I keep trying to convince my wife that driving on a motorway is safer and much less stressful than driving on a winding country road that isn't always wide enough for two vehicles to pass.
We'll never agree on this.
A few months back I was driving and we ended up taking a ridiculous route to end up at a destination about half a mile from a junction of the M62. I was not pleased!
I often take one route to go somewhere and a different route back. I don't know why.
I prefer winding roads to motorways as I enjoy driving them and hate motorways. If I'm on a long journey I use the motorway but get very bored very quickly. I am not capable of driving long distances on a motorway and don't know how people manage that.
In the past I drove quite often from Llandudno to Lossiemouth in the day using motorways, the infamous A9, and county roads from Aviemore
A distance of 456 miles and I could do all of that and back to Perth on a tank of diesel
It is now way beyond my ability
I think the furthest I've driven in one day is SE London to Campbelltown, about 550 miles.
My dad drove us from Ilford (east London) to Aviemore in a single day, back in 1989.
We used to regularly drive from Ayrshire to Felixstowe in one day. That was before we realised that Yorkshire was too good to drive through without stopping overnight.
It's only Ayrshire though. I mean, about 80% of it is south of the Scottish Border (@ Marshall Meadows)
Even more so if you count Lamberton Toll. (Bet @Sunil_Prasannan has never been on the Marshall Meadows seaweed railway ... in fact I'm sure he has not.)
Marshall Mathers what??
FPT if only to keep @Sunil_Prasannan from more suspense: the seaweed railway (rails taken up alas) goes *under* the East Coast Main Line.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Wrong
There are multiple ways to achieve growth without importing labour.
Investing in productivity is one way. Another is moving the economy towards higher paid, higher productivity industries that already exist.
Cheap importer labour is the cheap boiled sweets of economics - feels good at first. Terrible as a long term diet.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
Presumable joining the Customs Union would remove our ability to 'do our own trade deals'. What's extraordinary is that this was massive, fundamental selling point of Brexit during the campaign, but nowadays no one seems remotely bothered about it. I wonder if the bungled Truss/Boris Aussie destroyed the magic.
Presumable joining the Customs Union would remove our ability to 'do our own trade deals'. What's extraordinary is that this was massive, fundamental selling point of Brexit during the campaign, but nowadays no one seems remotely bothered about it. I wonder if the bungled Truss/Boris Aussie destroyed the magic.
The England cricket team are currently showing us what an Australia style deal would have looked like in practice.
I’ve been listening to all of my favourite bands on YouTube for the last two years. I can now listen to them properly again
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings are one of the greatest soul music bands of all time. If they’d been recording in the sixties everyone would know their music
Their recordings were superb. Their Dap Tone studio only uses analogue equipment. Amy Winehouse borrowed the Dap Kings and the studio to record Back To Black
But Sharon Jones was best live. I saw her five times, met her twice, and danced with her on stage at the Shepherds Bush Empire
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
Anyone else fed up with "scanning a QR-code" and "downloading our app" ?
I'm fed up being obligated to interface with the world around me though my phone.
Agree 100%. I battle against it every day.
Then, when after many attempts you manage to download the app, a new improved app comes out and you've got to go through the whole laborious process again.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
Does any organisation track what the fertility rate is if all the aborted babies are included?
Just to reference an excellent long interview between the mighty John Curtice an an interviewer who, despite being about 12 listened carefully, didn't interrupt and let Curtice explain and expand, asking a sensible question every twenty minutes or so. It also some contains hand waving and elaborate arm movements from Curtice of outstanding quality, worthy of silent film, and he is wearing a jumper that looks as if it was knitted by his great aunt.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I would love to see some stats on how the proportion of people dependent to some extend on benefits has changed over the past 50 years, and in particular the proportion of the working population. So many working people these days seem to be needing help with rent.
The country is massively subsidising the BTL owners through Housing Benefit and the Housing Element of UC.
A 'traditional' family of four or five with one adult working full-time at minimum wage and the other looking after the children, and renting a 3-bed semi for £1200 pm (here in the rural south west) plus £185 pm Council Tax, would have about £600pm after tax, rent, and CT to live on (food, heating, electricity, water, clothes, transport, telecoms, insurance, etc.)...
Were it not for UC.
But what kind of f*cked-up society have we arrived at where a working family cannot survive without government subsidy?
Anyone else fed up with "scanning a QR-code" and "downloading our app" ?
I'm fed up being obligated to interface with the world around me though my phone.
Agree 100%. I battle against it every day.
Then, when after many attempts you manage to download the app, a new improved app comes out and you've got to go through the whole laborious process again.
The app that lets me work my thermostat/heating is being replaced by a New! Improved! app. Which is missing all the features of the Old! Rubbish! app. Quite often can't even "find" my thermostat.
I'm sure quite a lot of money has changed hands though - so GDP Up! The chancellor will be pleased.
Anyone else fed up with "scanning a QR-code" and "downloading our app" ?
I'm fed up being obligated to interface with the world around me though my phone.
Agree 100%. I battle against it every day.
'It's better on the app' is one of the great lies of our day.
Rather, it is an obvious symptom of companies and products now expecting (and largely achieving) the consumer to sacrifice their own convenience to make things easier for the company.
Get something wrong or inconvenient? That's fine, in a lot of areas the public won't have much option to do anything about it, due to monopoly or oligopoly.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
Does any organisation track what the fertility rate is if all the aborted babies are included?
Since the number of abortions is about 40%* of the number of live births, you could estimate that the fertility rate if none of those abortions happened would be about 2.0, but... there would surely be fewer pregnancies if there was no legal abortion so you can't really say.
(*Although I support the current abortion legislation, I do find that rate shockingly high.)
One of life's small daily pleasures is to able to tell Siri to switch off all the lights when I go to bed. It always feels very satisfying for some strange reason.
Anyone else fed up with "scanning a QR-code" and "downloading our app" ?
I'm fed up being obligated to interface with the world around me though my phone.
Agree 100%. I battle against it every day.
'It's better on the app' is one of the great lies of our day.
Rather, it is an obvious symptom of companies and products now expecting (and largely achieving) the consumer to sacrifice their own convenience to make things easier for the company.
Get something wrong or inconvenient? That's fine, in a lot of areas the public won't have much option to do anything about it, due to monopoly or oligopoly.
"An App" also gets to bypass a lot of ad-block/privacy protections that regular browsers have these days.
One of life's small daily pleasures is to able to tell Siri to switch off all the lights when I go to bed. It always feels very satisfying for some strange reason.
Have you tried the new "Ludte" app? Lets you report sightings of spinning jenny's and seed drills! Join our community of fellow Ludte's! Upvote their pictures! Free to get started** (then $49/month***)!! (***$79 if you want to geotag your pictures****) (****which we will sell to meta so they can target you, you weirdo)
One of life's small daily pleasures is to able to tell Siri to switch off all the lights when I go to bed. It always feels very satisfying for some strange reason.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I would love to see some stats on how the proportion of people dependent to some extend on benefits has changed over the past 50 years, and in particular the proportion of the working population. So many working people these days seem to be needing help with rent.
The country is massively subsidising the BTL owners through Housing Benefit and the Housing Element of UC.
A 'traditional' family of four or five with one adult working full-time at minimum wage and the other looking after the children, and renting a 3-bed semi for £1200 pm (here in the rural south west) plus £185 pm Council Tax, would have about £600pm after tax, rent, and CT to live on (food, heating, electricity, water, clothes, transport, telecoms, insurance, etc.)...
Were it not for UC.
But what kind of f*cked-up society have we arrived at where a working family cannot survive without government subsidy?
Minimum wage is higher than ever and well over £20,000 and of course the mother would also be likely working at least part time too.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
Hardly, if most still had 2 children we would be nearly back at replacement rate. 100 years ago most people had far lower incomes than now and most rented their entire lives but still most parents had at least 2 and often 3 or 4 children.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
This Labour government has ended winter fuel allowance for those on above average incomes, introduced a Mansion Tax, taxed savings and dividends and is willing to concrete over much of the SE, it couldn't give a toss about most pensioners in the SE of England.
It has how whacked up public spending, increased minimum wage to such a level that many small businesses now find it too expensive to hire and ended the 2 child benefit cap so taxpaying parents on average and above incomes have to pay more for parents on UC with 3 or 4 children with no increase in child benefit for themselves
Tory Shadow Energy Minister Lord Malcom Offord has defected to Reform UK, becoming its first peer
I am sure most Reform voters in the Redwall will be delighted a millionaire banker and ex Tory Lord has defected to Farage, I am not sure Kemi will be that devastated either
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
Hardly, if most still had 2 children we would be nearly back at replacement rate. 100 years ago most people had far lower incomes than now and most rented their entire lives but still most parents had at least 2 and often 3 or 4 children.
Rent was only an average of 10%-15% of average income because there were rent controls in place.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
The fertility rate was highest in the UK, nearly 3, in the early 1960s under a Tory government, a pro family government where most mothers were homemakers and hardly any worked full time and also abortion was not yet legal. We will see whether the SC decision in the US and abortion bans and severe restrictions in the South and much of mid West USA leads to any restrictions on abortion elsewhere in the developed world
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I would love to see some stats on how the proportion of people dependent to some extend on benefits has changed over the past 50 years, and in particular the proportion of the working population. So many working people these days seem to be needing help with rent.
The country is massively subsidising the BTL owners through Housing Benefit and the Housing Element of UC.
A 'traditional' family of four or five with one adult working full-time at minimum wage and the other looking after the children, and renting a 3-bed semi for £1200 pm (here in the rural south west) plus £185 pm Council Tax, would have about £600pm after tax, rent, and CT to live on (food, heating, electricity, water, clothes, transport, telecoms, insurance, etc.)...
Were it not for UC.
But what kind of f*cked-up society have we arrived at where a working family cannot survive without government subsidy?
Minimum wage is higher than ever and well over £20,000 and of course the mother would also be likely working at least part time too.
My figures are correct though.
I thought you'd be a 'mothers should stay at home' advocate! If the other parent does work part-time there are child care costs which pretty much nullify the additional income for many.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
Hardly, if most still had 2 children we would be nearly back at replacement rate. 100 years ago most people had far lower incomes than now and most rented their entire lives but still most parents had at least 2 and often 3 or 4 children.
Rent was only an average of 10%-15% of average income because there were rent controls in place.
There were no rent controls in the 1950s and 1960s but we still had a higher birthrate
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
Hardly, if most still had 2 children we would be nearly back at replacement rate. 100 years ago most people had far lower incomes than now and most rented their entire lives but still most parents had at least 2 and often 3 or 4 children.
Rent was only an average of 10%-15% of average income because there were rent controls in place.
And that's the killer. A largeish chunk of what improved prosperity has been generated in recent years has ended up with owners of residential property.
In much the same way that the way to profit from a gold rush is to sell the pans.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I would love to see some stats on how the proportion of people dependent to some extend on benefits has changed over the past 50 years, and in particular the proportion of the working population. So many working people these days seem to be needing help with rent.
The country is massively subsidising the BTL owners through Housing Benefit and the Housing Element of UC.
A 'traditional' family of four or five with one adult working full-time at minimum wage and the other looking after the children, and renting a 3-bed semi for £1200 pm (here in the rural south west) plus £185 pm Council Tax, would have about £600pm after tax, rent, and CT to live on (food, heating, electricity, water, clothes, transport, telecoms, insurance, etc.)...
Were it not for UC.
But what kind of f*cked-up society have we arrived at where a working family cannot survive without government subsidy?
Minimum wage is higher than ever and well over £20,000 and of course the mother would also be likely working at least part time too.
My figures are correct though.
I thought you'd be a 'mothers should stay at home' advocate! If the other parent does work part-time there are child care costs which pretty much nullify the additional income for many.
If a mother only works part time then grandparents can look after children in that time or even the father if wfh can do some.
Mothers can also get 30 hours free childcare a week now, easily enough to cover part time hours
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
Hardly, if most still had 2 children we would be nearly back at replacement rate. 100 years ago most people had far lower incomes than now and most rented their entire lives but still most parents had at least 2 and often 3 or 4 children.
Rent was only an average of 10%-15% of average income because there were rent controls in place.
There were no rent controls in the 1950s and 1960s but we still had a higher birthrate
There didn't need to be rent controls because councils built housing and there was usually a few council houses waiting for tenants..
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
This Labour government has ended winter fuel allowance for those on above average incomes, introduced a Mansion Tax, taxed savings and dividends and is willing to concrete over much of the SE, it couldn't give a toss about most pensioners in the SE of England.
It has how whacked up public spending, increased minimum wage to such a level that many small businesses now find it too expensive to hire and ended the 2 child benefit cap so taxpaying parents on average and above incomes have to pay more for parents on UC with 3 or 4 children with no increase in child benefit for themselves
This Labour government hasn't ended winter fuel allowances for pensioners on above average incomes. It's ended winter fuel allowances only for those pensioners whose incomes are SIGNIFICANTLY above average incomes (£35k threshold.) And quite rightly too as those same pensioners are very likely to have even higher disposable incomes relative to the working age population, a combination of having no deductions from their income other than for income tax (i.e. 0% employee NI contributions, 0% pension contributions, 0% repayment on student loans) and no housing costs either as the mortgage was long paid off, not that they have much to spend that disposable income on without a family to support. And those same pensioners also receive the biggest element of the total welfare budget, the state pension, which thanks to the triple lock is still guaranteed to rise faster than the rise in average earnings over the long term.
The average pensioner couple is on £30k a year so lots of pensioners will be hit by the WFA cut.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
God didn't marry the mother of His only begotten son.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
God didn't marry the mother of His only begotten son.
Precisely, this is about choice, you can throw as much money at people as you want to, at the end of the day its their choice whether to have kids. Also know plenty of people who went travelling or enjoyed themselves post uni, settled down in their 30s and have thought sod that, I prefer the freedom. Then there's folk who would love to have kids, but don't have a partner or didn't settle down til later in life due to various circumstances. People don't get married in their early 20s like it's the 1960s any more
Long term it's a problem, we will need high immigration to replace an ageing population, and issues funding a growing band of pensioners which are well documented.
In very rural areas, depopulation of the younger generation is mainly due to young people leaving for uni/work and not wanting to move back, with older people easily able to outbid those in their 20s and 30s for housing - it's a problem which is getting worse
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
They are dropping in Africa, albeit slower and starting from a higher figure than Europe. Think it has more to do with health care than religion. The late Hans Rosling was an expert on this
Precisely, this is about choice, you can throw as much money at people as you want to, at the end of the day its their choice whether to have kids. Also know plenty of people who went travelling or enjoyed themselves post uni, settled down in their 30s and have thought sod that, I prefer the freedom. Then there's folk who would love to have kids, but don't have a partner or didn't settle down til later in life due to various circumstances. People don't get married in their early 20s like it's the 1960s any more
Long term it's a problem, we will need high immigration to replace an ageing population, and issues funding a growing band of pensioners which are well documented.
In very rural areas, depopulation of the younger generation is mainly due to young people leaving for uni/work and not wanting to move back, with older people easily able to outbid those in their 20s and 30s for housing - it's a problem which is getting worse
Or you can reduce choice eg the Vatican forbids divorce and abortion and says sex should only be in marriage and without contraception.
Plenty of Muslim nations also emphasise a woman's primary role is to be a wife and mother still and if she is allowed a career, that comes second
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
They are dropping in Africa, albeit slower and starting from a higher figure than Europe. Think it has more to do with health care than religion. The late Hans Rosling was an expert on this
Average fertility rate in Africa is 4.0, nearly 3 times the rate here.
6/10 of the most religious nations in the world are in Africa, 7/10 of the least religious nations are in Europe. China is the least religious nation of all and their fertility rate is only 1
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
God didn't marry the mother of His only begotten son.
He did produce a child with her though
Old Testament God had a midlife crisis. Younger woman, married to another man. There was a kid, big issues about parenting. Ended badly.
One of life's small daily pleasures is to able to tell Siri to switch off all the lights when I go to bed. It always feels very satisfying for some strange reason.
One of life's small daily pleasures is to able to tell Siri to switch off all the lights when I go to bed. It always feels very satisfying for some strange reason.
Hopefully not Siri Dahl
Is that a dish made with lentils?
I made it for my wife once. Thought she’d like it.
What a mistake that was !!
Over salted baby food she’d worked all day and I served her that !!
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
God didn't marry the mother of His only begotten son.
He did produce a child with her though
Old Testament God had a midlife crisis. Younger woman, married to another man. There was a kid, big issues about parenting. Ended badly.
Way more chill these days.
It didn't end badly, it ended with the Messiah and Resurrection
Precisely, this is about choice, you can throw as much money at people as you want to, at the end of the day its their choice whether to have kids. Also know plenty of people who went travelling or enjoyed themselves post uni, settled down in their 30s and have thought sod that, I prefer the freedom. Then there's folk who would love to have kids, but don't have a partner or didn't settle down til later in life due to various circumstances. People don't get married in their early 20s like it's the 1960s any more
Long term it's a problem, we will need high immigration to replace an ageing population, and issues funding a growing band of pensioners which are well documented.
In very rural areas, depopulation of the younger generation is mainly due to young people leaving for uni/work and not wanting to move back, with older people easily able to outbid those in their 20s and 30s for housing - it's a problem which is getting worse
Or you can reduce choice eg the Vatican forbids divorce and abortion and says sex should only be in marriage and without contraception.
Plenty of Muslim nations also emphasise a woman's primary role is to be a wife and mother still and if she is allowed a career, that comes second
I think its more that younger people are realising they don't have to live their lives according to a 2000 year old book or a specific religion
Precisely, this is about choice, you can throw as much money at people as you want to, at the end of the day its their choice whether to have kids. Also know plenty of people who went travelling or enjoyed themselves post uni, settled down in their 30s and have thought sod that, I prefer the freedom. Then there's folk who would love to have kids, but don't have a partner or didn't settle down til later in life due to various circumstances. People don't get married in their early 20s like it's the 1960s any more
Long term it's a problem, we will need high immigration to replace an ageing population, and issues funding a growing band of pensioners which are well documented.
In very rural areas, depopulation of the younger generation is mainly due to young people leaving for uni/work and not wanting to move back, with older people easily able to outbid those in their 20s and 30s for housing - it's a problem which is getting worse
Or you can reduce choice eg the Vatican forbids divorce and abortion and says sex should only be in marriage and without contraception.
Plenty of Muslim nations also emphasise a woman's primary role is to be a wife and mother still and if she is allowed a career, that comes second
I think its more that younger people are realising they don't have to live their lives according to a 2000 year old book or a specific religion
And yet they are more miserable than ever with anxiety and depression levels higher than ever before
So I haven't posted here in a long time because life... got extremely busy. BUT, I was looking at polling that was putting the Greens as potential Official Opposition and I remembered that on election day - I literally said that as a leftist who didn't vote Labour that I was very happy with the result and saw a bright future for the Greens. Now, even I didn't quite imagine a future THIS bright for the Greens (somewhat spoiled by the majorities predicted for Reform), but still, I thought I'd tag back in the relevant article I wrote way back when to see what people think now...
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
They are dropping in Africa, albeit slower and starting from a higher figure than Europe. Think it has more to do with health care than religion. The late Hans Rosling was an expert on this
Average fertility rate in Africa is 4.0, nearly 3 times the rate here.
6/10 of the most religious nations in the world are in Africa, 7/10 of the least religious nations are in Europe. China is the least religious nation of all and their fertility rate is only 1
Yes but China had pretty much a 1 child policy for decades
I honestly think high fertility rate is more about health care (and availability of money) than religion. In the Victorian days, big families were very common as fewer kids would survive. We don't have the same issues now, health care and immunisation have improved survival rates drastically
Watch the YouTube link HYUFD, dont think Mr Rosling mentions religion at all
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
They are dropping in Africa, albeit slower and starting from a higher figure than Europe. Think it has more to do with health care than religion. The late Hans Rosling was an expert on this
Average fertility rate in Africa is 4.0, nearly 3 times the rate here.
6/10 of the most religious nations in the world are in Africa, 7/10 of the least religious nations are in Europe. China is the least religious nation of all and their fertility rate is only 1
Yes but China had pretty much a 1 child policy for decades
I honestly think high fertility rate is more about health care (and availability of money) than religion. In the Victorian days, big families were very common as fewer kids would survive. We don't have the same issues now, health care and immunisation have improved survival rates drastically
It certainly isn't about money mainly, otherwise Africa would have a lower fertility rate than developed nations. Healthcare is more of a factor but we still had a fertility rate of 2.9 in the UK in 1964 with healthcare not significantly worse than now but with more religious adults of childbearing age
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
They are dropping in Africa, albeit slower and starting from a higher figure than Europe. Think it has more to do with health care than religion. The late Hans Rosling was an expert on this
Average fertility rate in Africa is 4.0, nearly 3 times the rate here.
6/10 of the most religious nations in the world are in Africa, 7/10 of the least religious nations are in Europe. China is the least religious nation of all and their fertility rate is only 1
Yes but China had pretty much a 1 child policy for decades
I honestly think high fertility rate is more about health care (and availability of money) than religion. In the Victorian days, big families were very common as fewer kids would survive. We don't have the same issues now, health care and immunisation have improved survival rates drastically
Watch the YouTube link HYUFD, dont think Mr Rosling mentions religion at all
Well of course he doesn't as he was a physician not a priest but that doesn't mean it wasn't a factor.
If divorce was criminalised, full time work was banned for women of child bearing age and abortion was made illegal again and contraception was banned our fertility rate would rocket within a decade without any change in healthcare.
However of course none of that would happen as it would be unacceptable to most in modern liberal, secular societies
One of life's small daily pleasures is to able to tell Siri to switch off all the lights when I go to bed. It always feels very satisfying for some strange reason.
Hopefully not Siri Dahl
Is that a dish made with lentils?
I made it for my wife once. Thought she’d like it.
What a mistake that was !!
Over salted baby food she’d worked all day and I served her that !!
Twenty years ago I had a paneer dahl in Sparkhill which still stands as the best vegetarian dish I've ever had. Proper authentic place. Not only did you have to get the wine at the corner shop, they wouldn't even handle the used bottles and you had to put them in the bin yourself.
One of life's small daily pleasures is to able to tell Siri to switch off all the lights when I go to bed. It always feels very satisfying for some strange reason.
Hopefully not Siri Dahl
Is that a dish made with lentils?
I made it for my wife once. Thought she’d like it.
What a mistake that was !!
Over salted baby food she’d worked all day and I served her that !!
Excellent stuff. Just call it traditional lentil soup. We make it with carrots and onions and bacon bits. Or use soaked split peas for those of us with digestive issues with lentils.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
They are dropping in Africa, albeit slower and starting from a higher figure than Europe. Think it has more to do with health care than religion. The late Hans Rosling was an expert on this
Average fertility rate in Africa is 4.0, nearly 3 times the rate here.
6/10 of the most religious nations in the world are in Africa, 7/10 of the least religious nations are in Europe. China is the least religious nation of all and their fertility rate is only 1
Yes but China had pretty much a 1 child policy for decades
I honestly think high fertility rate is more about health care (and availability of money) than religion. In the Victorian days, big families were very common as fewer kids would survive. We don't have the same issues now, health care and immunisation have improved survival rates drastically
Watch the YouTube link HYUFD, dont think Mr Rosling mentions religion at all
Well of course he doesn't as he was a physician not a priest but that doesn't mean it wasn't a factor.
If divorce was criminalised, full time work was banned for women of child bearing age and abortion was made illegal again and contraception was banned our fertility rate would rocket within a decade without any change in healthcare.
However of course none of that would happen as it would be unacceptable to most in modern liberal, secular societies
So you're calling for a return to good old Conservatism, then.
The Tories used to just make divorce so expensive that nobody could afford it, and banned contraception and abortion because the C of E (well, the Tories at Church) didn't like it, and so the women had to stay at home and look after the n babies.
That attitude lingered on well into living memory [edit] alongside the very necessary social and legal changes. Still does, so far as I can see [edit] in some quarters.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
They are dropping in Africa, albeit slower and starting from a higher figure than Europe. Think it has more to do with health care than religion. The late Hans Rosling was an expert on this
Average fertility rate in Africa is 4.0, nearly 3 times the rate here.
6/10 of the most religious nations in the world are in Africa, 7/10 of the least religious nations are in Europe. China is the least religious nation of all and their fertility rate is only 1
Yes but China had pretty much a 1 child policy for decades
I honestly think high fertility rate is more about health care (and availability of money) than religion. In the Victorian days, big families were very common as fewer kids would survive. We don't have the same issues now, health care and immunisation have improved survival rates drastically
It certainly isn't about money mainly, otherwise Africa would have a lower fertility rate than developed nations. Healthcare is more of a factor but we still had a fertility rate of 2.9 in the UK in 1964 with healthcare not significantly worse than now but with more religious adults of childbearing age
Biggest difference I can see with 1964 amongst younger people is the increase in amount of people going to uni. So we take away 3/4 years plus potential child bearing for a start. Other factors kick in as well, travelling, saving for a mortgage, and not everyone is interested in the opposite sex.
I don't think its a bad thing that people are taking time over major life decisions like if/when to get married, or have kids. There's way less societal pressure now to rush through things
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
They are dropping in Africa, albeit slower and starting from a higher figure than Europe. Think it has more to do with health care than religion. The late Hans Rosling was an expert on this
Average fertility rate in Africa is 4.0, nearly 3 times the rate here.
6/10 of the most religious nations in the world are in Africa, 7/10 of the least religious nations are in Europe. China is the least religious nation of all and their fertility rate is only 1
Yes but China had pretty much a 1 child policy for decades
I honestly think high fertility rate is more about health care (and availability of money) than religion. In the Victorian days, big families were very common as fewer kids would survive. We don't have the same issues now, health care and immunisation have improved survival rates drastically
Watch the YouTube link HYUFD, dont think Mr Rosling mentions religion at all
Well of course he doesn't as he was a physician not a priest but that doesn't mean it wasn't a factor.
If divorce was criminalised, full time work was banned for women of child bearing age and abortion was made illegal again and contraception was banned our fertility rate would rocket within a decade without any change in healthcare.
However of course none of that would happen as it would be unacceptable to most in modern liberal, secular societies
So you're calling for a return to good old Conservatism, then.
The Tories used to just make divorce so expensive that nobody could afford it, and banned contraception and abortion because the C of E (well, the Tories at Church) didn't like it, and so the women had to stay at home and look after the n babies.
That attitude lingered on well into living memory. Still does, so far as I can see [edit] in some quarters.
Not really, divorce was legalised here a century before Roman Catholic Ireland for example and abortion was legalised in the UK nearly half a century before the Irish legalised it too. The Vatican has also been far more anti contraception than the C of E has been.
Conservative Muslims in the UK would also be more sympathetic to restricting divorce and female full time careers than most liberal Anglicans would be
One of life's small daily pleasures is to able to tell Siri to switch off all the lights when I go to bed. It always feels very satisfying for some strange reason.
Hopefully not Siri Dahl
Is that a dish made with lentils?
I made it for my wife once. Thought she’d like it.
What a mistake that was !!
Over salted baby food she’d worked all day and I served her that !!
Twenty years ago I had a paneer dahl in Sparkhill which still stands as the best vegetarian dish I've ever had. Proper authentic place. Not only did you have to get the wine at the corner shop, they wouldn't even handle the used bottles and you had to put them in the bin yourself.
It's over 30 years since I last visited one of the Balti Houses in Sparkhill or Sparkbrook.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
They are dropping in Africa, albeit slower and starting from a higher figure than Europe. Think it has more to do with health care than religion. The late Hans Rosling was an expert on this
Average fertility rate in Africa is 4.0, nearly 3 times the rate here.
6/10 of the most religious nations in the world are in Africa, 7/10 of the least religious nations are in Europe. China is the least religious nation of all and their fertility rate is only 1
Yes but China had pretty much a 1 child policy for decades
I honestly think high fertility rate is more about health care (and availability of money) than religion. In the Victorian days, big families were very common as fewer kids would survive. We don't have the same issues now, health care and immunisation have improved survival rates drastically
It certainly isn't about money mainly, otherwise Africa would have a lower fertility rate than developed nations. Healthcare is more of a factor but we still had a fertility rate of 2.9 in the UK in 1964 with healthcare not significantly worse than now but with more religious adults of childbearing age
Biggest difference I can see with 1964 amongst younger people is the increase in amount of people going to uni. So we take away 3/4 years plus potential child bearing for a start. Other factors kick in as well, travelling, saving for a mortgage, and not everyone is interested in the opposite sex.
I don't think its a bad thing that people are taking time over major life decisions like if/when to get married, or have kids. There's way less societal pressure now to rush through things
Yes 40% now go to uni compared to 5-10% in the 1960s and more women have full time careers too as a result
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I suggest that you check the facts.
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
Current fertility rate in Sweden (2024) is around 1.43, and it is a fairly socially liberal country. Not sure who their equivalent of Geo Osborne figure is, in any case this is an issue which is very widespread in a lot of western countries which are not hard-right economically
Highest fertility rates in the world are in Africa, as they are very religious still relative to the West even if poorer
They are dropping in Africa, albeit slower and starting from a higher figure than Europe. Think it has more to do with health care than religion. The late Hans Rosling was an expert on this
Average fertility rate in Africa is 4.0, nearly 3 times the rate here.
6/10 of the most religious nations in the world are in Africa, 7/10 of the least religious nations are in Europe. China is the least religious nation of all and their fertility rate is only 1
Yes but China had pretty much a 1 child policy for decades
I honestly think high fertility rate is more about health care (and availability of money) than religion. In the Victorian days, big families were very common as fewer kids would survive. We don't have the same issues now, health care and immunisation have improved survival rates drastically
Watch the YouTube link HYUFD, dont think Mr Rosling mentions religion at all
Well of course he doesn't as he was a physician not a priest but that doesn't mean it wasn't a factor.
If divorce was criminalised, full time work was banned for women of child bearing age and abortion was made illegal again and contraception was banned our fertility rate would rocket within a decade without any change in healthcare.
However of course none of that would happen as it would be unacceptable to most in modern liberal, secular societies
So you're calling for a return to good old Conservatism, then.
The Tories used to just make divorce so expensive that nobody could afford it, and banned contraception and abortion because the C of E (well, the Tories at Church) didn't like it, and so the women had to stay at home and look after the n babies.
That attitude lingered on well into living memory. Still does, so far as I can see [edit] in some quarters.
Not really, divorce was legalised here a century before Roman Catholic Ireland for example and abortion was legalised in the UK nearly half a century before the Irish legalised it too. The Vatican has also been far more anti contraception than the C of E has been.
Conservative Muslims in the UK would also be more sympathetic to restricting divorce and female full time careers than most liberal Anglicans would be
Comments
I also had to switch phones because of dropping. Not so good
But I’m back to an iPhone after a couple of years, and now have all my iTunes purchases from twenty years ago available
Any Credence Clearwater Revival fans, this is my favourite cover of Lodi that I’ve just been blaring out on the Minirig, by Maxine Weldon from 1971
https://youtu.be/8zAr_qnYPGk
There are multiple ways to achieve growth without importing labour.
Investing in productivity is one way. Another is moving the economy towards higher paid, higher productivity industries that already exist.
Cheap importer labour is the cheap boiled sweets of economics - feels good at first. Terrible as a long term diet.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings are one of the greatest soul music bands of all time. If they’d been recording in the sixties everyone would know their music
Their recordings were superb. Their Dap Tone studio only uses analogue equipment. Amy Winehouse borrowed the Dap Kings and the studio to record Back To Black
But Sharon Jones was best live. I saw her five times, met her twice, and danced with her on stage at the Shepherds Bush Empire
If you like soul, check this out
Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings - Nobody’s Baby
https://youtu.be/CQ570S3XhEM
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
Which is least worst?
Highly recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0zEd41_x2k
The country is massively subsidising the BTL owners through Housing Benefit and the Housing Element of UC.
A 'traditional' family of four or five with one adult working full-time at minimum wage and the other looking after the children, and renting a 3-bed semi for £1200 pm (here in the rural south west) plus £185 pm Council Tax, would have about £600pm after tax, rent, and CT to live on (food, heating, electricity, water, clothes, transport, telecoms, insurance, etc.)...
Were it not for UC.
But what kind of f*cked-up society have we arrived at where a working family cannot survive without government subsidy?
I'm sure quite a lot of money has changed hands though - so GDP Up! The chancellor will be pleased.
Get something wrong or inconvenient? That's fine, in a lot of areas the public won't have much option to do anything about it, due to monopoly or oligopoly.
(*Although I support the current abortion legislation, I do find that rate shockingly high.)
Which I'm sure is a coincidence.
https://www.irishpoliticsnewsletter.ie/p/ireland-neutrality
"The richest family on the street, no locks on the door, but very strong opinions about the ethics of locksmithing."
Good rant with regard to the Dublin drone events.
What is it saying? I can't read pictures.
I have no idea frankly.
It has how whacked up public spending, increased minimum wage to such a level that many small businesses now find it too expensive to hire and ended the 2 child benefit cap so taxpaying parents on average and above incomes have to pay more for parents on UC with 3 or 4 children with no increase in child benefit for themselves
After reaching a post war low in 1977 (1.7), the E&W fertility rate generally rose in the period to 2012 (1.9) although there are some variations in that period. The sharpest fluctuation in that period being a rise from 2001 (1.6) to 2008 (1.9) which coincides quite closely with the introduction of better support for low income families through the Working Families Tax Credit in 1999.
The precipitate drop in the fertility rate came in the period 2012 (1.9) to 2024 (1.4), which coincides with Osborne's austerity squeeze and from 2017 the introduction of the two child benefit cap. And happened in an era generally when the financial interests of pensioners have been prioritised over those of low income families.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/27/england-and-wales-fertility-rate-falls-for-third-consecutive-year
I thought you'd be a 'mothers should stay at home' advocate! If the other parent does work part-time there are child care costs which pretty much nullify the additional income for many.
In much the same way that the way to profit from a gold rush is to sell the pans.
Mothers can also get 30 hours free childcare a week now, easily enough to cover part time hours
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Sounds like the Salah/Slot relationship has broken permanently
https://www.theprivateoffice.com/insights/average-retirement-income
The state pension is only £12k a year, now about £10k less than the full time minimum wage of £23k a year from next April
Long term it's a problem, we will need high immigration to replace an ageing population, and issues funding a growing band of pensioners which are well documented.
In very rural areas, depopulation of the younger generation is mainly due to young people leaving for uni/work and not wanting to move back, with older people easily able to outbid those in their 20s and 30s for housing - it's a problem which is getting worse
https://youtu.be/1vr6Q77lUHE?si=zzYu_NtlYamaqenh
Plenty of Muslim nations also emphasise a woman's primary role is to be a wife and mother still and if she is allowed a career, that comes second
6/10 of the most religious nations in the world are in Africa, 7/10 of the least religious nations are in Europe. China is the least religious nation of all and their fertility rate is only 1
https://ceoworld.biz/2024/04/08/worlds-most-and-least-religious-countries-2024/
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/chinas-fertility-rate-has-fallen-to-one-continuing-a-long-decline-that-began-before-and-continued-after-the-one-child-policy
Way more chill these days.
What a mistake that was !!
Over salted baby food she’d worked all day and I served her that !!
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/07/10/im-a-leftist-who-didnt-vote-labour-why-am-i-happy-with-the-election-results/
I honestly think high fertility rate is more about health care (and availability of money) than religion. In the Victorian days, big families were very common as fewer kids would survive. We don't have the same issues now, health care and immunisation have improved survival rates drastically
Watch the YouTube link HYUFD, dont think Mr Rosling mentions religion at all
If divorce was criminalised, full time work was banned for women of child bearing age and abortion was made illegal again and contraception was banned our fertility rate would rocket within a decade without any change in healthcare.
However of course none of that would happen as it would be unacceptable to most in modern liberal, secular societies
The Tories used to just make divorce so expensive that nobody could afford it, and banned contraception and abortion because the C of E (well, the Tories at Church) didn't like it, and so the women had to stay at home and look after the n babies.
That attitude lingered on well into living memory [edit] alongside the very necessary social and legal changes. Still does, so far as I can see [edit] in some quarters.
I don't think its a bad thing that people are taking time over major life decisions like if/when to get married, or have kids. There's way less societal pressure now to rush through things
Conservative Muslims in the UK would also be more sympathetic to restricting divorce and female full time careers than most liberal Anglicans would be
Great food.