If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
If there is going to be any more US aid for Ukraine, it's definitely going to be dependent on them conscripting 18-25 year olds. Which would be to Russia's great disadvantage but may be politically impossible for Ukraine. The other problem Zelenskiyiyyiyey has is that if he starts negotiating before the very last moment ahead of a military or political collapse then some Right Sektor lunatic will probably fucking kill him.
So speaks PB's very own Putin apologist. I think just about every prediction you have made on the Russian aggression against Ukraine has been wrong. But, who knows on this one you might be right, as even fools are right sometimes.
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
Maybe some of the lazy whingers can go out and do some work instead. It would be one of the few upsides of such a mental economy busting policy.
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
Is the issue not that the Rosebank oil will not in fact be used in the UK? (But I have not been following it.)
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
Labour will buckle. They are all gong and no dinner
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
Is the issue not that the Rosebank oil will not in fact be used in the UK? (But I have not been following it.)
Oh, so we get to export something for a change? *fans oneself vigorously to overcome a dizzy spell*
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
Labour will buckle. They are all gong and no dinner
Well, if they do Reeves hypocrisy will be loud and proud.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
The alternative is a Nazi party coming to power. Way to the right of Reform
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
I presume for every hour taught you have roughly the same in prep, marking and general thought?
It depends on what I'm teaching. Usually there isn't much extra marking, as I go through work in the session so we can correct it together. But sometimes planning can take a long time, yes, especially if it's a topic I haven't taught before.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
If there is going to be any more US aid for Ukraine, it's definitely going to be dependent on them conscripting 18-25 year olds. Which would be to Russia's great disadvantage but may be politically impossible for Ukraine. The other problem Zelenskiyiyyiyey has is that if he starts negotiating before the very last moment ahead of a military or political collapse then some Right Sektor lunatic will probably fucking kill him.
But from your Russophillic viewpoint, what are the key issues that Putin and Russia faces? Or is everything hunky-dory and rosy in the imperio-fascist state?
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
“Racism” is a pre-Vibeshift term. No one cares any more
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Interesting discussing on this, I've been thinking about this too and the impact if someone really did try to bring in low/net zero migration. It's curious because it seems to me that the people who are most likely to support it - older people who are perhaps home owners and pensioners but not especially wealthy - are the least likely to benefit. They will be stung by both higher taxation of property to pay for it, means-tested state pensions (as it will be unsustainable), and higher costs for all services as wages rise.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
I presume for every hour taught you have roughly the same in prep, marking and general thought?
It depends on what I'm teaching. Usually there isn't much extra marking, as I go through work in the session so we can correct it together. But sometimes planning can take a long time, yes, especially if it's a topic I haven't taught before.
Still your services compare very favourably with those of lawyers - they charge ten times what you do, are never prepped, and the only time they spend outside your case are on how to bill you for more hours.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
I presume for every hour taught you have roughly the same in prep, marking and general thought?
It depends on what I'm teaching. Usually there isn't much extra marking, as I go through work in the session so we can correct it together. But sometimes planning can take a long time, yes, especially if it's a topic I haven't taught before.
Still your services compare very favourably with those of lawyers - they charge ten times what you do, are never prepped, and the only time they spend outside your case are on how to bill you for more hours.
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
Is the issue not that the Rosebank oil will not in fact be used in the UK? (But I have not been following it.)
Oh, so we get to export something for a change? *fans oneself vigorously to overcome a dizzy spell*
The fundamental issue is that the easiest and cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions is to leave the carbon in the ground.
There are valid arguments about retaining domestic production, but the UK is broadly self-sufficient on oil at the moment (about £30 billion exports and imports each way), so it's hard to argue that we need to keep drilling.
Going forward, oil production is going to fall quickly regardless of your policy, so I think the fairest way to deal with the problem is to taper domestic consumption and production down in a way that retains that net balance of exports and imports, while accelerating our progression towards green tech, thereby retaining some energy security. (You'd want to factor in non-energy consumption too).
That would put the onus on the government to only refuse new oil licenses IF they can prove that imports stay at around zero. For green lefty types, that would mean much more aggressively pursuing EV infrastructure, which can only be a good thing.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
I presume for every hour taught you have roughly the same in prep, marking and general thought?
It depends on what I'm teaching. Usually there isn't much extra marking, as I go through work in the session so we can correct it together. But sometimes planning can take a long time, yes, especially if it's a topic I haven't taught before.
Still your services compare very favourably with those of lawyers - they charge ten times what you do, are never prepped, and the only time they spend outside your case are on how to bill you for more hours.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
Is this the point in Tomorrow belongs to me when the grumpy middle classes get up and start joining in?
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
Good. Though I do hope it isn't because our new immigrants are on average darker than our old ones.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
“Racism” is a pre-Vibeshift term. No one cares any more
Far Righters mind, when correctly characterised as such.
This "vibeshift" is like Richard Murphy's recessions.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
This sounds lovely in principle, but there are good reasons why it is very problematic for politicians in practice:
1. The already stretched and inadequate social care sector relies on imported low wage labour. You want the disabled and our vast and growing numbers of decrepit elderly looking after properly, absent those staff? You have to jack wages up enough to tempt supermarket workers and the like to move out of minimum wage roles and retrain. That's going to be very expensive. 2. The same goes double for the Health Service. £45K is below the starting wage for a doctor, let alone a nurse. If we stop importing anyone other than high wage earners who's going to give all that care? 3. You end immigration, the dependency ratio of the population deteriorates even more rapidly, and that makes the need to do really unpopular things like stripping the gold plate off the state pension and taxing assets, including houses, properly even more pressing. Our economic prospects would be considerably better if retirement provision were less generous and wealthy pensioners were properly rinsed to pay for their own upkeep, but selling a future in which current retirees get smaller pensions and land value tax bills, whilst future ones are told they must work to 75 to get their state handout, is a challenging sell.
Population growth is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They're also lying if they tell you it will be painless to put a stop to - and the longer the country waits to do it, the more painful it will become. It's small wonder that nobody has dared to try, and it'll be fascinating to see what happens if they ever do.
The are ways to avoid it becoming a Ponzi scheme. Two in particular spring to mind.
1. Short-term renewable visas that confer no right to remain on expiry.
2. BUILD MILLIONS MORE F*****G HOUSES!!!
The trouble with short-term visas is that, in practice, they turn into permanent residence, as the Germans and Austrians found with their Gastarbeiter programs in the 1960s and 1970s. In theory, you can get rid of them if you no longer need them. In reality, people end up marrying, having children, buying houses and so on. And nobody really wants to yank kids out of school or break up families, however much they want the parents to leave.
You have to assume that, once you let people in, they are there forever. And giving them a road to citizenship and a stake in the country is preferable to having millions of disenfranchised and volatile non-citizens permanently insecure about their status.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
I presume for every hour taught you have roughly the same in prep, marking and general thought?
It depends on what I'm teaching. Usually there isn't much extra marking, as I go through work in the session so we can correct it together. But sometimes planning can take a long time, yes, especially if it's a topic I haven't taught before.
Still your services compare very favourably with those of lawyers - they charge ten times what you do, are never prepped, and the only time they spend outside your case are on how to bill you for more hours.
If TSE bans us both...I'm blaming you!
PB is, as the philosopher says, an adventure playground for lawyers – Kemi.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
I presume for every hour taught you have roughly the same in prep, marking and general thought?
It depends on what I'm teaching. Usually there isn't much extra marking, as I go through work in the session so we can correct it together. But sometimes planning can take a long time, yes, especially if it's a topic I haven't taught before.
Still your services compare very favourably with those of lawyers - they charge ten times what you do, are never prepped, and the only time they spend outside your case are on how to bill you for more hours.
If TSE bans us both...I'm blaming you!
PB is, as the philosopher says, an adventure playground for lawyers – Kemi.
Isn't that lifted from the CBI head honcho a couple of weeks back? I trust the crack was credited.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
Good. Though I do hope it isn't because our new immigrants are on average darker than our old ones.
I posted on this topic the other day. Recently published evidence from a credible source, thus:
indicates that the major factor determining public receptiveness towards migrants is occupation and skill level. A hierarchy of preference by country of origin still exists, but isn't dramatic. When asked about skilled migration from Poland and from India (figure 5,) the responses were virtually identical.
For those who thought the ukraine war was a good idea ( most of pb including rcs)
Rubio: We deceived people into believing that Ukraine could defeat Russia
" The administration of the previous US leader, Joseph Biden, miscalculated by financing Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and somehow managed to convince people that Kiev could not only win, but also destroy Moscow. Ukraine has been set back 100 years because of the conflict, its energy system is badly damaged ," said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
I presume for every hour taught you have roughly the same in prep, marking and general thought?
It depends on what I'm teaching. Usually there isn't much extra marking, as I go through work in the session so we can correct it together. But sometimes planning can take a long time, yes, especially if it's a topic I haven't taught before.
Still your services compare very favourably with those of lawyers - they charge ten times what you do, are never prepped, and the only time they spend outside your case are on how to bill you for more hours.
You're being very unfair.
Only 99% of lawyers are like that - they give the other 1% an undeservedly bad name.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
Is this the point in Tomorrow belongs to me when the grumpy middle classes get up and start joining in?
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
This sounds lovely in principle, but there are good reasons why it is very problematic for politicians in practice:
1. The already stretched and inadequate social care sector relies on imported low wage labour. You want the disabled and our vast and growing numbers of decrepit elderly looking after properly, absent those staff? You have to jack wages up enough to tempt supermarket workers and the like to move out of minimum wage roles and retrain. That's going to be very expensive. 2. The same goes double for the Health Service. £45K is below the starting wage for a doctor, let alone a nurse. If we stop importing anyone other than high wage earners who's going to give all that care? 3. You end immigration, the dependency ratio of the population deteriorates even more rapidly, and that makes the need to do really unpopular things like stripping the gold plate off the state pension and taxing assets, including houses, properly even more pressing. Our economic prospects would be considerably better if retirement provision were less generous and wealthy pensioners were properly rinsed to pay for their own upkeep, but selling a future in which current retirees get smaller pensions and land value tax bills, whilst future ones are told they must work to 75 to get their state handout, is a challenging sell.
Population growth is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They're also lying if they tell you it will be painless to put a stop to - and the longer the country waits to do it, the more painful it will become. It's small wonder that nobody has dared to try, and it'll be fascinating to see what happens if they ever do.
Sadly, (I'm 76), I believe we're not far away from solving bedblocking by edict. Once the law to enable the choice to die goes through, it'll become quite likely that anyone blocking a bed will be offered a choice: be transported home to manage as best you can, or the less horrible pass out now in comfort. Around ten years after the law passes, I reckon.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
That 5-7 year hangover is what we need to go through as a country for getting ourselves into this position the first place. It's people like you who are suffering from the delusion that we can have out cake and eat it. Maybe that's what the public will vote for but that road leads to the UK going down the same road as Argentina and it's taken them 60 years to come back from that road with crushing poverty and falling living standards. We don't have the capacity for 5m more migrants, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the housing and we don't have the space. It's all well and good to say "well build it" but with what money? The migrants don't generate enough economic activity to pay for £200bn in new infrastructure which means to support these 5m more people everyone else's living standards will have to fall either through higher taxes or higher prices, probably a big chunk of both.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
This sounds lovely in principle, but there are good reasons why it is very problematic for politicians in practice:
1. The already stretched and inadequate social care sector relies on imported low wage labour. You want the disabled and our vast and growing numbers of decrepit elderly looking after properly, absent those staff? You have to jack wages up enough to tempt supermarket workers and the like to move out of minimum wage roles and retrain. That's going to be very expensive. 2. The same goes double for the Health Service. £45K is below the starting wage for a doctor, let alone a nurse. If we stop importing anyone other than high wage earners who's going to give all that care? 3. You end immigration, the dependency ratio of the population deteriorates even more rapidly, and that makes the need to do really unpopular things like stripping the gold plate off the state pension and taxing assets, including houses, properly even more pressing. Our economic prospects would be considerably better if retirement provision were less generous and wealthy pensioners were properly rinsed to pay for their own upkeep, but selling a future in which current retirees get smaller pensions and land value tax bills, whilst future ones are told they must work to 75 to get their state handout, is a challenging sell.
Population growth is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They're also lying if they tell you it will be painless to put a stop to - and the longer the country waits to do it, the more painful it will become. It's small wonder that nobody has dared to try, and it'll be fascinating to see what happens if they ever do.
Sadly, (I'm 76), I believe we're not far away from solving bedblocking by edict. Once the law to enable the choice to die goes through, it'll become quite likely that anyone blocking a bed will be offered a choice: be transported home to manage as best you can, or the less horrible pass out now in comfort. Around ten years after the law passes, I reckon.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
“Racism” is a pre-Vibeshift term. No one cares any more
They might not for the moment, but they will. Ultimately we live in an age of cultural overcorrections where those 'winning' tend to overplay their hand and make their enemies' arguments seem more attractive. 'Anti-wokeness' has a surprising amount of similarities with 'wokeness' in terms of being an inversion of the same idenity based concepts while still foregrounding them.
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
Is the issue not that the Rosebank oil will not in fact be used in the UK? (But I have not been following it.)
Oh, so we get to export something for a change? *fans oneself vigorously to overcome a dizzy spell*
The fundamental issue is that the easiest and cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions is to leave the carbon in the ground.
There are valid arguments about retaining domestic production, but the UK is broadly self-sufficient on oil at the moment (about £30 billion exports and imports each way), so it's hard to argue that we need to keep drilling.
Going forward, oil production is going to fall quickly regardless of your policy, so I think the fairest way to deal with the problem is to taper domestic consumption and production down in a way that retains that net balance of exports and imports, while accelerating our progression towards green tech, thereby retaining some energy security. (You'd want to factor in non-energy consumption too).
That would put the onus on the government to only refuse new oil licenses IF they can prove that imports stay at around zero. For green lefty types, that would mean much more aggressively pursuing EV infrastructure, which can only be a good thing.
Our oil production has been falling for decades now and can only remain close to consumption if exhausted fields are replaced by new ones. That will not stop our use tapering off but it does help our balance of payments and employment.
"Commodity reporting agency Argus says that in 2024, China’s coal consumption rose by about 6pc to a record 4.9bn tonnes, accounting for 56pc of the world’s global total.
This meant China burnt more than 300m tonnes of extra coal in 2024, which is equivalent to an extra 800m tonnes of carbon.
That one-year increase is practically double the 400m tonnes of CO2 that Britain has stripped from its energy system since 1990, an achievement often hailed by Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Miliband."
So, we buy EVs from China and think how pure we have been when the energy to produce those vehicles is far, far dirtier than the energy we would use here to build the equivalent and call that progress. Madness.
Right now it is asking its viewers “should Americans boycott companies that have dropped Woke and DEI?”
Go on then, good luck with that. Only problem: Trump got into power by explicitly saying “I will roll back Woke and cancel DEI”, and he won the popular vote. Of Americans
Is anyone up to speed on John H Rogers, an official being targeted by Trump who has been arrested in Germany for allegedly giving material enabling market manipulation to his students who were Chinese agents?
Is this more personal vendetta / revenge stuff (as I would expect this early), or is this one credible?
It was on a Trumpton Celebrations tweet earlier, and it is not one I followed.
John Harold Rogers, a former U.S. Federal Reserve official, has been accused of conspiring to steal Fed trade secrets to help China by the U.S. Justice Department.
The U.S. attorney's office outlined the charges faced by Rogers, a former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (FRB) arrested on Friday.
"Migrants and a once-liberal paradise where the PM now admits: 'We've lost control'... Sue Reid reports as Sweden is engulfed by a crime wave of rape, gang bombings, assassination - and even a reported lynching..."
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
The alternative is a Nazi party coming to power. Way to the right of Reform
But if Labourites seize on this and get even more complacent, all good
You sound complacent, as you call out complacency ☺️
Where we can agree, Labour (LibDems too) had remarkable efficiency of vote at the last election. I think we can also agree, that amazing efficiency of vote didn’t come from any great love for Starmer or his Labour colleagues or his something and nothing manifesto.
Where we might disagree, I reckon that efficiency of vote was born out of voters dislike for the alternatives.
There isn’t a great love or excitement for this inevitable anti woke, multi cultural society dismantling surge going on out there. In fact a majority can exploit FPTP to effectively and efficiently block such a cultural revolution.
A king once went down to the beach, and let the tide come in over him, in order to say to people STFU - you can’t stop the tide of progress, nor can I, and I’m the king, chosen by God. All this Trumpian and Farage stuff is not heeding that message. It’s just sad old timeless reactionary desperation, You can’t stop the tide of progress coming in.
So what changes between the two general elections, that makes the efficiency of vote for the progressives, the motivation born out of voters dislike for the reactionary cultural revolution, dissipate?
The header is actually spot on, an uninspiring and at times incompetent Labour government, can easily get back in with a landslide, with alternative to them neatly split in votes in FPTP electoral system.
To answer your other question - what made Reform surge in Autumn? Probably the same thing that gave UKIP surge in 2012: a budget. Voters put hands in pockets and don’t find much in there (if I’m allowed a more traditional metaphor) and told by all media that the budget will make that much worse.
Funny how so many of our 'Tories' end up making utterly absurd defences of this binfire of a Labour Government. 'Told by the media' were they? Ok.
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
Is the issue not that the Rosebank oil will not in fact be used in the UK? (But I have not been following it.)
Oh, so we get to export something for a change? *fans oneself vigorously to overcome a dizzy spell*
The fundamental issue is that the easiest and cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions is to leave the carbon in the ground.
There are valid arguments about retaining domestic production, but the UK is broadly self-sufficient on oil at the moment (about £30 billion exports and imports each way), so it's hard to argue that we need to keep drilling.
Going forward, oil production is going to fall quickly regardless of your policy, so I think the fairest way to deal with the problem is to taper domestic consumption and production down in a way that retains that net balance of exports and imports, while accelerating our progression towards green tech, thereby retaining some energy security. (You'd want to factor in non-energy consumption too).
That would put the onus on the government to only refuse new oil licenses IF they can prove that imports stay at around zero. For green lefty types, that would mean much more aggressively pursuing EV infrastructure, which can only be a good thing.
Our oil production has been falling for decades now and can only remain close to consumption if exhausted fields are replaced by new ones. That will not stop our use tapering off but it does help our balance of payments and employment.
"Commodity reporting agency Argus says that in 2024, China’s coal consumption rose by about 6pc to a record 4.9bn tonnes, accounting for 56pc of the world’s global total.
This meant China burnt more than 300m tonnes of extra coal in 2024, which is equivalent to an extra 800m tonnes of carbon.
That one-year increase is practically double the 400m tonnes of CO2 that Britain has stripped from its energy system since 1990, an achievement often hailed by Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Miliband."
So, we buy EVs from China and think how pure we have been when the energy to produce those vehicles is far, far dirtier than the energy we would use here to build the equivalent and call that progress. Madness.
But this analysis is based on the false premise that climate change is a binary yes/no thing. Every bit of carbon we burn matters, and with some of the tipping points we have identified the next bit always matters more than the last.
China's coal consumption would be even more spectacular if it wasn't for the fact they have installed 1000GW of renewable capacity - about 20x as much as we have, with a GDP per capita less than a quarter of ours.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
“Racism” is a pre-Vibeshift term. No one cares any more
They might not for the moment, but they will. Ultimately we live in an age of cultural overcorrections where those 'winning' tend to overplay their hand and make their enemies' arguments seem more attractive. 'Anti-wokeness' has a surprising amount of similarities with 'wokeness' in terms of being an inversion of the same idenity based concepts while still foregrounding them.
Indeed, but these pendulum shifts last decades - see the apparently endless rise of Wokeism and progressive causes, over 40-50 years
I presume this pendulum swing will last a long time, similarly
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
Is the issue not that the Rosebank oil will not in fact be used in the UK? (But I have not been following it.)
Oh, so we get to export something for a change? *fans oneself vigorously to overcome a dizzy spell*
The fundamental issue is that the easiest and cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions is to leave the carbon in the ground.
There are valid arguments about retaining domestic production, but the UK is broadly self-sufficient on oil at the moment (about £30 billion exports and imports each way), so it's hard to argue that we need to keep drilling.
Going forward, oil production is going to fall quickly regardless of your policy, so I think the fairest way to deal with the problem is to taper domestic consumption and production down in a way that retains that net balance of exports and imports, while accelerating our progression towards green tech, thereby retaining some energy security. (You'd want to factor in non-energy consumption too).
That would put the onus on the government to only refuse new oil licenses IF they can prove that imports stay at around zero. For green lefty types, that would mean much more aggressively pursuing EV infrastructure, which can only be a good thing.
Our oil production has been falling for decades now and can only remain close to consumption if exhausted fields are replaced by new ones. That will not stop our use tapering off but it does help our balance of payments and employment.
"Commodity reporting agency Argus says that in 2024, China’s coal consumption rose by about 6pc to a record 4.9bn tonnes, accounting for 56pc of the world’s global total.
This meant China burnt more than 300m tonnes of extra coal in 2024, which is equivalent to an extra 800m tonnes of carbon.
That one-year increase is practically double the 400m tonnes of CO2 that Britain has stripped from its energy system since 1990, an achievement often hailed by Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Miliband."
So, we buy EVs from China and think how pure we have been when the energy to produce those vehicles is far, far dirtier than the energy we would use here to build the equivalent and call that progress. Madness.
But this analysis is based on the false premise that climate change is a binary yes/no thing. Every bit of carbon we burn matters, and with some of the tipping points we have identified the next bit always matters more than the last.
China's coal consumption would be even more spectacular if it wasn't for the fact they have installed 1000GW of renewable capacity - about 20x as much as we have.
Every bit of carbon matters no matter where in the world it comes from or is burned. So we need to drive down our use of carbon for fuel (as we have been) but within that use we should use our own fuel rather than someone else's. This isn't complicated and thinking that penalising ourselves by denying ourselves the use of our own resources will in some way help is simply delusional, particularly when we are such a small part of the overall picture.
And by the way, 20x our green energy production means that they are doing slightly worse than us per capita.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
Is this the point in Tomorrow belongs to me when the grumpy middle classes get up and start joining in?
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
Is the issue not that the Rosebank oil will not in fact be used in the UK? (But I have not been following it.)
Oh, so we get to export something for a change? *fans oneself vigorously to overcome a dizzy spell*
The fundamental issue is that the easiest and cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions is to leave the carbon in the ground.
There are valid arguments about retaining domestic production, but the UK is broadly self-sufficient on oil at the moment (about £30 billion exports and imports each way), so it's hard to argue that we need to keep drilling.
Going forward, oil production is going to fall quickly regardless of your policy, so I think the fairest way to deal with the problem is to taper domestic consumption and production down in a way that retains that net balance of exports and imports, while accelerating our progression towards green tech, thereby retaining some energy security. (You'd want to factor in non-energy consumption too).
That would put the onus on the government to only refuse new oil licenses IF they can prove that imports stay at around zero. For green lefty types, that would mean much more aggressively pursuing EV infrastructure, which can only be a good thing.
Our oil production has been falling for decades now and can only remain close to consumption if exhausted fields are replaced by new ones. That will not stop our use tapering off but it does help our balance of payments and employment.
"Commodity reporting agency Argus says that in 2024, China’s coal consumption rose by about 6pc to a record 4.9bn tonnes, accounting for 56pc of the world’s global total.
This meant China burnt more than 300m tonnes of extra coal in 2024, which is equivalent to an extra 800m tonnes of carbon.
That one-year increase is practically double the 400m tonnes of CO2 that Britain has stripped from its energy system since 1990, an achievement often hailed by Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Miliband."
So, we buy EVs from China and think how pure we have been when the energy to produce those vehicles is far, far dirtier than the energy we would use here to build the equivalent and call that progress. Madness.
But this analysis is based on the false premise that climate change is a binary yes/no thing. Every bit of carbon we burn matters, and with some of the tipping points we have identified the next bit always matters more than the last.
China's coal consumption would be even more spectacular if it wasn't for the fact they have installed 1000GW of renewable capacity - about 20x as much as we have, with a GDP per capita less than a quarter of ours.
People making excuses for China's voracious appetite for fossil fuels whilst conniving in or supporting actively the shut down of far cleaner British industries have gone down a very warped rabbit hole.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I predict that the party which most convincingly argues that it will curtail immigration in 2028 will do very well, and will likely win. Labour cannot do that, the Tories can't, not any more, so we are left with Reform
Was talking with a builder yesterday working alone. They can’t hire labourers or apprentices. The work is too hard apparently. Not the first time I heard that story.
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
Is the issue not that the Rosebank oil will not in fact be used in the UK? (But I have not been following it.)
Oh, so we get to export something for a change? *fans oneself vigorously to overcome a dizzy spell*
The fundamental issue is that the easiest and cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions is to leave the carbon in the ground.
There are valid arguments about retaining domestic production, but the UK is broadly self-sufficient on oil at the moment (about £30 billion exports and imports each way), so it's hard to argue that we need to keep drilling.
Going forward, oil production is going to fall quickly regardless of your policy, so I think the fairest way to deal with the problem is to taper domestic consumption and production down in a way that retains that net balance of exports and imports, while accelerating our progression towards green tech, thereby retaining some energy security. (You'd want to factor in non-energy consumption too).
That would put the onus on the government to only refuse new oil licenses IF they can prove that imports stay at around zero. For green lefty types, that would mean much more aggressively pursuing EV infrastructure, which can only be a good thing.
Our oil production has been falling for decades now and can only remain close to consumption if exhausted fields are replaced by new ones. That will not stop our use tapering off but it does help our balance of payments and employment.
"Commodity reporting agency Argus says that in 2024, China’s coal consumption rose by about 6pc to a record 4.9bn tonnes, accounting for 56pc of the world’s global total.
This meant China burnt more than 300m tonnes of extra coal in 2024, which is equivalent to an extra 800m tonnes of carbon.
That one-year increase is practically double the 400m tonnes of CO2 that Britain has stripped from its energy system since 1990, an achievement often hailed by Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Miliband."
So, we buy EVs from China and think how pure we have been when the energy to produce those vehicles is far, far dirtier than the energy we would use here to build the equivalent and call that progress. Madness.
But this analysis is based on the false premise that climate change is a binary yes/no thing. Every bit of carbon we burn matters, and with some of the tipping points we have identified the next bit always matters more than the last.
China's coal consumption would be even more spectacular if it wasn't for the fact they have installed 1000GW of renewable capacity - about 20x as much as we have.
Every bit of carbon matters no matter where in the world it comes from or is burned. So we need to drive down our use of carbon for fuel (as we have been) but within that use we should use our own fuel rather than someone else's. This isn't complicated and thinking that penalising ourselves by denying ourselves the use of our own resources will in some way help is simply delusional, particularly when we are such a small part of the overall picture.
And that's what we are doing, and what I have suggested. The point is that we desperately need to accelerate our move to EVs, for example, because our oil production will halve by 2035 even if we exploit every undeveloped discovery, and make some more discoveries on top. I'm not even sure they would be economically viable anyway.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
Is this the point in Tomorrow belongs to me when the grumpy middle classes get up and start joining in?
In the ongoing saga of just how committed is Reeves to growth we now have the decision of Lord Ericht reducing the decision of the previous government to grant permission for the development of the Jackdaw field in the North Sea. He reduced it because the decision failed to consider the down stream implications of using that oil and gas against our ecology targets. That was not in dispute.
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
This and the jumping spiders from earlier are good examples of the consequences of governments legislating for targets.
A target should be a policy, that can be changed, not a law
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Or, put another way, I'll be fine but good luck if you require public services.
But if Labourites seize on this and get even more complacent, all good
You sound complacent, as you call out complacency ☺️
Where we can agree, Labour (LibDems too) had remarkable efficiency of vote at the last election. I think we can also agree, that amazing efficiency of vote didn’t come from any great love for Starmer or his Labour colleagues or his something and nothing manifesto.
Where we might disagree, I reckon that efficiency of vote was born out of voters dislike for the alternatives.
There isn’t a great love or excitement for this inevitable anti woke, multi cultural society dismantling surge going on out there. In fact a majority can exploit FPTP to effectively and efficiently block such a cultural revolution.
A king once went down to the beach, and let the tide come in over him, in order to say to people STFU - you can’t stop the tide of progress, nor can I, and I’m the king, chosen by God. All this Trumpian and Farage stuff is not heeding that message. It’s just sad old timeless reactionary desperation, You can’t stop the tide of progress coming in.
So what changes between the two general elections, that makes the efficiency of vote for the progressives, the motivation born out of voters dislike for the reactionary cultural revolution, dissipate?
The header is actually spot on, an uninspiring and at times incompetent Labour government, can easily get back in with a landslide, with alternative to them neatly split in votes in FPTP electoral system.
To answer your other question - what made Reform surge in Autumn? Probably the same thing that gave UKIP surge in 2012: a budget. Voters put hands in pockets and don’t find much in there (if I’m allowed a more traditional metaphor) and told by all media that the budget will make that much worse.
Funny how so many of our 'Tories' end up making utterly absurd defences of this binfire of a Labour Government. 'Told by the media' were they? Ok.
It seems to me quite sensible to think of government action which is designed to be beneficial actually being pursued is a creditable contrast which this government has made with the last.
Starmer's government policies are pretty middle ground. There's a really basic misunderstanding of economics, but Reeves is doing absolutely brilliantly to limit the damage. (Surely this experience will have her become a Tory some day)
Right now it is asking its viewers “should Americans boycott companies that have dropped Woke and DEI?”
Go on then, good luck with that. Only problem: Trump got into power by explicitly saying “I will roll back Woke and cancel DEI”, and he won the popular vote. Of Americans
And most Americans did not believe he meant what he said. The fools.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
This sounds lovely in principle, but there are good reasons why it is very problematic for politicians in practice:
1. The already stretched and inadequate social care sector relies on imported low wage labour. You want the disabled and our vast and growing numbers of decrepit elderly looking after properly, absent those staff? You have to jack wages up enough to tempt supermarket workers and the like to move out of minimum wage roles and retrain. That's going to be very expensive. 2. The same goes double for the Health Service. £45K is below the starting wage for a doctor, let alone a nurse. If we stop importing anyone other than high wage earners who's going to give all that care? 3. You end immigration, the dependency ratio of the population deteriorates even more rapidly, and that makes the need to do really unpopular things like stripping the gold plate off the state pension and taxing assets, including houses, properly even more pressing. Our economic prospects would be considerably better if retirement provision were less generous and wealthy pensioners were properly rinsed to pay for their own upkeep, but selling a future in which current retirees get smaller pensions and land value tax bills, whilst future ones are told they must work to 75 to get their state handout, is a challenging sell.
Population growth is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They're also lying if they tell you it will be painless to put a stop to - and the longer the country waits to do it, the more painful it will become. It's small wonder that nobody has dared to try, and it'll be fascinating to see what happens if they ever do.
Sadly, (I'm 76), I believe we're not far away from solving bedblocking by edict. Once the law to enable the choice to die goes through, it'll become quite likely that anyone blocking a bed will be offered a choice: be transported home to manage as best you can, or the less horrible pass out now in comfort. Around ten years after the law passes, I reckon.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Good afternoon to you too! That will sort out families between those who are willing to look after their elderly relatives and keep them alive and those who will be happy to let them die to avoid inconvenience to themselves, and to get their inheritance sooner.
One small example, should we really now believe air safety investigations? Another - will anyone really care about the ~5,000 transgender military personnel set to lose their jobs?
Tariffs announced overnight are set to cost the average American household roughly $2,000 per annum.
Supporters of the German Democratic Republic felt the same way about the wall coming down.
Sometimes your posts are so intellectually challenging for me.
One small example, should we really now believe air safety investigations? Another - will anyone really care about the ~5,000 transgender military personnel set to lose their jobs?
Tariffs announced overnight are set to cost the average American household roughly $2,000 per annum.
Supporters of the German Democratic Republic felt the same way about the wall coming down.
Did a poster really just compare America under Biden with East Germany under Krenz?
I mean - WTAFF?
I am relieved that someone of the intellectual equivalence of William actually understood the post. I am but an ill educated serf and as such didn't have a Scooby Doo as to what it all meant. William's posts may be the work of a genius but they are sometimes very obtuse.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
That 5-7 year hangover is what we need to go through as a country for getting ourselves into this position the first place. It's people like you who are suffering from the delusion that we can have out cake and eat it. Maybe that's what the public will vote for but that road leads to the UK going down the same road as Argentina and it's taken them 60 years to come back from that road with crushing poverty and falling living standards. We don't have the capacity for 5m more migrants, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the housing and we don't have the space. It's all well and good to say "well build it" but with what money? The migrants don't generate enough economic activity to pay for £200bn in new infrastructure which means to support these 5m more people everyone else's living standards will have to fall either through higher taxes or higher prices, probably a big chunk of both.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
"If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be."
Spoken like a true consultant who can just walk away when it all goes tits up!
But if Labourites seize on this and get even more complacent, all good
You sound complacent, as you call out complacency ☺️
Where we can agree, Labour (LibDems too) had remarkable efficiency of vote at the last election. I think we can also agree, that amazing efficiency of vote didn’t come from any great love for Starmer or his Labour colleagues or his something and nothing manifesto.
Where we might disagree, I reckon that efficiency of vote was born out of voters dislike for the alternatives.
There isn’t a great love or excitement for this inevitable anti woke, multi cultural society dismantling surge going on out there. In fact a majority can exploit FPTP to effectively and efficiently block such a cultural revolution.
A king once went down to the beach, and let the tide come in over him, in order to say to people STFU - you can’t stop the tide of progress, nor can I, and I’m the king, chosen by God. All this Trumpian and Farage stuff is not heeding that message. It’s just sad old timeless reactionary desperation, You can’t stop the tide of progress coming in.
So what changes between the two general elections, that makes the efficiency of vote for the progressives, the motivation born out of voters dislike for the reactionary cultural revolution, dissipate?
The header is actually spot on, an uninspiring and at times incompetent Labour government, can easily get back in with a landslide, with alternative to them neatly split in votes in FPTP electoral system.
To answer your other question - what made Reform surge in Autumn? Probably the same thing that gave UKIP surge in 2012: a budget. Voters put hands in pockets and don’t find much in there (if I’m allowed a more traditional metaphor) and told by all media that the budget will make that much worse.
Is net migration of 5-6m people per decade, all part of this “tide of progress” that you love so much?
"The police are calling it an 'escalation of violence', Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson a 'national crisis', and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has admitted that the government is not in control. But why has Sweden seen a record number of bombings in January? Sweden has seen more than 30 bombings in the month of January – an average of more than one per day. Although the majority of them have taken place in southern Stockholm, cases have also been reported in other parts of the country. But what’s behind them?"
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
That 5-7 year hangover is what we need to go through as a country for getting ourselves into this position the first place. It's people like you who are suffering from the delusion that we can have out cake and eat it. Maybe that's what the public will vote for but that road leads to the UK going down the same road as Argentina and it's taken them 60 years to come back from that road with crushing poverty and falling living standards. We don't have the capacity for 5m more migrants, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the housing and we don't have the space. It's all well and good to say "well build it" but with what money? The migrants don't generate enough economic activity to pay for £200bn in new infrastructure which means to support these 5m more people everyone else's living standards will have to fall either through higher taxes or higher prices, probably a big chunk of both.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
"If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be."
Spoken like a true consultant who can just walk away when it all goes tits up!
Do you think Britain can absorb another 5m migrants in the next ten years, without horrible consequences?
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Or, put another way, I'll be fine but good luck if you require public services.
Immigrants use public services as well.
And the poorer the immigrant the more public services they will use.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
This sounds lovely in principle, but there are good reasons why it is very problematic for politicians in practice:
1. The already stretched and inadequate social care sector relies on imported low wage labour. You want the disabled and our vast and growing numbers of decrepit elderly looking after properly, absent those staff? You have to jack wages up enough to tempt supermarket workers and the like to move out of minimum wage roles and retrain. That's going to be very expensive. 2. The same goes double for the Health Service. £45K is below the starting wage for a doctor, let alone a nurse. If we stop importing anyone other than high wage earners who's going to give all that care? 3. You end immigration, the dependency ratio of the population deteriorates even more rapidly, and that makes the need to do really unpopular things like stripping the gold plate off the state pension and taxing assets, including houses, properly even more pressing. Our economic prospects would be considerably better if retirement provision were less generous and wealthy pensioners were properly rinsed to pay for their own upkeep, but selling a future in which current retirees get smaller pensions and land value tax bills, whilst future ones are told they must work to 75 to get their state handout, is a challenging sell.
Population growth is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They're also lying if they tell you it will be painless to put a stop to - and the longer the country waits to do it, the more painful it will become. It's small wonder that nobody has dared to try, and it'll be fascinating to see what happens if they ever do.
The social care sector should never have become reliant on imported low wage labour in the first place. Who thought that was a good idea?
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
That 5-7 year hangover is what we need to go through as a country for getting ourselves into this position the first place. It's people like you who are suffering from the delusion that we can have out cake and eat it. Maybe that's what the public will vote for but that road leads to the UK going down the same road as Argentina and it's taken them 60 years to come back from that road with crushing poverty and falling living standards. We don't have the capacity for 5m more migrants, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the housing and we don't have the space. It's all well and good to say "well build it" but with what money? The migrants don't generate enough economic activity to pay for £200bn in new infrastructure which means to support these 5m more people everyone else's living standards will have to fall either through higher taxes or higher prices, probably a big chunk of both.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
"If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be."
Spoken like a true consultant who can just walk away when it all goes tits up!
Do you think Britain can absorb another 5m migrants in the next ten years, without horrible consequences?
Show your working
I don't think we will absorb another 5 million immigrants net.
I am absolutely certain that essentially removing public services from millions of elderly people will be disastrous. You, me and MaxPB will be fine in a country that does as he advocates. Most people won't be. They will be in a far worse position than they are today.
One small example, should we really now believe air safety investigations? Another - will anyone really care about the ~5,000 transgender military personnel set to lose their jobs?
Tariffs announced overnight are set to cost the average American household roughly $2,000 per annum.
Supporters of the German Democratic Republic felt the same way about the wall coming down.
Sometimes you posts are so intellectually challenging for me.
One small example, should we really now believe air safety investigations? Another - will anyone really care about the ~5,000 transgender military personnel set to lose their jobs?
Tariffs announced overnight are set to cost the average American household roughly $2,000 per annum.
Supporters of the German Democratic Republic felt the same way about the wall coming down.
Did a poster really just compare America under Biden with East Germany under Krenz?
I mean - WTAFF?
I am relieved that someone of the intellectual equivalence of William actually understood the post. I am but an ill educated serf and as such didn't have a Scooby Doo as to what it all meant. William's posts may be the work of a genius but they are sometimes very obtuse.
I'm musing on the comparison between Bishop Budde (who called Trump out) and the Patriotic Sermons of Jerzy Popiełuszko in Poland at the time of Solidarity.
Both are individuals under authoritarian Governments dedicated to using the State to target opponents, in relatively safe positions.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
That 5-7 year hangover is what we need to go through as a country for getting ourselves into this position the first place. It's people like you who are suffering from the delusion that we can have out cake and eat it. Maybe that's what the public will vote for but that road leads to the UK going down the same road as Argentina and it's taken them 60 years to come back from that road with crushing poverty and falling living standards. We don't have the capacity for 5m more migrants, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the housing and we don't have the space. It's all well and good to say "well build it" but with what money? The migrants don't generate enough economic activity to pay for £200bn in new infrastructure which means to support these 5m more people everyone else's living standards will have to fall either through higher taxes or higher prices, probably a big chunk of both.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
"If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be."
Spoken like a true consultant who can just walk away when it all goes tits up!
Do you think Britain can absorb another 5m migrants in the next ten years, without horrible consequences?
Show your working
I don't think we will absorb another 5 million immigrants net.
I am absolutely certain that essentially removing public services from millions of elderly people will be disastrous. You, me and MaxPB will be fine in a country that do as he advocates. Most people won't be. They will be in a far worse position than they are today.
So your answer is, “that won’t happen” even tho it is the official prediction of the Labour government stats dept and it absolutely tallies with recent migration data
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I predict that the party which most convincingly argues that it will curtail immigration in 2028 will do very well, and will likely win. Labour cannot do that, the Tories can't, not any more, so we are left with Reform
Was talking with a builder yesterday working alone. They can’t hire labourers or apprentices. The work is too hard apparently. Not the first time I heard that story.
Someone has to do the hard work.
Yes, robots. And I'm quite serious
Bet it doesn't happen anytime soon.
Most of us have been waiting for him to be serious for years.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Or, put another way, I'll be fine but good luck if you require public services.
Immigrants use public services as well.
And the poorer the immigrant the more public services they will use.
Yes, we live in a complex world with many moving parts. The easy fixes Max suggests from his position of privilege will cause immense harm to a lot of people of all kinds.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
That 5-7 year hangover is what we need to go through as a country for getting ourselves into this position the first place. It's people like you who are suffering from the delusion that we can have out cake and eat it. Maybe that's what the public will vote for but that road leads to the UK going down the same road as Argentina and it's taken them 60 years to come back from that road with crushing poverty and falling living standards. We don't have the capacity for 5m more migrants, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the housing and we don't have the space. It's all well and good to say "well build it" but with what money? The migrants don't generate enough economic activity to pay for £200bn in new infrastructure which means to support these 5m more people everyone else's living standards will have to fall either through higher taxes or higher prices, probably a big chunk of both.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
No we can't have our cake and eat it, but we also can't wish away the consequences of simply turning the tap off, rather than working to bring immigration down sustainably over a number of years. If you're going to create a situation in which medical and social care must be more strictly rationed then you have to decide who is going to be deprived of care, and whether they will be left to cope or if we're going to spare some people a lingering death and euthanize them. Which is it to be?
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Or, put another way, I'll be fine but good luck if you require public services.
Immigrants use public services as well.
And the poorer the immigrant the more public services they will use.
Yes, we live in a complex world with many moving parts. The easy fixes Max suggests from his position of privilege will cause immense harm to a lot of people of all kinds.
Continuously importing half a million people a year, many of whom don’t give a fuck about Britain, British history, our culture - and some of whom actively hate us - will also cause immense harm
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
That 5-7 year hangover is what we need to go through as a country for getting ourselves into this position the first place. It's people like you who are suffering from the delusion that we can have out cake and eat it. Maybe that's what the public will vote for but that road leads to the UK going down the same road as Argentina and it's taken them 60 years to come back from that road with crushing poverty and falling living standards. We don't have the capacity for 5m more migrants, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the housing and we don't have the space. It's all well and good to say "well build it" but with what money? The migrants don't generate enough economic activity to pay for £200bn in new infrastructure which means to support these 5m more people everyone else's living standards will have to fall either through higher taxes or higher prices, probably a big chunk of both.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
"If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be."
Spoken like a true consultant who can just walk away when it all goes tits up!
Do you think Britain can absorb another 5m migrants in the next ten years, without horrible consequences?
Show your working
I don't think we will absorb another 5 million immigrants net.
I am absolutely certain that essentially removing public services from millions of elderly people will be disastrous. You, me and MaxPB will be fine in a country that does as he advocates. Most people won't be. They will be in a far worse position than they are today.
Neither do I. The number of visas granted has plummeted. Hence the financial crisis in universities and anaemic growth, so I think that net immigration in the first year of Labour will have dropped precipitously, even before all the "patriotic" millionaires have buggered off.
But if Labourites seize on this and get even more complacent, all good
You sound complacent, as you call out complacency ☺️
Where we can agree, Labour (LibDems too) had remarkable efficiency of vote at the last election. I think we can also agree, that amazing efficiency of vote didn’t come from any great love for Starmer or his Labour colleagues or his something and nothing manifesto.
Where we might disagree, I reckon that efficiency of vote was born out of voters dislike for the alternatives.
There isn’t a great love or excitement for this inevitable anti woke, multi cultural society dismantling surge going on out there. In fact a majority can exploit FPTP to effectively and efficiently block such a cultural revolution.
A king once went down to the beach, and let the tide come in over him, in order to say to people STFU - you can’t stop the tide of progress, nor can I, and I’m the king, chosen by God. All this Trumpian and Farage stuff is not heeding that message. It’s just sad old timeless reactionary desperation, You can’t stop the tide of progress coming in.
So what changes between the two general elections, that makes the efficiency of vote for the progressives, the motivation born out of voters dislike for the reactionary cultural revolution, dissipate?
The header is actually spot on, an uninspiring and at times incompetent Labour government, can easily get back in with a landslide, with alternative to them neatly split in votes in FPTP electoral system.
To answer your other question - what made Reform surge in Autumn? Probably the same thing that gave UKIP surge in 2012: a budget. Voters put hands in pockets and don’t find much in there (if I’m allowed a more traditional metaphor) and told by all media that the budget will make that much worse.
Is net migration of 5-6m people per decade, all part of this “tide of progress” that you love so much?
A splurge in migration is not progress, it’s utter failure. But You are intelligent enough to know this, and that the splurge in migration in recent years is mainly driven by UKs brexit on UK economy. In Kemi Badenoch’s own words in criticism of Brexit implementation - brexit may not have been wrong, but without a plan to implement it properly.
Products off the shelf from high street may not be wrong, they may be world leading - but implementation of them into your business can create a goodness almighty mess, with all sorts of unexpected vice.
We must accept a gormless populist agenda as antidote to the Brexit wrecking ball? Is that all you got? Otherwise I don’t know why you aren’t debating properly.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
That 5-7 year hangover is what we need to go through as a country for getting ourselves into this position the first place. It's people like you who are suffering from the delusion that we can have out cake and eat it. Maybe that's what the public will vote for but that road leads to the UK going down the same road as Argentina and it's taken them 60 years to come back from that road with crushing poverty and falling living standards. We don't have the capacity for 5m more migrants, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the housing and we don't have the space. It's all well and good to say "well build it" but with what money? The migrants don't generate enough economic activity to pay for £200bn in new infrastructure which means to support these 5m more people everyone else's living standards will have to fall either through higher taxes or higher prices, probably a big chunk of both.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
"If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be."
Spoken like a true consultant who can just walk away when it all goes tits up!
Do you think Britain can absorb another 5m migrants in the next ten years, without horrible consequences?
Show your working
I don't think we will absorb another 5 million immigrants net.
I am absolutely certain that essentially removing public services from millions of elderly people will be disastrous. You, me and MaxPB will be fine in a country that do as he advocates. Most people won't be. They will be in a far worse position than they are today.
So your answer is, “that won’t happen” even tho it is the official prediction of the Labour government stats dept and it absolutely tallies with recent migration data
Pitiful
Yep, my guess is that immigration levels are going to fall and that if you extrapolate based on recent surges due to Boris Johnson letting in hundreds of thousands of additional people post-Covid, plus refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong, then you are going to get the misleading numbers. I also note that the ONS says they have supplied a projection, and not a prediction.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Or, put another way, I'll be fine but good luck if you require public services.
But immigration hugely increases demand for public services and welfare. They increase overall aggregate demand by a much larger amount than their contribution. It is why immigration has resulting in falling GDP per capita so no, reducing immigration and moving into net emigration of low skill and low wage workers will reduce demand more than it reduces their contribution meaning more overall resource per person.
You have completely ignored the actual result of immigration for the past decade to draw your pithy one liner which makes you a fool.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
That 5-7 year hangover is what we need to go through as a country for getting ourselves into this position the first place. It's people like you who are suffering from the delusion that we can have out cake and eat it. Maybe that's what the public will vote for but that road leads to the UK going down the same road as Argentina and it's taken them 60 years to come back from that road with crushing poverty and falling living standards. We don't have the capacity for 5m more migrants, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the housing and we don't have the space. It's all well and good to say "well build it" but with what money? The migrants don't generate enough economic activity to pay for £200bn in new infrastructure which means to support these 5m more people everyone else's living standards will have to fall either through higher taxes or higher prices, probably a big chunk of both.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
If there's migration of another 5m people we definitely will have Farage as PM.
Are Labour in a good position in the polls? No. Are they “on course for re-election”? Far too early to say.
Yes what they have going for them is a divided opposition but they are at the mercy of what happens to that opposition. A long road to travel on that front before we start thinking of the next GE. Conversely, there’s still plenty of time for them to start improving.
At this stage it's hard to see past another Labour -led Government. Crudely put, the more likely a Trumpian breakthrough in poor people places looks, the greater the stampede towards Ed Davey in rich people places.
You can't assemble a right-wing majority in the Commons if you've got the large bulk of the city vote, Scotland and half of Southern England running away from you screaming.
On the ground in Scotland we are seeing the highest right wing share for almost my whole life. As you guys will know most of the key votes here fall under some form of PR so having 2 right wing parties is quite possible. The drop off in Labour vote share is dramatic and as the Scottish elections are only 15 months away they are running out of time to turn it around. A disaster in Scotland could be very difficult for Starmer and also reduce the power of Westminster to implement their ideas. We could genuinely see a Scottish Parliament more right wing than Westminster.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Or, put another way, I'll be fine but good luck if you require public services.
Immigrants use public services as well.
And the poorer the immigrant the more public services they will use.
Yes, we live in a complex world with many moving parts. The easy fixes Max suggests from his position of privilege will cause immense harm to a lot of people of all kinds.
Continuously importing half a million people a year, many of whom don’t give a fuck about Britain, British history, our culture - and some of whom actively hate us - will also cause immense harm
I was far happier with freedom of movement within the EU than I am with having to reply on people from further afield. Culturally, they are far more able to assimilate, they tended to be younger and were less likely to bring dependents, and they often went home again. But we are where we are. And where we are is that if we do no have properly functioning public services it causes immense harm to millions of people. Not you, perhaps, not me or Max, but many others. That will have consequences.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
“Racism” is a pre-Vibeshift term. No one cares any more
They might not for the moment, but they will. Ultimately we live in an age of cultural overcorrections where those 'winning' tend to overplay their hand and make their enemies' arguments seem more attractive. 'Anti-wokeness' has a surprising amount of similarities with 'wokeness' in terms of being an inversion of the same idenity based concepts while still foregrounding them.
Indeed, but these pendulum shifts last decades - see the apparently endless rise of Wokeism and progressive causes, over 40-50 years
I presume this pendulum swing will last a long time, similarly
I doubt it, technology means we tend to speedrun these things. What one might identify as 'wokeism' only really kicks in as a cultural shift in the 2010s.
Thatcher, Reagan, Bush(s) and even Clinton were hardly champions of progressive causes as politicians. Watch films from the 90s or early 2000s and they're strongly gendered - full of machismo action or sex comedies or romcoms. Here it's the era of the lads' mag. Blokes with guitars are still a major force in music, with frat boy rock and post-gangsta rap dominating the American charts.
Woke it ain't - it's more of a rise of our old version of liberalism that rejects conservatism because it's stuffy and restrictive, rather than out of concerns over diversity or a desire to culturally remake attitudes. You get diversity on screen because Will Smith is more novel than Mel Gibson - but not because they're really doing much different.
That I think starts to change after 2010. Obama's was supposed to be this big moment of catharsis and unity, a wiping out of America's original sin and of progressive inevitability - but of course it wasn't.
So people get more radical with theories trying to explain why that is - turbo-charged by online sharing and become mainstreamed - where it's picked up by Hollywood and corporations as something zeitgeisty they need to get with. That is accelerated by Trump beating Hillary - whose election was supposed to be proof were 'solving' sexism as Obama's was supposed to racism.
In the UK Labour are turfed out and young people who came of age after Iraq and the financial crisis become more sympathetic to left-wing activism and a similar process occurs. The more hedonistic liberalism of the 90s and 2000s being seen to have failed, there's a shift to a more hectoring demanding version that wants proof of virtue and immediate solutions to x or y issue rather than a discussion.
That's obviously helped create the moment we're now in - but if the start of Trump 2 and some of the sheer hubris of it is anything to go by, then if (when?) it doesn't turn out well, your 'vibeshift' maybe less permanent than you think.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
Hope the elderly don't like their state pensions then, because we'll not be able to pay them.
There's sadly a lot of wilful delusion being expressed on here about the consequences of adopting a cliff-edge approach to cutting immigration. You can't cut off the supply of key workers and then breezily assert that everything will come right in a decade. It might do, but the amount of suffering that would occur during that period would be immense. Not so much a case of ripping off the patient's plaster as cutting off their legs. Letting mass immigration drag on indefinitely is a terrible idea but so is abruptly hauling up the drawbridge. These problems need to be addressed properly. That takes time.
That 5-7 year hangover is what we need to go through as a country for getting ourselves into this position the first place. It's people like you who are suffering from the delusion that we can have out cake and eat it. Maybe that's what the public will vote for but that road leads to the UK going down the same road as Argentina and it's taken them 60 years to come back from that road with crushing poverty and falling living standards. We don't have the capacity for 5m more migrants, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the housing and we don't have the space. It's all well and good to say "well build it" but with what money? The migrants don't generate enough economic activity to pay for £200bn in new infrastructure which means to support these 5m more people everyone else's living standards will have to fall either through higher taxes or higher prices, probably a big chunk of both.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
No we can't have our cake and eat it, but we also can't wish away the consequences of simply turning the tap off, rather than working to bring immigration down sustainably over a number of years. If you're going to create a situation in which medical and social care must be more strictly rationed then you have to decide who is going to be deprived of care, and whether they will be left to cope or if we're going to spare some people a lingering death and euthanize them. Which is it to be?
I'm not wishing away the consequences of turning the taps off, I fully acknowledge that it will be difficult to adjust and that people are going to have to get used to, for a while, doing with less while markets realise there is a new reality. Landlords won't be able to rip people off when there aren't half a million new migrants causing a surge in demand for housing that doesn't exist, care home owners won't be able to get away with paying minimum wage while handing themselves huge pay packets and dividends and demand for infrastructure will drop meaning finally some spare capacity leading to some drop off in inflation. That will all take time to feed through and the years it takes to get there won't be easy but it's a necessary period that we must go through after 10 years of over immigration.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Or, put another way, I'll be fine but good luck if you require public services.
But immigration hugely increases demand for public services and welfare. They increase overall aggregate demand by a much larger amount than their contribution. It is why immigration has resulting in falling GDP per capita so no, reducing immigration and moving into net emigration of low skill and low wage workers will reduce demand more than it reduces their contribution meaning more overall resource per person.
You have completely ignored the actual result of immigration for the past decade to draw your pithy one liner which makes you a fool.
I am very aware that non-EU immigration has soared since we left the EU and that non-EU migrants do tend to be lower paid, are more likely to have dependents and may not generate as much taxable income as EU migrants did. However, the new arrivals are here because we need them to keep aspects of the country that you do not need or notice going.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Incidentally, this is now openly talked about at dinner parties with no one worried about 'seeming racist'
Finally!
“Racism” is a pre-Vibeshift term. No one cares any more
They might not for the moment, but they will. Ultimately we live in an age of cultural overcorrections where those 'winning' tend to overplay their hand and make their enemies' arguments seem more attractive. 'Anti-wokeness' has a surprising amount of similarities with 'wokeness' in terms of being an inversion of the same idenity based concepts while still foregrounding them.
Indeed, but these pendulum shifts last decades - see the apparently endless rise of Wokeism and progressive causes, over 40-50 years
I presume this pendulum swing will last a long time, similarly
I doubt it, technology means we tend to speedrun these things. What one might identify as 'wokeism' only really kicks in as a cultural shift in the 2010s.
Thatcher, Reagan, Bush(s) and even Clinton were hardly champions of progressive causes as politicians. Watch films from the 90s or early 2000s and they're strongly gendered - full of machismo action or sex comedies or romcoms. Here it's the era of the lads' mag. Blokes with guitars are still a major force in music, with frat boy rock and post-gangsta rap dominating the American charts.
Woke it ain't - it's more of a rise of our old version of liberalism that rejects conservatism because it's stuffy and restrictive, rather than out of concerns over diversity or a desire to culturally remake attitudes. You get diversity on screen because Will Smith is more novel than Mel Gibson - but not because they're really doing much different.
That I think starts to change after 2010. Obama's was supposed to be this big moment of catharsis and unity, a wiping out of America's original sin and of progressive inevitability - but of course it wasn't.
So people get more radical with theories trying to explain why that is - turbo-charged by online sharing and become mainstreamed - where it's picked up by Hollywood and corporations as something zeitgeisty they need to get with. That is accelerated by Trump beating Hillary - whose election was supposed to be proof were 'solving' sexism as Obama's was supposed to racism.
In the UK Labour are turfed out and young people who came of age after Iraq and the financial crisis become more sympathetic to left-wing activism and a similar process occurs. The more hedonistic liberalism of the 90s and 2000s being seen to have failed, there's a shift to a more hectoring demanding version that wants proof of virtue and immediate solutions to x or y issue rather than a discussion.
That's obviously helped create the moment we're now in - but if the start of Trump 2 and some of the sheer hubris of it is anything to go by, then if (when?) it doesn't turn out well, your 'vibeshift' maybe less permanent than you think.
Interesting points, eloquently argued, so Thankyou
I agree everything has accelerated so maybe 40 years is optimistic from my point of view. 20 years?
By then we will all be living on a fake moon of Neptune
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
This sounds lovely in principle, but there are good reasons why it is very problematic for politicians in practice:
1. The already stretched and inadequate social care sector relies on imported low wage labour. You want the disabled and our vast and growing numbers of decrepit elderly looking after properly, absent those staff? You have to jack wages up enough to tempt supermarket workers and the like to move out of minimum wage roles and retrain. That's going to be very expensive. 2. The same goes double for the Health Service. £45K is below the starting wage for a doctor, let alone a nurse. If we stop importing anyone other than high wage earners who's going to give all that care? 3. You end immigration, the dependency ratio of the population deteriorates even more rapidly, and that makes the need to do really unpopular things like stripping the gold plate off the state pension and taxing assets, including houses, properly even more pressing. Our economic prospects would be considerably better if retirement provision were less generous and wealthy pensioners were properly rinsed to pay for their own upkeep, but selling a future in which current retirees get smaller pensions and land value tax bills, whilst future ones are told they must work to 75 to get their state handout, is a challenging sell.
Population growth is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They're also lying if they tell you it will be painless to put a stop to - and the longer the country waits to do it, the more painful it will become. It's small wonder that nobody has dared to try, and it'll be fascinating to see what happens if they ever do.
The are ways to avoid it becoming a Ponzi scheme. Two in particular spring to mind.
1. Short-term renewable visas that confer no right to remain on expiry.
2. BUILD MILLIONS MORE F*****G HOUSES!!!
Try telling the nimbys that.
Where do you live, who’s your MP and how much is development delayed or cancelled by activist opponents in your area?
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
This sounds lovely in principle, but there are good reasons why it is very problematic for politicians in practice:
1. The already stretched and inadequate social care sector relies on imported low wage labour. You want the disabled and our vast and growing numbers of decrepit elderly looking after properly, absent those staff? You have to jack wages up enough to tempt supermarket workers and the like to move out of minimum wage roles and retrain. That's going to be very expensive. 2. The same goes double for the Health Service. £45K is below the starting wage for a doctor, let alone a nurse. If we stop importing anyone other than high wage earners who's going to give all that care? 3. You end immigration, the dependency ratio of the population deteriorates even more rapidly, and that makes the need to do really unpopular things like stripping the gold plate off the state pension and taxing assets, including houses, properly even more pressing. Our economic prospects would be considerably better if retirement provision were less generous and wealthy pensioners were properly rinsed to pay for their own upkeep, but selling a future in which current retirees get smaller pensions and land value tax bills, whilst future ones are told they must work to 75 to get their state handout, is a challenging sell.
Population growth is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They're also lying if they tell you it will be painless to put a stop to - and the longer the country waits to do it, the more painful it will become. It's small wonder that nobody has dared to try, and it'll be fascinating to see what happens if they ever do.
Sadly, (I'm 76), I believe we're not far away from solving bedblocking by edict. Once the law to enable the choice to die goes through, it'll become quite likely that anyone blocking a bed will be offered a choice: be transported home to manage as best you can, or the less horrible pass out now in comfort. Around ten years after the law passes, I reckon.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Good afternoon to you too! That will sort out families between those who are willing to look after their elderly relatives and keep them alive and those who will be happy to let them die to avoid inconvenience to themselves, and to get their inheritance sooner.
Not quite. There are lots of families struggling to keep their loved one at home and only able to manage that with the help of professional carers. Then there are the people like myself who have no close family. Also the people who were born with disabilities and have no families, living in residential care. Many other categories I haven't thought of, probably.
But if we can't go on the way we're going, something will have to give.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Or, put another way, I'll be fine but good luck if you require public services.
But immigration hugely increases demand for public services and welfare. They increase overall aggregate demand by a much larger amount than their contribution. It is why immigration has resulting in falling GDP per capita so no, reducing immigration and moving into net emigration of low skill and low wage workers will reduce demand more than it reduces their contribution meaning more overall resource per person.
You have completely ignored the actual result of immigration for the past decade to draw your pithy one liner which makes you a fool.
I am very aware that non-EU immigration has soared since we left the EU and that non-EU migrants do tend to be lower paid, are more likely to have dependents and may not generate as much taxable income as EU migrants did. However, the new arrivals are here because we need them to keep aspects of the country that you do not need or notice going.
That's just not true though, a big chuck are students who go to shit "unis" and do shit jobs for the 3 or 4 years they are here for before going home. We don't need them and we also don't need those "universities" that are glorified visa agents. If we need more care workers then we have millions of people on benefits in the country that can do those jobs with training and withdrawal of benefits as punishment for not doing the work. We can increase the number of training roles for nurses and doctors and tell the medical unions to get fucked if they object.
We have decided as a nation to be happy that some people just refuse to work and sit on various benefits then import low wage workers to take their place in the economy. That has a cost and it's time to unwind that.
I'd also be surprised if there was a substantial difference between tax contributions per worker from low wage EU migrants and low wage non-EU migrants. The difference is that non-EU migrants were stupidly given the right to bring dependents by Boris which meant 100k workers meant gross migration of 500k people while EU workers were probably more like 100k workers for 150k migrants in total because most came alone with the eventual intention of going back to their home country or if they were young then making a life here.
Boris absolutely fucked it, there is no doubt. I think if immigration had been 150k rather than 500k per 100k workers we would probably have had significantly better per capita and overall growth.
Meanwhile here in the U.K. the Committee scrutinising the AD Bill has been hearing evidence, some of it quite extraordinary, including the claim from one that assisting someone to die was a form of suicide prevention. Yet not a peep about it on here, AFAICS.
We also learnt this week that a British hostage held by Hamas and released a few days ago was held for a while in an UNRWA facility, the same UNRWA to which the British government is paying money.
What happens to US Federal employees is interesting. But it is not more interesting than how Parliament and the government approaches its obligations to citizens here.
The more I watch politics the more I'm reminded of Camus's quote:
"Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed but in every case it is someone else's blood.That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything."
Have been following your comments on X (Twitter) on the AD Bill. Very good indeed, it’s one of the most astonishing pieces of legislation in my lifetime in that it’s being rammed through with no opposite voices seemingly allowed to speak at all.
Is the Private Member’s Bill process being abused here, by government forces who are trying to use a different process with less public scrutiny than would be the case for a government Bill?
I’m in favour of the right to kill oneself.
To start with, this is what it is. No mealy mouthed euphemisms.
The way this bill is being handled presents a picture - its sponsors are ideologically committed to it *and* believe that an open discussion can’t be allowed.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
This sounds lovely in principle, but there are good reasons why it is very problematic for politicians in practice:
1. The already stretched and inadequate social care sector relies on imported low wage labour. You want the disabled and our vast and growing numbers of decrepit elderly looking after properly, absent those staff? You have to jack wages up enough to tempt supermarket workers and the like to move out of minimum wage roles and retrain. That's going to be very expensive. 2. The same goes double for the Health Service. £45K is below the starting wage for a doctor, let alone a nurse. If we stop importing anyone other than high wage earners who's going to give all that care? 3. You end immigration, the dependency ratio of the population deteriorates even more rapidly, and that makes the need to do really unpopular things like stripping the gold plate off the state pension and taxing assets, including houses, properly even more pressing. Our economic prospects would be considerably better if retirement provision were less generous and wealthy pensioners were properly rinsed to pay for their own upkeep, but selling a future in which current retirees get smaller pensions and land value tax bills, whilst future ones are told they must work to 75 to get their state handout, is a challenging sell.
Population growth is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They're also lying if they tell you it will be painless to put a stop to - and the longer the country waits to do it, the more painful it will become. It's small wonder that nobody has dared to try, and it'll be fascinating to see what happens if they ever do.
Sadly, (I'm 76), I believe we're not far away from solving bedblocking by edict. Once the law to enable the choice to die goes through, it'll become quite likely that anyone blocking a bed will be offered a choice: be transported home to manage as best you can, or the less horrible pass out now in comfort. Around ten years after the law passes, I reckon.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Good afternoon to you too! That will sort out families between those who are willing to look after their elderly relatives and keep them alive and those who will be happy to let them die to avoid inconvenience to themselves, and to get their inheritance sooner.
Not quite. There are lots of families struggling to keep their loved one at home and only able to manage that with the help of professional carers. Then there are the people like myself who have no close family. Also the people who were born with disabilities and have no families, living in residential care. Many other categories I haven't thought of, probably.
But if we can't go on the way we're going, something will have to give.
We keep being told we need an honest debate about immigration. I totally agree. But we never have it because those politicians who want to stop it and put it into reverse - Farage, Badenoch and co - never tell the truth about the downsides. It's not just social care that will be massively and adversely affected but also the health service, where there are a huge number of vacancies despite the reliance we already have on immigrants. Our ageing population requires social and health care. Without either, many elderly people will die before thy otherwise would.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Or, put another way, I'll be fine but good luck if you require public services.
But immigration hugely increases demand for public services and welfare. They increase overall aggregate demand by a much larger amount than their contribution. It is why immigration has resulting in falling GDP per capita so no, reducing immigration and moving into net emigration of low skill and low wage workers will reduce demand more than it reduces their contribution meaning more overall resource per person.
You have completely ignored the actual result of immigration for the past decade to draw your pithy one liner which makes you a fool.
I am very aware that non-EU immigration has soared since we left the EU and that non-EU migrants do tend to be lower paid, are more likely to have dependents and may not generate as much taxable income as EU migrants did. However, the new arrivals are here because we need them to keep aspects of the country that you do not need or notice going.
So your argument is that Boris Johnson was acting altruistically out of concern for the less well off?
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
This sounds lovely in principle, but there are good reasons why it is very problematic for politicians in practice:
1. The already stretched and inadequate social care sector relies on imported low wage labour. You want the disabled and our vast and growing numbers of decrepit elderly looking after properly, absent those staff? You have to jack wages up enough to tempt supermarket workers and the like to move out of minimum wage roles and retrain. That's going to be very expensive. 2. The same goes double for the Health Service. £45K is below the starting wage for a doctor, let alone a nurse. If we stop importing anyone other than high wage earners who's going to give all that care? 3. You end immigration, the dependency ratio of the population deteriorates even more rapidly, and that makes the need to do really unpopular things like stripping the gold plate off the state pension and taxing assets, including houses, properly even more pressing. Our economic prospects would be considerably better if retirement provision were less generous and wealthy pensioners were properly rinsed to pay for their own upkeep, but selling a future in which current retirees get smaller pensions and land value tax bills, whilst future ones are told they must work to 75 to get their state handout, is a challenging sell.
Population growth is, ultimately, a Ponzi scheme, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. They're also lying if they tell you it will be painless to put a stop to - and the longer the country waits to do it, the more painful it will become. It's small wonder that nobody has dared to try, and it'll be fascinating to see what happens if they ever do.
The social care sector should never have become reliant on imported low wage labour in the first place. Who thought that was a good idea?
People who wanted the job doing cheaply, which is most people. We've thus evolved a worst of all worlds system: the workers are paid crap and there aren't enough of them, home care is severely rationed, and if you're unlucky enough to be a homeowner who ends up needing to go into residential care then you win a reverse lottery in which virtually all of your wealth is drained away in fees.
The obvious problem with replacing patchy, inadequate care and the pot luck "get Alzheimer's, lose your house" provision that we have at the moment is that doing it would cost a large amount of money, and the fairest way to do that is through some mechanism of risk pooling in which older people make enough of a contribution collectively that the unlucky ones can have their care paid for from the pot, and aren't cleaned out by sky-high care bills. Of course, the stock responses to this are bitter resentment - but I paid my taxes, I worked harder than anyone else who has ever lived so why should I help anyone else, that kind of thing - along with a lot of head in the sand thinking along the lines of it'll never happen to me. So nothing is done.
Personally if I were in charge I'd make all social care free and levy inheritance tax on all estates worth £100,000 and above, at whatever rate was needed to cover the whole bill. But I don't have to go out and win votes.
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d
No
What needs to change is the realisation that there are two positive options possible
1) High immigration. Vast amounts of infrastructure actually built. Nothing allowed to stop it. Fuck the bats. This is how countries with 0.5% per year population growth handle it
2) Lower immigration. You’ll still need a lot of infrastructure built to close the gap. Massive investment in productivity - raspberry picking machines etc…
If a paradigm has shifted, it’s the fall of the free trade pro business conservative centre right replaced by the nationalist, protectionist “fuck business” populist right.
Yes, I think that's correct
Britain has enjoyed or endured spectacular levels of immigration in the last 10-20 years. We are constantly assured this contributes to growth. Yet, as @Sandpit shows, the reality is that GDP per capita has not grown at all even as our population has exploded by many millions, putting pressure on everything - from sewage systems to landscapes, from education to health. Meanwhile our cities crumble and we have very real and unpleasant social problems stemming from the migration
Now we are told "another 5 million must come in the next ten years". Why? What the fuck? We don't want any more. Polls show that voters - by almost 2 to 1 - would rather have LESS immigration EVEN IF IT COMES AT THE EXPENSE OF GROWTH
No one buys the "growth" shit any more, and even if they do, they are past caring
I think that's true. There are exceptions for very highly motivated or wealthy individuals, but generally per capita growth does not generally come from opening the floodgates to unskilled or semi-skilled immigration - it comes from low taxes, low but efficient government spending and light but effective regulation.
In short the exact opposite of the route we've been following for more than twenty years.
Yes. And the public has finally woken up to this reality. Hence the paradigm shift
Here's a good thought experiment - imagine a scenario where we get a Reform/Tory government next time out and they get serious about immigration, not only do we pause inwards migration from people with income under £50-60k we also pause visa renewals and revoke visas for immigrants who earn under £35k. This results in net emigration of 300-400k per year as low wage workers and their dependents are forced to leave the country. It will result in overall growth falling due to falling aggregate demand from those 400k leaving but per capita GDP will rise as there's 400k fewer low and no wage people in the country.
We may have headlines showing the country in recession or zero growth but people will feel better off because within a few years of such action there will be a couple of million fewer people relying on the state for welfare for their dependents (education for many kids, NHS care for families, in some insane cases housing benefits) while removing net negative tax contributions from them.
In a falling or stagnating economy, we can achieve pretty strong net growth in per capita GDP if the government halts low wage immigration and revokes visa status for low wage migrants already in the country. It is within our power to fix this and send these people home unless they have a significant contribution to the tax base of the country which we know only starts at about £45k.
That's entirely true, but it would be enormously disruptive and the market wage for shelf stackers and social care workers would rocket. The NHS in particular would come under huge funding pressure, particularly as it already suffers from Baumol's cost disease. And if you thought the reaction to employer NICs was bad....
But we would finally fix our unusually bad problem with (relative) in-work poverty. PB doesn't like relative measures, but it's really important here for making work at the bottom of the labour market pay for a half decent lifestyle, with median wages the price setter for stuff like eating out.
So it would need to be brought in very gradually. In the long term, it must be accompanied with something that makes having children very attractive - income tax break allowances, council tax exemptions, stamp duty abolished etc. Otherwise the dependency ratio - which isn't too bad with current immigration levels - would spiral out of control.
Immigration drives up rent and property prices and makes it much more difficult for middle income families to have more children. Net emigration of 2-3m of low wage people and their dependents over 5 years would see a huge drop in property demand which would lower rent and stall house prices while also increasing GDP per capita so people will feel better off.
Immigration is a bit like a heroin addict thinking that one more hit will make them feel better. That's the situation we're in right now, we don't want to go through the short term pain of cold turkey which will make a lot of headline numbers look bad but in 5-7 years rebalance the whole economy with, as you point out, pay at the bottom of the scale looking liveable, lower rents, more affordable housing, falling demand leading to lower inflation overall. The country is at breaking point, we simply don't have the capacity in infrastructure to take another 5m people, in fact with the infrastructure we have the country is probably about 3m overpopulated. People including us, talk about lack of infrastructure investment over the last 20 years but the maths of our low wage immigration is the cause of this. We've grown the population from 60m to about 68m, but the economy has grown by far, far less than that population growth should be worth. That has left little to no money for infrastructure, the migrants that have arrived all have dependents and need welfare spending (healthcare, education) which means the government has had to increase spending in these areas more than the tax that those people generate, hence borrowing rising and taxe rates increasing and the overall proportion of the economy accounted for by state spending continually rising.
Immigration must fall rapidly and, I think, in the next government term it must move into a prolonged period of net emigration of low wage and low skill workers. A minimum salary bar of £55-60k for migrants should be implemented for people with dependents and £45-50k for single people. If that causes a labour shortage in healthcare it will force wages to rise and the lazy unemployed/"sick" can actually do some work for once.
Or, put another way, I'll be fine but good luck if you require public services.
But immigration hugely increases demand for public services and welfare. They increase overall aggregate demand by a much larger amount than their contribution. It is why immigration has resulting in falling GDP per capita so no, reducing immigration and moving into net emigration of low skill and low wage workers will reduce demand more than it reduces their contribution meaning more overall resource per person.
You have completely ignored the actual result of immigration for the past decade to draw your pithy one liner which makes you a fool.
I am very aware that non-EU immigration has soared since we left the EU and that non-EU migrants do tend to be lower paid, are more likely to have dependents and may not generate as much taxable income as EU migrants did. However, the new arrivals are here because we need them to keep aspects of the country that you do not need or notice going.
So your argument is that Boris Johnson was acting altruistically out of concern for the less well off?
Not at all. I think he has always been and always will be a bullshitter, interested only in mugging a living, and lying his way to the trappings of power.
Brexit allows UK government control of migration into UK? But at what impact to the size and nature of the British economy? The same British Economy that puts money in everybody’s pocket and pays the public service bills and pensions at the end of the day. That key element of Brexit implementation was never clearly spelt out amongst all Boris and Farage big promises and bluster.
The UK government can only stop importing migration by saying fuck business, and apart from muttering it, those in power implementing Brexit have left the reigns free on business to do pretty much what ever they like, with a “this is caps and stringent rules now post Brexit… apart these billion opt outs.” Swiftly followed by another tranche of loosening, and another tranche of loosening until, guess what, back in exactly the same place as before Brexit implementation.
Brexit is already a dead duck - it was based on the twin whoppers it generates money for public services like NHS, and that it will allow UK to control immigration. Both these lies are already politically coming home to roost in just five years!
We entered the EEC to generate money by removing hidden and admin costs on business, and on exit we reversed exactly that. We lost far more than we gained.
Comments
From nine to five I have to spend my time at work,
My job is very boring, posting like a jerk...
(There is also that fake terrible soap opera attached to a Ben Miller sitcom, possibly the last time that ITV tried to do anything interesting.)
He said: "“Having considered all the circumstances of the case and the various public and private interests, I have reached the conclusion that the balance lies in favour of granting reduction. The public interest in authorities acting lawfully and the private interest of members of the public in climate change outweigh the private interest of the developers. The factors advanced by Shell, Equinor and Ithaca in respect of their private interest do not justify the departure on equitable grounds from the normal remedy of reduction of an unlawful decision.”
So far, Labour has been hiding behind the Tories on this one saying well permission has already been granted and a lot of money has been spent. Now, they have to decide whether they want to own this decision. Growth and balance of payment implications point in one direction, the Ed Miliband fanatics in the other.
Personally, I would come up with something on the back of an envelope saying that the down stream implications are mildly positive because we will otherwise have to import exactly the same amount of gas and oil from elsewhere in the world so please get on with it soonest. I wonder, though, after the Heathrow decision, if this would be a line in the sand for the mad Ed. One can only hope.
For you guys, it's £40.
Why don't the councils just charge less per month but over 12 months?
And with so many private schools closing down demand is about to increase sharply.
I presume for every hour taught you have roughly the same in prep, marking and general thought?
That should concentrate minds
Finally!
There is a certain irony that I'm likely to be a key beneficiary of a policy I"ve been criticising as highly misguided.
There are valid arguments about retaining domestic production, but the UK is broadly self-sufficient on oil at the moment (about £30 billion exports and imports each way), so it's hard to argue that we need to keep drilling.
Going forward, oil production is going to fall quickly regardless of your policy, so I think the fairest way to deal with the problem is to taper domestic consumption and production down in a way that retains that net balance of exports and imports, while accelerating our progression towards green tech, thereby retaining some energy security. (You'd want to factor in non-energy consumption too).
That would put the onus on the government to only refuse new oil licenses IF they can prove that imports stay at around zero. For green lefty types, that would mean much more aggressively pursuing EV infrastructure, which can only be a good thing.
https://youtu.be/SDuHXTG3uyY
This "vibeshift" is like Richard Murphy's recessions.
You have to assume that, once you let people in, they are there forever. And giving them a road to citizenship and a stake in the country is preferable to having millions of disenfranchised and volatile non-citizens permanently insecure about their status.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14280431/Labours-workers-rights-bill-playground-lawyers.html
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/uk-public-opinion-toward-immigration-overall-attitudes-and-level-of-concern/
indicates that the major factor determining public receptiveness towards migrants is occupation and skill level. A hierarchy of preference by country of origin still exists, but isn't dramatic. When asked about skilled migration from Poland and from India (figure 5,) the responses were virtually identical.
Only 99% of lawyers are like that - they give the other 1% an undeservedly bad name.
Good afternoon, everyone.
No, we've come to the end of the journey on mass immigration of low skilled people, it's time to look for other answers and start to revoke visas for the people who are here. If that means £20/h for care workers then that's the cost of doing business, if it bankrupts private care homes than that's just the way it's going to be. We can't continue to import half a million people per year, the country doesn't have the means to support these people any more.
The fantasy world of the environmentalists is shown by this piece: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/xi-jinping-s-coal-burning-blitz-makes-the-dream-of-net-zero-meaningless/ar-AA1yerO3?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=c60437e996004853943e79573244d1f1&ei=18
It says:
"Commodity reporting agency Argus says that in 2024, China’s coal consumption rose by about 6pc to a record 4.9bn tonnes, accounting for 56pc of the world’s global total.
This meant China burnt more than 300m tonnes of extra coal in 2024, which is equivalent to an extra 800m tonnes of carbon.
That one-year increase is practically double the 400m tonnes of CO2 that Britain has stripped from its energy system since 1990, an achievement often hailed by Sir Keir Starmer and Mr Miliband."
So, we buy EVs from China and think how pure we have been when the energy to produce those vehicles is far, far dirtier than the energy we would use here to build the equivalent and call that progress. Madness.
Right now it is asking its viewers “should Americans boycott companies that have dropped Woke and DEI?”
Go on then, good luck with that. Only problem: Trump got into power by explicitly saying “I will roll back Woke and cancel DEI”, and he won the popular vote. Of Americans
Is this more personal vendetta / revenge stuff (as I would expect this early), or is this one credible?
It was on a Trumpton Celebrations tweet earlier, and it is not one I followed.
John Harold Rogers, a former U.S. Federal Reserve official, has been accused of conspiring to steal Fed trade secrets to help China by the U.S. Justice Department.
The U.S. attorney's office outlined the charges faced by Rogers, a former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (FRB) arrested on Friday.
Newsweek has contacted the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. for comment.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/who-is-john-harold-rogers-ex-us-official-accused-of-conspiring-with-china/ar-AA1ydY99
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14347033/Migrants-liberal-paradise-PM-lost-control-SUE-REID-Sweden-crime-rape-bombings-assassination-lynching.html
China's coal consumption would be even more spectacular if it wasn't for the fact they have installed 1000GW of renewable capacity - about 20x as much as we have, with a GDP per capita less than a quarter of ours.
I presume this pendulum swing will last a long time, similarly
And by the way, 20x our green energy production means that they are doing slightly worse than us per capita.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl3oTz9BLdk
A target should be a policy, that can be changed, not a law
And if you allow payments up until March 31 and something goes wrong you have no time to chase.
Speculation though
Starmer's government policies are pretty middle ground. There's a really basic misunderstanding of economics, but Reeves is doing absolutely brilliantly to limit the damage. (Surely this experience will have her become a Tory some day)
Spoken like a true consultant who can just walk away when it all goes tits up!
"The police are calling it an 'escalation of violence', Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson a 'national crisis', and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has admitted that the government is not in control. But why has Sweden seen a record number of bombings in January? Sweden has seen more than 30 bombings in the month of January – an average of more than one per day. Although the majority of them have taken place in southern Stockholm, cases have also been reported in other parts of the country. But what’s behind them?"
https://www.thelocal.se/20250131/whats-behind-the-latest-spate-of-bombings-in-sweden
https://archive.is/FeJsG#selection-1569.25-1589.23
Show your working
And the poorer the immigrant the more public services they will use.
I am absolutely certain that essentially removing public services from millions of elderly people will be disastrous. You, me and MaxPB will be fine in a country that does as he advocates. Most people won't be. They will be in a far worse position than they are today.
Both are individuals under authoritarian Governments dedicated to using the State to target opponents, in relatively safe positions.
Pitiful
Self-service petrol pumps are illegal in New Jersey.
(But not for diesel.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8XyuLiPSgw
https://bsky.app/profile/jdportes.bsky.social/post/3lgslmocs422a
Products off the shelf from high street may not be wrong, they may be world leading - but implementation of them into your business can create a goodness almighty mess, with all sorts of unexpected vice.
We must accept a gormless populist agenda as antidote to the Brexit wrecking ball? Is that all you got? Otherwise I don’t know why you aren’t debating properly.
You have completely ignored the actual result of immigration for the past decade to draw your pithy one liner which makes you a fool.
Thatcher, Reagan, Bush(s) and even Clinton were hardly champions of progressive causes as politicians. Watch films from the 90s or early 2000s and they're strongly gendered - full of machismo action or sex comedies or romcoms. Here it's the era of the lads' mag. Blokes with guitars are still a major force in music, with frat boy rock and post-gangsta rap dominating the American charts.
Woke it ain't - it's more of a rise of our old version of liberalism that rejects conservatism because it's stuffy and restrictive, rather than out of concerns over diversity or a desire to culturally remake attitudes. You get diversity on screen because Will Smith is more novel than Mel Gibson - but not because they're really doing much different.
That I think starts to change after 2010. Obama's was supposed to be this big moment of catharsis and unity, a wiping out of America's original sin and of progressive inevitability - but of course it wasn't.
So people get more radical with theories trying to explain why that is - turbo-charged by online sharing and become mainstreamed - where it's picked up by Hollywood and corporations as something zeitgeisty they need to get with. That is accelerated by Trump beating Hillary - whose election was supposed to be proof were 'solving' sexism as Obama's was supposed to racism.
In the UK Labour are turfed out and young people who came of age after Iraq and the financial crisis become more sympathetic to left-wing activism and a similar process occurs. The more hedonistic liberalism of the 90s and 2000s being seen to have failed, there's a shift to a more hectoring demanding version that wants proof of virtue and immediate solutions to x or y issue rather than a discussion.
That's obviously helped create the moment we're now in - but if the start of Trump 2 and some of the sheer hubris of it is anything to go by, then if (when?) it doesn't turn out well, your 'vibeshift' maybe less permanent than you think.
An EU energy law dispute fractured the coalition beyond repair"
https://www.politico.eu/article/norway-government-collapse-eu-energy-euroskeptic-centre-party-trygve-slagsvold-vedum/
I agree everything has accelerated so maybe 40 years is optimistic from my point of view. 20 years?
By then we will all be living on a fake moon of Neptune
But if we can't go on the way we're going, something will have to give.
We have decided as a nation to be happy that some people just refuse to work and sit on various benefits then import low wage workers to take their place in the economy. That has a cost and it's time to unwind that.
I'd also be surprised if there was a substantial difference between tax contributions per worker from low wage EU migrants and low wage non-EU migrants. The difference is that non-EU migrants were stupidly given the right to bring dependents by Boris which meant 100k workers meant gross migration of 500k people while EU workers were probably more like 100k workers for 150k migrants in total because most came alone with the eventual intention of going back to their home country or if they were young then making a life here.
Boris absolutely fucked it, there is no doubt. I think if immigration had been 150k rather than 500k per 100k workers we would probably have had significantly better per capita and overall growth.
To start with, this is what it is. No mealy mouthed euphemisms.
The way this bill is being handled presents a picture - its sponsors are ideologically committed to it *and* believe that an open discussion can’t be allowed.
The obvious problem with replacing patchy, inadequate care and the pot luck "get Alzheimer's, lose your house" provision that we have at the moment is that doing it would cost a large amount of money, and the fairest way to do that is through some mechanism of risk pooling in which older people make enough of a contribution collectively that the unlucky ones can have their care paid for from the pot, and aren't cleaned out by sky-high care bills. Of course, the stock responses to this are bitter resentment - but I paid my taxes, I worked harder than anyone else who has ever lived so why should I help anyone else, that kind of thing - along with a lot of head in the sand thinking along the lines of it'll never happen to me. So nothing is done.
Personally if I were in charge I'd make all social care free and levy inheritance tax on all estates worth £100,000 and above, at whatever rate was needed to cover the whole bill. But I don't have to go out and win votes.
What needs to change is the realisation that there are two positive options possible
1) High immigration. Vast amounts of infrastructure actually built. Nothing allowed to stop it. Fuck the bats. This is how countries with 0.5% per year population growth handle it
2) Lower immigration. You’ll still need a lot of infrastructure built to close the gap. Massive investment in productivity - raspberry picking machines etc…
Brexit allows UK government control of migration into UK? But at what impact to the size and nature of the British economy? The same British Economy that puts money in everybody’s pocket and pays the public service bills and pensions at the end of the day. That key element of Brexit implementation was never clearly spelt out amongst all Boris and Farage big promises and bluster.
The UK government can only stop importing migration by saying fuck business, and apart from muttering it, those in power implementing Brexit have left the reigns free on business to do pretty much what ever they like, with a “this is caps and stringent rules now post Brexit… apart these billion opt outs.” Swiftly followed by another tranche of loosening, and another tranche of loosening until, guess what, back in exactly the same place as before Brexit implementation.
Brexit is already a dead duck - it was based on the twin whoppers it generates money for public services like NHS, and that it will allow UK to control immigration. Both these lies are already politically coming home to roost in just five years!
We entered the EEC to generate money by removing hidden and admin costs on business, and on exit we reversed exactly that. We lost far more than we gained.