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.
The best way to reduce it is to eliminate the poverty trap by making work pay.
If someone works 16 hours a week and not an hour more then they can get tens of thousands in benefits. If they work any more, then combining Income Tax, NIC, UC Taper and more they can be on 70-80% plus real marginal tax rate.
Its not finding jobs that is the issue, we have full employment. The bigger issue is people who don't work because they are being entirely rational in the tax system that exists!
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
US prison rate is five times ours. Better get on with building those prisons and increasing taxes to pay for more police and prison officers.
Also while the Tories enjoy leads (however small) in some polls, Badenoch is safe right now. The same is true of Starmer. So talk of ditching leaders is exceptionally premature right now.
If we see significant changes in 2025 (eg the Tories slipping back to low 20s, Reform into low 30s), then we’ll see more pressure. But not now.
There is 4 plus years to go and I just cannot see a change in the leaders for sometime, if at all
The locals so far have been good for the conservatives and lib dems, but the real test is coming in May 2026 with the Welsh and Scottish elections for the Senedd and Holyrood
“The locals so far”
Being in government for a full two decades can hollow you out of local government, but you keep winning general elections if your preferred to manage economy and your prospective PM preferred - the two main questions on GE ballot paper not on local election ballot papers.
We have seen all other election nights, including National elections for EU in 1999 when Hague thrashed Blair’s new Labour government, poor pointers to what happens at GE. And rightly so, we should see all GE as completely different question asked of voters.
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.
Sensible, but I'd add a bloc for the Greens and Independents as they're more like Reform in relation to the Tories in terms of having strong - often crank - views they're unwilling to brook any compromise on or challenges to and want whatever the cost or impracticalities. People like Owen Jones hate Labour now has much as the Tories.
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
When I was signing on in the early Eighties, I couldn't get Unemployment benefit as I had no history of paying NI, but I was entitled to Supplementary benefit of about £22 per week, probably about £60 in current money.
Do these other countries have a Supplementary benefit equivalent, for those with no NI record?
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.
Sensible, but I'd add a bloc for the Greens and Independents as they're more like Reform in relation to the Tories in terms of having strong - often crank - views they're unwilling to brook any compromise on or challenges to and want whatever the cost or impracticalities. People like Owen Jones hate Labour now has much as the Tories.
I think if Greens everywhere were not in bloc one, but stuck together as a bloody minded separate bloc like the remaining Con and Ref are separate blocs, greens would get 11-16% and bloc 1 very much suffer in seats. Labour and Libdem seat totals are so because more than then half potential Green vote are not bloody minded as the 6% are, so votes in Bloc 1. Jones and our own BJO very much in the bloody minded 6%, but don’t define the potential green vote.
Where greens can do well, local and national, is in Tory seats where they are seen by bloc 1 friends as hurting the Tories.
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
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.
The best way to reduce it is to eliminate the poverty trap by making work pay.
If someone works 16 hours a week and not an hour more then they can get tens of thousands in benefits. If they work any more, then combining Income Tax, NIC, UC Taper and more they can be on 70-80% plus real marginal tax rate.
Its not finding jobs that is the issue, we have full employment. The bigger issue is people who don't work because they are being entirely rational in the tax system that exists!
But you can't fix this issue without dragging a different set of people including people who are earning well over the median wage into the same "safety" net...
We've discussed this before - the taper is too high but fixing the taper creates a different issue.
Would it be wise to mandate that all new builds (all buildings, not just homes) have skillion roofs that face south?
(Scillion roofs are what are also termed "monopitch".)
No, that's too crude, and could cause a monotonous built environment. Plus they are not necessarily cost efficient in an overall building.
For a start E-W orientated panels can work better in the shoulder or winter months, when we arguably need solar to be optimised. And panels laid flat are not materially worse.
South facing does not work very well, for example, on N-facing slopes, or on terraces, or on the N-side of elevated landscape.
A better guide could be a certain amount of productive solar capacity per developed hectare, for example.
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.
Tomato belongs in the hand, exploding over the white shirts of all your pretentious colleagues.
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
When I was signing on in the early Eighties, I couldn't get Unemployment benefit as I had no history of paying NI, but I was entitled to Supplementary benefit of about £22 per week, probably about £60 in current money.
Do these other countries have a Supplementary benefit equivalent, for those with no NI record?
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.
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.
Tomato belongs in the hand, exploding over the white shirts of all your pretentious colleagues.
Don't get me wrong, I love tomatoes, Insalata Caprese is one of my favourite starters, though does require good beefy tomatoes, and buffalo mozzarella.
Uncooked tomatoes should be kept away from bread though.
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.
Here's the thing.
There are solutions. They just take much longer than the length of a parliament to have an effect. Which means that - all too often - governments are lazy.
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is 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.
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.
Tomato belongs in the hand, exploding over the white shirts of all your pretentious colleagues.
Don't get me wrong, I love tomatoes, Insalata Caprese is one of my favourite starters, though does require good beefy tomatoes, and buffalo mozzarella.
Uncooked tomatoes should be kept away from bread though.
You can preserve the bread by applying more butter than an NHS consultant is probably allowed to eat. That is what butter is for - you put fat in a sandwich to stop the ingredients making it soggy. And to make it a balanced meal
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
Branston is available both as original and as small chunk. I prefer the latter myself.
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.
The best way to reduce it is to eliminate the poverty trap by making work pay.
If someone works 16 hours a week and not an hour more then they can get tens of thousands in benefits. If they work any more, then combining Income Tax, NIC, UC Taper and more they can be on 70-80% plus real marginal tax rate.
Its not finding jobs that is the issue, we have full employment. The bigger issue is people who don't work because they are being entirely rational in the tax system that exists!
But how would you change that Barty? Would you have a UC taper rate at 20%? If so millions more would be qualifying for UC.
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.
The best way to reduce it is to eliminate the poverty trap by making work pay.
If someone works 16 hours a week and not an hour more then they can get tens of thousands in benefits. If they work any more, then combining Income Tax, NIC, UC Taper and more they can be on 70-80% plus real marginal tax rate.
Its not finding jobs that is the issue, we have full employment. The bigger issue is people who don't work because they are being entirely rational in the tax system that exists!
This is absolutely spot on.
We have managed to disincentivize work for an entire segment of the population, which degrades them and their skills, while encouraging immigration to fill the gap.
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
Ok calm down - it's nothing to get in a pickle about.
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.
Here's the thing.
There are solutions. They just take much longer than the length of a parliament to have an effect. Which means that - all too often - governments are lazy.
That's not true - all 4 items things were initially cut by Osbourne's "Austerity" - which started with good ideas that had Labour's name all over them.
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.
Tomato belongs in the hand, exploding over the white shirts of all your pretentious colleagues.
Don't get me wrong, I love tomatoes, Insalata Caprese is one of my favourite starters, though does require good beefy tomatoes, and buffalo mozzarella.
Uncooked tomatoes should be kept away from bread though.
You can preserve the bread by applying more butter than an NHS consultant is probably allowed to eat. That is what butter is for - you put fat in a sandwich to stop the ingredients making it soggy. And to make it a balanced meal
I can see the point in an impermeable barrier in a breakfast snack, but there remains the issue of mixing lipid and aqueous phases without something to esterify the interface. Something acid might work, perhaps a tangy relish, but alcohol would probably be better. So beer and sandwiches it is, but not for breakfast. At that I draw the line.
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.
The best way to reduce it is to eliminate the poverty trap by making work pay.
If someone works 16 hours a week and not an hour more then they can get tens of thousands in benefits. If they work any more, then combining Income Tax, NIC, UC Taper and more they can be on 70-80% plus real marginal tax rate.
Its not finding jobs that is the issue, we have full employment. The bigger issue is people who don't work because they are being entirely rational in the tax system that exists!
This is absolutely spot on.
We have managed to disincentivize work for an entire segment of the population, which degrades them and their skills, while encouraging immigration to fill the gap.
The problem is that you can't fix where we are without dragging a lot of other families into a similar situation so you end up in a position where people seriously lose out when they can't find 16 hours work while incentivising a number of people who currently work 40 hours to work fewer as they start to qualify for some Universal Credit.
That isn't to say I don't agree with Bart as I do - I just don't think the Government savings would be that great (or actually occur) the end result would be more people sucking on the benefit tit..
Also while the Tories enjoy leads (however small) in some polls, Badenoch is safe right now. The same is true of Starmer. So talk of ditching leaders is exceptionally premature right now.
If we see significant changes in 2025 (eg the Tories slipping back to low 20s, Reform into low 30s), then we’ll see more pressure. But not now.
I think next year's locals will be very interesting: can Reform make inroads, grab some councils, and get some significant on the ground strength? (And can it follow that with decent management of said councils...)
The opportunity has never been greater for them, but at the same time there's risk here: a failure to establish a foothold, and the story of the night being big Conservative gains, and then it's that little bit harder for them.
Aren’t the locals the same ones fought at Peak Boris though? So some Tory losses are likely I think?
It feels like it’s a night that might be perfectly set up for a Tory/Labour losses, Reform gains result.
What I would look for in the May locals in coming years is if the Conservatives do stand out on a night you would expect a sitting government to suffer a bit in mid term.
This is where the top top - as Merson would say - Psephologists, like myself and Professor Curtice, acknowledge the opposition parties wins on the night but say it’s by not enough, opposition are not on course.
What could we be looking at? Where Tories are not fighting Labour, but fighting LibDem, Green or Reform to regain, or gain a ward, how are they faring - as that could take the special topping off the win result, leaving just fruit cake of a win.
The way I would put it is knowing the difference between the yardstick and the chopstick. What looks like a win over Labour on surface if you picked up a chopstick, the yardsticks can be showing it’s by not enough if a General Election night. In fact the main story of the locals could be Tory struggles under the surface against other parties, libdems, Greens, Reform, stealing the icing off the Tory cake, for me, it would points more to what happens next GE night than the headline Tory win - now we know for sure there’s three voting blocs who decided last GE seat totals, by how they worked together, or can’t work together.
Or in short, measure our three voting bloc’s at the locals. As in previous locals this decade, libdems and greens need help from the voting bloc to advance, but labour need help from it for better than expected night. Not all of that might happen. Conservatives will be fighting Labour 1:1 but also fighting libdem, Green and Reform 1:1.
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
A tomato shouldn't be bland. Obviously a supermarket bought tomato that has been grown to schedule in an industrial warehouse, and picked before it's ripe so that it won't rot in the supply chain, that tomato will be bland.
But if you grow your own tomatoes in a greenhouse, and you let them get really ripe, those tomatoes will not be bland. Obviously, then, you'll only have tomatoes to eat for a couple of months in the year at best, but at least they will taste of something.
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.
Because the oil&gas industry has a very effective lobbying system, and he’s not very bright ?
It is an idiotic misallocation of scarce resources, judged on every metric.
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
US prison rate is five times ours. Better get on with building those prisons and increasing taxes to pay for more police and prison officers.
The US has lower taxes than we do and more prisons. Of course they don't have universal public healthcare either, Farage also wants more US style private health insurance and not just NHS monopoly.
There is also of course foodbanks and charity too in the US if you haven't got enough insurance contributions to get unemployment benefits or your benefits are time limited
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
Panzanella says you are wrong. (I’d be interested in @Cyclefree ’s reaction to Kemi’s bread nonsense.)
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.
The best way to reduce it is to eliminate the poverty trap by making work pay.
If someone works 16 hours a week and not an hour more then they can get tens of thousands in benefits. If they work any more, then combining Income Tax, NIC, UC Taper and more they can be on 70-80% plus real marginal tax rate.
Its not finding jobs that is the issue, we have full employment. The bigger issue is people who don't work because they are being entirely rational in the tax system that exists!
That problem is less of an issue since universal credit
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.
Here's the thing.
There are solutions. They just take much longer than the length of a parliament to have an effect. Which means that - all too often - governments are lazy.
Its not really a question of laziness. Its a mix of rational electoral incentives, the decline of the concept of public service/duty, and a lack of understanding.
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
A tomato shouldn't be bland. Obviously a supermarket bought tomato that has been grown to schedule in an industrial warehouse, and picked before it's ripe so that it won't rot in the supply chain, that tomato will be bland.
But if you grow your own tomatoes in a greenhouse, and you let them get really ripe, those tomatoes will not be bland. Obviously, then, you'll only have tomatoes to eat for a couple of months in the year at best, but at least they will taste of something.
Imagine, if you will. Someone who didn't have their own greenhouse. I know. It's difficult to picture, even for a few months at best. But I've heard there are such people.
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.
Tomato belongs in the hand, exploding over the white shirts of all your pretentious colleagues.
Don't get me wrong, I love tomatoes, Insalata Caprese is one of my favourite starters, though does require good beefy tomatoes, and buffalo mozzarella.
Uncooked tomatoes should be kept away from bread though.
You can preserve the bread by applying more butter than an NHS consultant is probably allowed to eat allowed to tell you to eat. That is what butter is for - you put fat in a sandwich to stop the ingredients making it soggy. And to make it a balanced meal
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
This is why a tomato crisp buttie exists. A nice roll, 'some' butter, a big handful of tomato crisps.
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.
The best way to reduce it is to eliminate the poverty trap by making work pay.
If someone works 16 hours a week and not an hour more then they can get tens of thousands in benefits. If they work any more, then combining Income Tax, NIC, UC Taper and more they can be on 70-80% plus real marginal tax rate.
Its not finding jobs that is the issue, we have full employment. The bigger issue is people who don't work because they are being entirely rational in the tax system that exists!
That problem is less of an issue since universal credit
Indeed. UC was a good idea and it's a pity IDC was stamped on by Osborne. Think of the good ideas the Conservatives generated over the past quarter of a century and it's a small list (Brexit was more imposed on it than generated by them). UC, Boris's levelling-up...then it becomes a list of smaller things like more train stations.
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.
Here's the thing.
There are solutions. They just take much longer than the length of a parliament to have an effect. Which means that - all too often - governments are lazy.
They aren't lazy. They won't do anything where
a) the benefits don't get seen in that Parliament and especially
b) where the pain of their actions is front-loaded into that Parliament, even if it bears great fruit 5 -10 years down the line. That is, when their political opponents might have taken over and get the credit.
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
US prison rate is five times ours. Better get on with building those prisons and increasing taxes to pay for more police and prison officers.
The US has lower taxes than we do and more prisons. Of course they don't have universal public healthcare either, Farage also wants more US style private health insurance and not just NHS monopoly.
There is also of course foodbanks and charity too in the US if you haven't got enough insurance contributions to get unemployment benefits or your benefits are time limited
Not sure arguing for US style jailing and social services is a great look.
Tories, when you are in a 3rd place hole, stop digging.
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
This is why a tomato crisp buttie exists. A nice roll, 'some' butter, a big handful of tomato crisps.
When I was working at Cambridge 20 years ago, I used to like the chip buttie they had at Gardenia's.
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
This is why a tomato crisp buttie exists. A nice roll, 'some' butter, a big handful of tomato crisps.
When I was working at Cambridge 20 years ago, I used to like the chip buttie they had at Gardenia's.
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
This is why a tomato crisp buttie exists. A nice roll, 'some' butter, a big handful of tomato crisps.
When I was working at Cambridge 20 years ago, I used to like the chip buttie they had at Gardenia's.
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
See also. I eat at my desk. You do? Have you taken medical advice? It's straight up weird. People don't like to work when they don't have to.
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
It's amazing how many people are saying that you can't even buy apples individually. You certainly could the last time I was in a grocery store in the USA, but anything Trump says has to be wrong by definition.
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
This is why a tomato crisp buttie exists. A nice roll, 'some' butter, a big handful of tomato crisps.
When I was working at Cambridge 20 years ago, I used to like the chip buttie they had at Gardenia's.
Did you ever go upstairs?
No, I just had it as take-away.
I ask, because it was about five years into going to the Gardenia that someone told me it had an upstairs!
This is all just ridiculous. We've very likely got years to go till anything happens GE-wise and Kier can win it too.
If anyone or anything becomes too short in any UK political market - and that includes Nige atm - just lay it. But bear in mind if you're doing the next PM you may be waiting a decade or more for collection in worst case, so ensure you're happy to keep on playing the market that long to build up a healthy book!
It is pretty ridiculous. Not least because various technological advancements are about to upend the entire world. Britain might be barely recognisable by 2029
Maybe. We just launched one although the first client essentially neutered it. I am worried about lawyers destroying potential in general.
This is all just ridiculous. We've very likely got years to go till anything happens GE-wise and Kier can win it too.
If anyone or anything becomes too short in any UK political market - and that includes Nige atm - just lay it. But bear in mind if you're doing the next PM you may be waiting a decade or more for collection in worst case, so ensure you're happy to keep on playing the market that long to build up a healthy book!
Keir. K-E-I-R.
Another PB Dumbo who cannot spell the name of even the most high-profile of politicians.
Spell Kemi's name in full if you wanna impress me
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch
Points for me?
I do hope no one's nobbled her Wikipedia profile or I'm going to look silly!
Well it's what I'd check your answer against Wikipedia so we rise and fall together. Unlike Anabobazina.
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
It's amazing how many people are saying that you can't even buy apples individually. You certainly could the last time I was in a grocery store in the USA, but anything Trump says has to be wrong by definition.
Maybe you are right. I have no idea.
But what the intellecto-left have to realise is that voters will just go 'oh ho, yes that's right - costs a bomb more' rather than ohhh, errr, you can't buy apples in threes, eerrrhhh, I got you lying etc etc...
As Bill Clinton said the other day - you gotta meet the voters where they are.
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
US prison rate is five times ours. Better get on with building those prisons and increasing taxes to pay for more police and prison officers.
The US has lower taxes than we do and more prisons. Of course they don't have universal public healthcare either, Farage also wants more US style private health insurance and not just NHS monopoly.
There is also of course foodbanks and charity too in the US if you haven't got enough insurance contributions to get unemployment benefits or your benefits are time limited
Not sure arguing for US style jailing and social services is a great look.
Tories, when you are in a 3rd place hole, stop digging.
Except it is Farage and Reform arguing for it not the Tories and they are the ones surging on tonight’s local by elections
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
It's amazing how many people are saying that you can't even buy apples individually. You certainly could the last time I was in a grocery store in the USA, but anything Trump says has to be wrong by definition.
Maybe you are right. I have no idea.
But what the intellecto-left have to realise is that voters will just go 'oh ho, yes that's right - costs a bomb more' rather than ohhh, errr, you can't buy apples in threes, eerrrhhh, I got you lying etc etc...
As Bill Clinton said the other day - you gotta meet the voters where they are.
The voters simultaneously want both higher wages and lower prices alongside more government spending and lower taxes.
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.
Tomato is OK, but it has to be a sandwich you make to eat immediately, not one you make the night before for tomorrow's packed lunch. Also it is bland and needs something else. BLT is OK as bacon is salty. Adding basil would work. Cheese and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
This is why a tomato crisp buttie exists. A nice roll, 'some' butter, a big handful of tomato crisps.
When I was working at Cambridge 20 years ago, I used to like the chip buttie they had at Gardenia's.
Did you ever go upstairs?
Yeah I've been up there a couple of times as my husband likes their 'Greek Fried Chicken '. You do get the impression that it's only ever been wiped with a moist cloth once every 10 years. The Gardenia isn't a patch on the Erania which I miss intensely.
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
They absolutely do put fruit like apples in the fridge in places like Bodegas i.e. NY corner shops, because it gets so warm / humid in the summer and those places are like little heat boxes.
Also, its quite common in supermarkets (normally higher ends ones) to have all the produce in open refrigerated shelving that also sprays mists of water.
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
It's amazing how many people are saying that you can't even buy apples individually. You certainly could the last time I was in a grocery store in the USA, but anything Trump says has to be wrong by definition.
Maybe you are right. I have no idea.
But what the intellecto-left have to realise is that voters will just go 'oh ho, yes that's right - costs a bomb more' rather than ohhh, errr, you can't buy apples in threes, eerrrhhh, I got you lying etc etc...
As Bill Clinton said the other day - you gotta meet the voters where they are.
The voters simultaneously want both higher wages and lower prices alongside more government spending and lower taxes.
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
Hope they are US apples as if they are foreign apples once Trump’s tariffs kick in she would have to take them all back
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.
Because the oil&gas industry has a very effective lobbying system, and he’s not very bright ?
It is an idiotic misallocation of scarce resources, judged on every metric.
At least some in the Oil and Gas industry are telling him its an idiotic idea.
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
It's amazing how many people are saying that you can't even buy apples individually. You certainly could the last time I was in a grocery store in the USA, but anything Trump says has to be wrong by definition.
Maybe you are right. I have no idea.
But what the intellecto-left have to realise is that voters will just go 'oh ho, yes that's right - costs a bomb more' rather than ohhh, errr, you can't buy apples in threes, eerrrhhh, I got you lying etc etc...
As Bill Clinton said the other day - you gotta meet the voters where they are.
The voters simultaneously want both higher wages and lower prices alongside more government spending and lower taxes.
The average voter is a non graduate on average wage we often forget. They want a lot of things, government can’t deliver them all, the problem is most in government are highly educated and high earners and can’t explain that to said average voters in words they will accept
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
It's amazing how many people are saying that you can't even buy apples individually. You certainly could the last time I was in a grocery store in the USA, but anything Trump says has to be wrong by definition.
Maybe you are right. I have no idea.
But what the intellecto-left have to realise is that voters will just go 'oh ho, yes that's right - costs a bomb more' rather than ohhh, errr, you can't buy apples in threes, eerrrhhh, I got you lying etc etc...
As Bill Clinton said the other day - you gotta meet the voters where they are.
The voters simultaneously want both higher wages and lower prices alongside more government spending and lower taxes.
The average voter is a non graduate on average wage we often forget. They want a lot of things, government can’t deliver them all, the problem is most in government are highly educated and high earners and can’t explain that to said average voters in words they will accept
It doesn't matter what anyone in government says if they themselves live by different rules.
"We're all in this together" has to be followed by politicians.
This is all just ridiculous. We've very likely got years to go till anything happens GE-wise and Kier can win it too.
If anyone or anything becomes too short in any UK political market - and that includes Nige atm - just lay it. But bear in mind if you're doing the next PM you may be waiting a decade or more for collection in worst case, so ensure you're happy to keep on playing the market that long to build up a healthy book!
It is pretty ridiculous. Not least because various technological advancements are about to upend the entire world. Britain might be barely recognisable by 2029
Maybe. We just launched one although the first client essentially neutered it. I am worried about lawyers destroying potential in general.
This is all just ridiculous. We've very likely got years to go till anything happens GE-wise and Kier can win it too.
If anyone or anything becomes too short in any UK political market - and that includes Nige atm - just lay it. But bear in mind if you're doing the next PM you may be waiting a decade or more for collection in worst case, so ensure you're happy to keep on playing the market that long to build up a healthy book!
Keir. K-E-I-R.
Another PB Dumbo who cannot spell the name of even the most high-profile of politicians.
Spell Kemi's name in full if you wanna impress me
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch
Points for me?
I do hope no one's nobbled her Wikipedia profile or I'm going to look silly!
Well it's what I'd check your answer against Wikipedia so we rise and fall together. Unlike Anabobazina.
She goes by Kemi, ergo it’s perfectly valid to say Kemi is her name. Unlike Kier, which is not Keir’s name, but your dumbo misspelling.
Anyway, I doubt that even in the USA people are in the poor house because of the price of fruit rather than the cost of housing.
Actually in places like NYC they have aggressive rent controls for the poor, but those people often have limited choices when it comes to supermarkets. So your rent can be manageable and has been capped for years, but other costs of living like food have really hit hard.
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.
Because the oil&gas industry has a very effective lobbying system, and he’s not very bright ?
It is an idiotic misallocation of scarce resources, judged on every metric.
At least some in the Oil and Gas industry are telling him its an idiotic idea.
I am very very busy all day, but a weird news cycle with talks of apples in fridges and if a sandwich is real food...its a good job there aren't any important things happening in the world.
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
It's amazing how many people are saying that you can't even buy apples individually. You certainly could the last time I was in a grocery store in the USA, but anything Trump says has to be wrong by definition.
Maybe you are right. I have no idea.
But what the intellecto-left have to realise is that voters will just go 'oh ho, yes that's right - costs a bomb more' rather than ohhh, errr, you can't buy apples in threes, eerrrhhh, I got you lying etc etc...
As Bill Clinton said the other day - you gotta meet the voters where they are.
The voters simultaneously want both higher wages and lower prices alongside more government spending and lower taxes.
Also, they believe taxes should be higher for people earning slightly more than they are.
This is all just ridiculous. We've very likely got years to go till anything happens GE-wise and Kier can win it too.
If anyone or anything becomes too short in any UK political market - and that includes Nige atm - just lay it. But bear in mind if you're doing the next PM you may be waiting a decade or more for collection in worst case, so ensure you're happy to keep on playing the market that long to build up a healthy book!
It is pretty ridiculous. Not least because various technological advancements are about to upend the entire world. Britain might be barely recognisable by 2029
Maybe. We just launched one although the first client essentially neutered it. I am worried about lawyers destroying potential in general.
This is all just ridiculous. We've very likely got years to go till anything happens GE-wise and Kier can win it too.
If anyone or anything becomes too short in any UK political market - and that includes Nige atm - just lay it. But bear in mind if you're doing the next PM you may be waiting a decade or more for collection in worst case, so ensure you're happy to keep on playing the market that long to build up a healthy book!
Keir. K-E-I-R.
Another PB Dumbo who cannot spell the name of even the most high-profile of politicians.
Spell Kemi's name in full if you wanna impress me
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch
Points for me?
I do hope no one's nobbled her Wikipedia profile or I'm going to look silly!
Well it's what I'd check your answer against Wikipedia so we rise and fall together. Unlike Anabobazina.
She goes by Kemi, ergo it’s perfectly valid to say Kemi is her name. Unlike Kier, which is not Keir’s name, but your dumbo misspelling.
I asked you to spell her name in full if you wanted to impress me. I'd even have let you spell "Olukemi" "Kemi" if you like.
This is all just ridiculous. We've very likely got years to go till anything happens GE-wise and Kier can win it too.
If anyone or anything becomes too short in any UK political market - and that includes Nige atm - just lay it. But bear in mind if you're doing the next PM you may be waiting a decade or more for collection in worst case, so ensure you're happy to keep on playing the market that long to build up a healthy book!
It is pretty ridiculous. Not least because various technological advancements are about to upend the entire world. Britain might be barely recognisable by 2029
Maybe. We just launched one although the first client essentially neutered it. I am worried about lawyers destroying potential in general.
This is all just ridiculous. We've very likely got years to go till anything happens GE-wise and Kier can win it too.
If anyone or anything becomes too short in any UK political market - and that includes Nige atm - just lay it. But bear in mind if you're doing the next PM you may be waiting a decade or more for collection in worst case, so ensure you're happy to keep on playing the market that long to build up a healthy book!
Keir. K-E-I-R.
Another PB Dumbo who cannot spell the name of even the most high-profile of politicians.
Spell Kemi's name in full if you wanna impress me
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch
Points for me?
I do hope no one's nobbled her Wikipedia profile or I'm going to look silly!
Well it's what I'd check your answer against Wikipedia so we rise and fall together. Unlike Anabobazina.
She goes by Kemi, ergo it’s perfectly valid to say Kemi is her name. Unlike Kier, which is not Keir’s name, but your dumbo misspelling.
Police chiefs have warned the home secretary that without further funding neighbourhood police officers - a government priority - could be cut.
Nearly a quarter of police forces in England and Wales have called on Yvette Cooper to underwrite the costs of pay rises and higher employer taxes when details of their funding are announced early next week.
Some are facing budget deficits of £10m or more, and the chief constable of Lincolnshire Police has told the BBC the jobs of a third of his officers could be at risk, jeopardising the force's viability.
Acyn @Acyn Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
It's amazing how many people are saying that you can't even buy apples individually. You certainly could the last time I was in a grocery store in the USA, but anything Trump says has to be wrong by definition.
Of course you can buy single Apples in the US. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy more than one iPhone at a time.
I think Starmer has got the message that very high levels of migration have got to be brought under control. It'll be interesting if he actually do anything about it though,
This is all just ridiculous. We've very likely got years to go till anything happens GE-wise and Kier can win it too.
If anyone or anything becomes too short in any UK political market - and that includes Nige atm - just lay it. But bear in mind if you're doing the next PM you may be waiting a decade or more for collection in worst case, so ensure you're happy to keep on playing the market that long to build up a healthy book!
It is pretty ridiculous. Not least because various technological advancements are about to upend the entire world. Britain might be barely recognisable by 2029
Maybe. We just launched one although the first client essentially neutered it. I am worried about lawyers destroying potential in general.
This is all just ridiculous. We've very likely got years to go till anything happens GE-wise and Kier can win it too.
If anyone or anything becomes too short in any UK political market - and that includes Nige atm - just lay it. But bear in mind if you're doing the next PM you may be waiting a decade or more for collection in worst case, so ensure you're happy to keep on playing the market that long to build up a healthy book!
Keir. K-E-I-R.
Another PB Dumbo who cannot spell the name of even the most high-profile of politicians.
Spell Kemi's name in full if you wanna impress me
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch
Points for me?
I do hope no one's nobbled her Wikipedia profile or I'm going to look silly!
Well it's what I'd check your answer against Wikipedia so we rise and fall together. Unlike Anabobazina.
Olu Olu?
Is Kemi launching assault on sandwiches fake news? It’s not on MailOnline.
Comments
If someone works 16 hours a week and not an hour more then they can get tens of thousands in benefits. If they work any more, then combining Income Tax, NIC, UC Taper and more they can be on 70-80% plus real marginal tax rate.
Its not finding jobs that is the issue, we have full employment. The bigger issue is people who don't work because they are being entirely rational in the tax system that exists!
Being in government for a full two decades can hollow you out of local government, but you keep winning general elections if your preferred to manage economy and your prospective PM preferred - the two main questions on GE ballot paper not on local election ballot papers.
We have seen all other election nights, including National elections for EU in 1999 when Hague thrashed Blair’s new Labour government, poor pointers to what happens at GE. And rightly so, we should see all GE as completely different question asked of voters.
https://x.com/528vibes/status/1867292684668608725
Do these other countries have a Supplementary benefit equivalent, for those with no NI record?
Where greens can do well, local and national, is in Tory seats where they are seen by bloc 1 friends as hurting the Tories.
They are very much entwined into bloc 1.
We've discussed this before - the taper is too high but fixing the taper creates a different issue.
No spoilers please - give folks a chance to catch up.
I just hope it gets remembered for these chefs - and not Gregg Wallace's antics.
No, that's too crude, and could cause a monotonous built environment. Plus they are not necessarily cost efficient in an overall building.
For a start E-W orientated panels can work better in the shoulder or winter months, when we arguably need solar to be optimised. And panels laid flat are not materially worse.
South facing does not work very well, for example, on N-facing slopes, or on terraces, or on the N-side of elevated landscape.
A better guide could be a certain amount of productive solar capacity per developed hectare, for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpSDNyVsFM
Uncooked tomatoes should be kept away from bread though.
There are solutions. They just take much longer than the length of a parliament to have an effect. Which means that - all too often - governments are lazy.
and tomato is meh (you need some crunch too which is why Cheddar and Branston works but cheese and chutney is also meh. And I am sure they have reduced the chunk size in Branston which is not good)
We have managed to disincentivize work for an entire segment of the population, which degrades them and their skills, while encouraging immigration to fill the gap.
That isn't to say I don't agree with Bart as I do - I just don't think the Government savings would be that great (or actually occur) the end result would be more people sucking on the benefit tit..
This is where the top top - as Merson would say - Psephologists, like myself and Professor Curtice, acknowledge the opposition parties wins on the night but say it’s by not enough, opposition are not on course.
What could we be looking at? Where Tories are not fighting Labour, but fighting LibDem, Green or Reform to regain, or gain a ward, how are they faring - as that could take the special topping off the win result, leaving just fruit cake of a win.
The way I would put it is knowing the difference between the yardstick and the chopstick. What looks like a win over Labour on surface if you picked up a chopstick, the yardsticks can be showing it’s by not enough if a General Election night. In fact the main story of the locals could be Tory struggles under the surface against other parties, libdems, Greens, Reform, stealing the icing off the Tory cake, for me, it would points more to what happens next GE night than the headline Tory win - now we know for sure there’s three voting blocs who decided last GE seat totals, by how they worked together, or can’t work together.
Or in short, measure our three voting bloc’s at the locals. As in previous locals this decade, libdems and greens need help from the voting bloc to advance, but labour need help from it for better than expected night. Not all of that might happen. Conservatives will be fighting Labour 1:1 but also fighting libdem, Green and Reform 1:1.
But if you grow your own tomatoes in a greenhouse, and you let them get really ripe, those tomatoes will not be bland. Obviously, then, you'll only have tomatoes to eat for a couple of months in the year at best, but at least they will taste of something.
It is an idiotic misallocation of scarce resources, judged on every metric.
There is also of course foodbanks and charity too in the US if you haven't got enough insurance contributions to get unemployment benefits or your benefits are time limited
(I’d be interested in @Cyclefree ’s reaction to Kemi’s bread nonsense.)
I'm also allergic to prawn.
Lab 26.2%
Con 25.4%
RefUK 22.4%
LD 11.4%
Grn 8.2%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
Yes to tomatoes.
Yes to A Complete Unknown. Teasers look epic. (And it's got Ed Norton as Pete Seeger).
No to home schooling.
a) the benefits don't get seen in that Parliament and especially
b) where the pain of their actions is front-loaded into that Parliament, even if it bears great fruit 5 -10 years down the line. That is, when their political opponents might have taken over and get the credit.
https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/london
Tories, when you are in a 3rd place hole, stop digging.
Acyn
@Acyn
Trump: I tell the story about a woman who… went to a grocery store, had three apples and she put them down on the counter and she looked and saw the price and she said will you excuse me? And she walked one of the apples back to the refrigerator...
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1867316591521935778
The comments are full of - 'why, that can't happen - apples aren't in the fridge', 'Trump made this up', 'No one would buy three apples and nothing else' etc etc.
The Dems just don't get it. You gotta tell the voters a story. A narrative. Trump's story may often be actually made up but they are close enough to truth that Joe Public says 'yeh, huh, I saw that last week'.
I eat at my desk.
You do? Have you taken medical advice? It's straight up weird. People don't like to work when they don't have to.
Murder is valuable political theatre.
But what the intellecto-left have to realise is that voters will just go 'oh ho, yes that's right - costs a bomb more' rather than ohhh, errr, you can't buy apples in threes, eerrrhhh, I got you lying etc etc...
As Bill Clinton said the other day - you gotta meet the voters where they are.
➡️ RFM: 41.1% (New)
🌹 LAB: 34.7% (-18.4)
🌍 GRN: 12.6% (-16.4)
🌳 CON: 7.7% (-10.2)
🙋 IND: 3.9% (New)
Reform GAIN from Labour.
Changes w/ 2022.
https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1867352053133070523
Blackbrook (St Helens) Council By-Election Result: RFM: 41.1% (New) LAB: 34.7% (-18.4) GRN: 12.6% (-16.4) CON: 7.7% (-10.2) IND: 3.9% (New) Reform GAIN from Labour. Changes w/ 2022.
https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1867354585288827112
Dodworth (Barnsley) Council By-Election Result:
🔶 LDM: 49.7% (-1.7)
➡️ RFM: 24.3% (New)
🌹 LAB: 16.1% (-18.5)
🌳 CON: 7.1% (-6.9)
🌍 GRN: 2.8% (New)
Liberal Democrat HOLD.
Changes w/ 2024.
https://freshfoodsnyc.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/the-bedford-express-fresh-bodega/
Also, its quite common in supermarkets (normally higher ends ones) to have all the produce in open refrigerated shelving that also sprays mists of water.
"We're all in this together" has to be followed by politicians.
https://x.com/KaiLentit/status/1867000042801787307
Though it does rather demolish claims that a free trade agreement would lead to a flood of American food in British supermarkets.
As it is...
Nearly a quarter of police forces in England and Wales have called on Yvette Cooper to underwrite the costs of pay rises and higher employer taxes when details of their funding are announced early next week.
Some are facing budget deficits of £10m or more, and the chief constable of Lincolnshire Police has told the BBC the jobs of a third of his officers could be at risk, jeopardising the force's viability.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clykw2yl40go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbV07tK0sn4
Conservative Nutters - 25%
Faragist Nutters - 25%
Yellowy Green Nutters - 25%
Good luck guys!
Is Kemi launching assault on sandwiches fake news? It’s not on MailOnline.