90 percent of employment growth in this country was accounted for by foreign nationals – even though there were 1.4 million people who spent most of the 2000s living on out-of-work benefits.
https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2015/localpdf/Conservatives.pdf
1) It already makes sense for most homeowners to do it anyway. Breakeven can be less than 10 years, even in Scotland.
2) Lots of power when we don't really need it (looking 20 years ahead)
3) Generally, government subsidy should be used to stimulate a market or technology that hasn't got onto its own two feet yet. Solar is flying already.
So mad, uncertain new technologies like CCS are probably the best place to put that cash. Alternatively, £20 billion buys you 20,000 miles of segregated cycle lane, which would have a much more certain return on your investment in terms of emissions (and indeed other stuff like obesity).
*if* they could find the money to put them in to start with.
What about somebody who doesn't have that cash handy? Borrowing doesn't make economic sense as the interest wipes out your savings. Leasing is a poor substitute (if it's even still available).
Just think what free solar panels would do for people on low incomes. Especially pensioners who are at home all day, but also single parents, shift workers...
I'm not against "give poor people stuff", but you can just give poor people more money. But the electorate don't seem that keen on increasing benefits.
How much it will help others, I don't know.
If, of course, they have solar panels so don't need to buy as much electricity...
increase our birthrate so we have less need for immigrant workers to do British jobs.
He would scrap the two child benefit cap and increase the married couples tax allowance
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13530147/amp/Nigel-Farage-says-people-encouraged-children-twice-wed-father-four-backs-scrapping-two-child-benefit-cap-tax-breaks-married-couples.html
Cheapest to do on green field (import migrants, ready skilled, cheap wages initially - when they want more, get more migrants)
Most expensive on industrial sites that need remediation (long term unemployed, need careful coaxing and training to get them into work)
So we stack up the sick and not seeking work, while importing people to do the jobs.
Iain Martin
@iainmartin1
·
1h
Trump is about to demand as high as 5% of GDP on defence and settle for 3.5%, is the word. Yet something v strange is happening in British politics. The Treasury and politics are going on as though this big thing isn’t about to happen. Have written my latest newsletter on it…
https://x.com/iainmartin1/status/1867281878690279657
In the meantime while we wait for our birthrate to rise we can get more of the millions living on welfare into full time jobs and use AI for some of the other posts we can’t fill
We are better off because the crisis in NHS and care is partially mitigated by the hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers.
1) Wait
2) Get millions into jobs
3) Use AI.
A short manifesto, admittedly. But then you could also play the green card and claim to be saving Gaia by using less paper.
Everyone knows the Tories talk shit, because we have just had 14 years without any delivery to match your words.
But Kemi's likely instinctive reaction to a trickle of people to Reform might be the correct one. "State publicly in the next 5 days that you'll never join Reform or you're losing the whip" might be a good reaction to that. An exodus of the kind of imbeciles that helped sink the Tory ship in the first place might be helpful.
Tacking to the centre is optional. Having an MP base such that the choice of tacking to the centre or tacking to the realistic right are both genuine options available and both wings would be able to lead the party would be an absolute boon.
I agree with him on much of it though, certainly if you aren’t regularly applying for jobs when on universal credit or JSA and if you are turning down job offers then you lose your benefits. Indeed even Starmer Labour is moving towards that
And across the developed world, whether there is immigration or not, they are voting for hand car washes over machines ones.
Just as they are choosing to have coffee made by Baristas rather than using instant coffee or an automatic machine.
Who are you to deny them their choice?
I haven't got a day off until next Friday; I'm not entirely sure that I'll make it
Prior to the disastrous 1948 planning act, in the 1930s we were building more homes per annum than were ever built post-war . . . even though post-war there was Council etc construction too and rebuilding from the war, none of that matched what came pre-war and pre-planning act.
Because in the 1930s anyone who wanted to build a home could do so, within reason. Which is what we should go back to. Rather than saying Barratt have permission to build a hundred but everyone else can't do squat.
Farage is going further though with deportations of illegals and proposals to slash immigration. Starmer too is going harder on welfare so you lose your benefits if not applying for jobs or turning down job offers
Personally I can get a Costa Coffee for £3.40 made by a barista, or a Costa Coffee made by a machine in Tesco's opposite it, as part of a meal deal, for £3.60
When that's the price choice, I'm quite content to pay the extra 20p and get a meal and a snack with my coffee and forfeit the barista, though they don't have many meals suitable for my diet unfortunately.
And I do think that voters should be allowed to vote and decide, because we live in a democracy.
What I think the government should avoid doing is trying to micromanage the economy, because they will (almost always) be shit at it.
If the voters decide they only want high skilled immigration, or indeed no immigration at all, they should get it. And the Conservative government certainly fucked up on the income thresholds (further evidence, for what it's worth, that politicians aren't very good at micromanaging the economy).
What we should all be clear about, though, is that decisions have consequences. One only has to look at Japan - a place I love - to see what happens to a country where both the birth rate and immigration are low.
Solar panels is one of the few things you are allowed to do with farm land. Farming has tight margins - see the supermarkets. Solar panels + sheep = a better life.
On immigration Reform would also withdraw from the ECHR to make it easier to deport illegal immigrants and adopt a ‘one in’ new immigrant means ‘one out’ so another immigrant would have to have left first before a new immigrant could come in
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/0/reform-uk-manifesto-richard-tice-key-policies-glance/
And they are essentially arguing a business case to try and get it started, using 20% of area not of count of warehouses.
I have previously done ballpark numbers suggesting that the warehouse roof space from published numbers is more like 700 sqkm available, and that does not cover other things such as shopping centres.
Plus of course solar panels can be put over lightweight structures over car parks can so on - solar car ports over garages and dealers are a thing. I have looked at those myself for my own planned veranda as the entire roof structure, but no one is really in the domestic sector as demand is so high elsewhere.
Plus the useful of a warehouse roof by % solar panel area should be perhaps 2x that of a solar farm.
Reducing the impact of Green Belt needed for new housing sounds like a killer argument to me, or a strong objection in writing of a local plan - BUT "what about the huge retail park or industrial park which is being built?". I can see that having weight with the Planning Inspectorate.
Surestart = cancelled
Community and youth clubs = cut
Probation service = cut
Prison service = cut
If we had two or three decades of investment in these areas you would gradually reduce the size of the underclass, a bit. You can't do it by rehashing schemes like linking benefits to job searching which have been repeatedly championed by every government I can remember. If that worked we wouldn't still be talking about it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy478pgy171o
A scandal we don't hear much about because it was mostly abroad:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files
(No sniggering at the back, please.)
One thing I learnt from Diabetes care very quickly is that the specialist nurses have the extra face to face time with the patients they deal with to have a far better handle than Doctors on the real detail, because Drs are the scarce resource who's contact time is much more rationed.
* Weird analogy: how many ways are there to skin a cat?
I do see an argument that making migrant labour integral to employers has reduced opportunity for those who need upskilling or some experience. Maybe that C.V gap would be overlooked if the labour market was a bit tighter.
Here, for example, is a (probably Amazon publicity) 2020 piece about their distribution warehouse in Tilbury:
https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/sustainability/amazon-unveils-its-largest-fulfilment-centre-solar-panel-installation-in-europe
(They call it a fulfilment centre, but that sounds like a brothel or something under a blue pyramid in Glastonbury.)
Satellite view:
https://www.google.com/maps/search/amazon+distribution+centre+tilbury/@51.4680434,0.3524436,285m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTIxMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw==
"The cleanest of the many ways ..."
I imagine it depends what you want - cat gloves, or cat dinner in a hurry, or a skeleton to display - and what the state is ...
Sadly I can't post it here
“Under FPTP with three parties within in 3% of each other could see utter carnage in the number of seats won.”
No. That is the complete opposite of the lesson we should be drawing.
under FPTP if voters from other parties chose you when their 1st preference can’t win, you go up just 0.6% from last election yet go from 11 to 72 seats, up just 1.6% and add 211 seats - alternatively get 14.3% of votes for just 5 seats because you are second preference of no one.
Mike Smithson has been saying this to us for years and years: second and third preferences do matter loads in FPTP.
look at Stodge’s NZ roundup in this thread, that he boiled down not into parties but blocks. We should look at UK polling not as parties, but as blocs. The psephological stats from last UK GE in para 2 is the result of blocs with 1st 2nd 3rd preferences in play.
The last election result defines for us the current blocs in UK politics.
And we have the political term for policies and governing which brings the 2nd and 3rd prefs of your voting block into play for you, fishes for and puts those votes in your net as one metaphor - spectral-syncretic politics. Or this is gardening/cultivating your bloc to use another metaphor.
And a note for HY: Conservatives and Reform are 100% not in the same voting block. Both Conservative Party and Reform are in their own separate blocks. They are in cannibal deathmatch with each other. The first and second preferences of last election result is 100% proof of this.
Block 1 Lab 33.7% - 412 seats; LibDem 12.2% - 72 seats; Green 6.7% - 4 seats.
Block 2 Conservatives 23.7% - 121 seats.
Block 3 Reform 14.3% - 5 seats.
Labour and Libdems can 100% poll higher than that for less seats, if helping each other wasn’t happening. %s produce these seats from blocs working together, or blocs fighting each other in cannibalism deathmatch.
Despite spectral-syncretics from the Labour government, still the most powerful glue for Bloc 1 voters sticking together for maximum impact, would be bloc 2 and 3 cosying up.
It is how people are treated as kids and at key crisis incidents as adults around housing, criminality, poverty that matter, and that is the job of the state. Some will say it is the job of parents, but by the nature of the underclass and despite many, many great parents within that group, too many parents will fail, so the state has to be the fallback if we want to change anything.
but a number of developed
nations have such a system
with unemployment benefits
only given to those with
sufficient insurance
contributions, including the
US, Canada, Poland and Italy, Japan and Singapore