The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers. That likely wouldn’t have happened without EU freedom of movement.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
Thanks for answering.
Isn't the theory that lower paid Brits will, in the face of low-skilled immigration, move up the skills ladder?
Well, that was the pitch.
The way it turned out, low skilled immigrants were used, conveyor belt style, to reduce and hold wages at minimum wage levels in a number of jobs. The fact that the conditions of the jobs were horrible could be sustained by a steady stream of immigrants to replace the ones that were escaping from the shit jobs.
This resulted in chunks of the job market where pay was so low that it could only sustain living x adults in a room etc...
So what did the plucky Brits that were pushed out of such jobs do? And rightly or wrongly there is a minimum and national living wage that puts a floor under wages so where were all these jobs where the conditions were so horrible? Car washes?
You seem to view the minimum wage as a maximum. Why is that?
Where did the Brits go who were pushed out of these horrible jobs?
Many of them still do these jobs but the wages are suppressed by ensuring they're kept at the bottom.
To take one example that's been in the news a lot of care homes - 84% of care staff are actually British, but free movement has helped ensure that a job like care that really ought to not be a minimum wage job has been held down to being one.
If there were staff shortages seeing pay rise across the board that would see pay rises above the minimum for the 84% of Britons doing that job not just those attracted by higher wages.
Who is keeping them at the bottom?
If a worker in a care home felt they were being underpaid, why didn't they move jobs?
You of all people should be championing the market working in this way. You say you don't mind free movement of labour as long as there is ample housing but then cite an employment example as to why it's bad.
I never judged it as good or bad, I just understand actions have consequences. The consequences of free movement was suppressing the wages for the low-skilled because of the almost infinite amount of free movement from the East.
Now personally, I don't object to that. Others did. Those others had a point, it did have that consequence. It was simply a consequence I was prepared to live with.
The only thing that made it really unjustifiable is combining this wage suppression with increased demand for housing for which there was no quid pro quo free market.
So why didn't the low-skilled upskill?
The problem of meritocracy is that many are incapable of doing so, lacking the academic, economic and/or social skills to do so. A fair society needs to be able to provide a decent life to all, not just those with monetiseable skills.
I'd expand that from the individual to the community.
A fair country needs all demographic groups and geographic parts to feel they are contributing and are valued.
At some point the UK became, or at least appeared to be, focussed on the needs of the 1% in London.
Hopefully the B&S result will water down some of the red wall generalising that has been doing the rounds in the media for too long. Tories took lots of seats and gained vote share in lots of seats in the North and Midlands in 2019, and that's a real phenomenon. But this has then become "the North is turning Tory", or at most "The North (apart from Manchester and Liverpool) is turning Tory. We've now had it confirmed that the North of England is, actually, a politically diverse and varied place. Who'd a thought it.
Same with the Blue wall in the South. Boris is not uniformly "losing the home counties", nor, where he is losing support, is it uniformly to the Lib Dems. In a large arc broadly speaking from the Chilterns through the Surrey hills and bagshot beds into the South downs of Hampshire that is happening. In certain other gentrifying spots in old seaside and university towns they have been losing votes to Labour and the Greens since the Brexit vote, and in large swathes of Herts, Essex, Kent and Sussex as well as much of the South West they are still doing very nicely.
Ah, but. "The North is turning Tory" enables journalists to spout this without having to visit one of those ghastly places and do some research. In fact, the North is the most heterogeneous of the broad regions, and thus currently the most politically interesting.
Yup, it's not all flat caps, whippets, and to t'pub.
Heck you could argue that parts of Manchester/Greater Manchester are the most heterogeneous parts of the of country.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers. That likely wouldn’t have happened without EU freedom of movement.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
Thanks for answering.
Isn't the theory that lower paid Brits will, in the face of low-skilled immigration, move up the skills ladder?
Well, that was the pitch.
The way it turned out, low skilled immigrants were used, conveyor belt style, to reduce and hold wages at minimum wage levels in a number of jobs. The fact that the conditions of the jobs were horrible could be sustained by a steady stream of immigrants to replace the ones that were escaping from the shit jobs.
This resulted in chunks of the job market where pay was so low that it could only sustain living x adults in a room etc...
So what did the plucky Brits that were pushed out of such jobs do? And rightly or wrongly there is a minimum and national living wage that puts a floor under wages so where were all these jobs where the conditions were so horrible? Car washes?
You seem to view the minimum wage as a maximum. Why is that?
Where did the Brits go who were pushed out of these horrible jobs?
Many of them still do these jobs but the wages are suppressed by ensuring they're kept at the bottom.
To take one example that's been in the news a lot of care homes - 84% of care staff are actually British, but free movement has helped ensure that a job like care that really ought to not be a minimum wage job has been held down to being one.
If there were staff shortages seeing pay rise across the board that would see pay rises above the minimum for the 84% of Britons doing that job not just those attracted by higher wages.
Who is keeping them at the bottom?
If a worker in a care home felt they were being underpaid, why didn't they move jobs?
You of all people should be championing the market working in this way. You say you don't mind free movement of labour as long as there is ample housing but then cite an employment example as to why it's bad.
I never judged it as good or bad, I just understand actions have consequences. The consequences of free movement was suppressing the wages for the low-skilled because of the almost infinite amount of free movement from the East.
Now personally, I don't object to that. Others did. Those others had a point, it did have that consequence. It was simply a consequence I was prepared to live with.
The only thing that made it really unjustifiable is combining this wage suppression with increased demand for housing for which there was no quid pro quo free market.
So why didn't the low-skilled upskill?
The problem of meritocracy is that many are incapable of doing so, lacking the academic, economic and/or social skills to do so. A fair society needs to be able to provide a decent life to all, not just those with monetiseable skills.
One thing that really not understood by the highly educated, is that the concepts of future gain, risk taking etc are seen differently by the less educated.
A relative who went into the building business, after a serious academic career, could describe the process of trying to motivate people. He went through all the schemes of motivation to offer better rewards for better work - and was genuinely prepared to pay more for more.... The results were interesting. Oh, and cross cultural - you get the same issue with Polish brickies and Scottish brickies, it seems.
If you work in your local shop/factory with colleagues who have become good friends, and it suits your family/social life for it to stay that way, why would you want to retrain/up skill for a possible small pay rise? Maybe these people didn’t want an influx of competition for their low wage but reliable work. Is it the governments job to squeeze every bit of economic value out of the continents Labour market or do what makes the population content?
Conservatism (with a small 'c') is very comforting. People like to be able to predict their world.
But there's a problem.
Change and disruption correlate very strongly with economic performance.
If you ask "which US states have the highest rates of business failure", you might guess West Virginia or some place in the rust belt, or in the Deep South.
And you'd be wrong: business failures and economic growth are highly correlated. The less likely that your employer is to be in business next year, the more likely your wage packet is to grow and the more likely you are to be employed.
The challenge for governments is to maintain enough stability to avoid humans feeling all at sea (something that was clearly failed with regards to immigration in the UK), while allowing enough chaos for the economy to perform at a level that meets peoples' economic aspirations.
Hopefully the B&S result will water down some of the red wall generalising that has been doing the rounds in the media for too long. Tories took lots of seats and gained vote share in lots of seats in the North and Midlands in 2019, and that's a real phenomenon. But this has then become "the North is turning Tory", or at most "The North (apart from Manchester and Liverpool) is turning Tory. We've now had it confirmed that the North of England is, actually, a politically diverse and varied place. Who'd a thought it.
Same with the Blue wall in the South. Boris is not uniformly "losing the home counties", nor, where he is losing support, is it uniformly to the Lib Dems. In a large arc broadly speaking from the Chilterns through the Surrey hills and bagshot beds into the South downs of Hampshire that is happening. In certain other gentrifying spots in old seaside and university towns they have been losing votes to Labour and the Greens since the Brexit vote, and in large swathes of Herts, Essex, Kent and Sussex as well as much of the South West they are still doing very nicely.
Ah, but. "The North is turning Tory" enables journalists to spout this without having to visit one of those ghastly places and do some research. In fact, the North is the most heterogeneous of the broad regions, and thus currently the most politically interesting.
I doubt its just the journalists.
Hartlepool, Batley, Brexit party voters, Heavy Woollen voters - all the same isn't it.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers. That likely wouldn’t have happened without EU freedom of movement.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
Thanks for answering.
Isn't the theory that lower paid Brits will, in the face of low-skilled immigration, move up the skills ladder?
Well, that was the pitch.
The way it turned out, low skilled immigrants were used, conveyor belt style, to reduce and hold wages at minimum wage levels in a number of jobs. The fact that the conditions of the jobs were horrible could be sustained by a steady stream of immigrants to replace the ones that were escaping from the shit jobs.
This resulted in chunks of the job market where pay was so low that it could only sustain living x adults in a room etc...
So what did the plucky Brits that were pushed out of such jobs do? And rightly or wrongly there is a minimum and national living wage that puts a floor under wages so where were all these jobs where the conditions were so horrible? Car washes?
You seem to view the minimum wage as a maximum. Why is that?
Where did the Brits go who were pushed out of these horrible jobs?
Many of them still do these jobs but the wages are suppressed by ensuring they're kept at the bottom.
To take one example that's been in the news a lot of care homes - 84% of care staff are actually British, but free movement has helped ensure that a job like care that really ought to not be a minimum wage job has been held down to being one.
If there were staff shortages seeing pay rise across the board that would see pay rises above the minimum for the 84% of Britons doing that job not just those attracted by higher wages.
Who is keeping them at the bottom?
If a worker in a care home felt they were being underpaid, why didn't they move jobs?
You of all people should be championing the market working in this way. You say you don't mind free movement of labour as long as there is ample housing but then cite an employment example as to why it's bad.
I never judged it as good or bad, I just understand actions have consequences. The consequences of free movement was suppressing the wages for the low-skilled because of the almost infinite amount of free movement from the East.
Now personally, I don't object to that. Others did. Those others had a point, it did have that consequence. It was simply a consequence I was prepared to live with.
The only thing that made it really unjustifiable is combining this wage suppression with increased demand for housing for which there was no quid pro quo free market.
So why didn't the low-skilled upskill?
The problem of meritocracy is that many are incapable of doing so, lacking the academic, economic and/or social skills to do so. A fair society needs to be able to provide a decent life to all, not just those with monetiseable skills.
One thing that really not understood by the highly educated, is that the concepts of future gain, risk taking etc are seen differently by the less educated.
A relative who went into the building business, after a serious academic career, could describe the process of trying to motivate people. He went through all the schemes of motivation to offer better rewards for better work - and was genuinely prepared to pay more for more.... The results were interesting. Oh, and cross cultural - you get the same issue with Polish brickies and Scottish brickies, it seems.
If you work in your local shop/factory with colleagues who have become good friends, and it suits your family/social life for it to stay that way, why would you want to retrain/up skill for a possible small pay rise? Maybe these people didn’t want an influx of competition for their low wage but reliable work. Is it the governments job to squeeze every bit of economic value out of the continents Labour market or do what makes the population content?
Conservatism (with a small 'c') is very comforting. People like to be able to predict their world.
But there's a problem.
Change and disruption correlate very strongly with economic performance.
If you ask "which US states have the highest rates of business failure", you might guess West Virginia or some place in the rust belt, or in the Deep South.
And you'd be wrong: business failures and economic growth are highly correlated. The less likely that your employer is to be in business next year, the more likely your wage packet is to grow and the more likely you are to be employed.
The challenge for governments is to maintain enough stability to avoid humans feeling all at sea (something that was clearly failed with regards to immigration in the UK), while allowing enough chaos for the economy to perform at a level that meets peoples' economic aspirations.
Sure, change and disrupt peoples lives who can afford to have them disrupted, not those at the bottom end of the wage scale. I favour massive protectionism for jobs under a certain pay level and complete market freedom above another. We already pay people not to work, why not let a small economic edge go by in order to maintain social harmony?
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers. That likely wouldn’t have happened without EU freedom of movement.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
Thanks for answering.
Isn't the theory that lower paid Brits will, in the face of low-skilled immigration, move up the skills ladder?
Well, that was the pitch.
The way it turned out, low skilled immigrants were used, conveyor belt style, to reduce and hold wages at minimum wage levels in a number of jobs. The fact that the conditions of the jobs were horrible could be sustained by a steady stream of immigrants to replace the ones that were escaping from the shit jobs.
This resulted in chunks of the job market where pay was so low that it could only sustain living x adults in a room etc...
So what did the plucky Brits that were pushed out of such jobs do? And rightly or wrongly there is a minimum and national living wage that puts a floor under wages so where were all these jobs where the conditions were so horrible? Car washes?
You seem to view the minimum wage as a maximum. Why is that?
Where did the Brits go who were pushed out of these horrible jobs?
Many of them still do these jobs but the wages are suppressed by ensuring they're kept at the bottom.
To take one example that's been in the news a lot of care homes - 84% of care staff are actually British, but free movement has helped ensure that a job like care that really ought to not be a minimum wage job has been held down to being one.
If there were staff shortages seeing pay rise across the board that would see pay rises above the minimum for the 84% of Britons doing that job not just those attracted by higher wages.
Who is keeping them at the bottom?
If a worker in a care home felt they were being underpaid, why didn't they move jobs?
You of all people should be championing the market working in this way. You say you don't mind free movement of labour as long as there is ample housing but then cite an employment example as to why it's bad.
I never judged it as good or bad, I just understand actions have consequences. The consequences of free movement was suppressing the wages for the low-skilled because of the almost infinite amount of free movement from the East.
Now personally, I don't object to that. Others did. Those others had a point, it did have that consequence. It was simply a consequence I was prepared to live with.
The only thing that made it really unjustifiable is combining this wage suppression with increased demand for housing for which there was no quid pro quo free market.
So why didn't the low-skilled upskill?
The problem of meritocracy is that many are incapable of doing so, lacking the academic, economic and/or social skills to do so. A fair society needs to be able to provide a decent life to all, not just those with monetiseable skills.
One thing that really not understood by the highly educated, is that the concepts of future gain, risk taking etc are seen differently by the less educated.
A relative who went into the building business, after a serious academic career, could describe the process of trying to motivate people. He went through all the schemes of motivation to offer better rewards for better work - and was genuinely prepared to pay more for more.... The results were interesting. Oh, and cross cultural - you get the same issue with Polish brickies and Scottish brickies, it seems.
If you work in your local shop/factory with colleagues who have become good friends, and it suits your family/social life for it to stay that way, why would you want to retrain/up skill for a possible small pay rise? Maybe these people didn’t want an influx of competition for their low wage but reliable work. Is it the governments job to squeeze every bit of economic value out of the continents Labour market or do what makes the population content?
Conservatism (with a small 'c') is very comforting. People like to be able to predict their world.
But there's a problem.
Change and disruption correlate very strongly with economic performance.
If you ask "which US states have the highest rates of business failure", you might guess West Virginia or some place in the rust belt, or in the Deep South.
And you'd be wrong: business failures and economic growth are highly correlated. The less likely that your employer is to be in business next year, the more likely your wage packet is to grow and the more likely you are to be employed.
The challenge for governments is to maintain enough stability to avoid humans feeling all at sea (something that was clearly failed with regards to immigration in the UK), while allowing enough chaos for the economy to perform at a level that meets peoples' economic aspirations.
Makes senses. Seems analagous to how you need a strong state to have stability and security, but an overstrong state causes more problems than it solves.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers. That likely wouldn’t have happened without EU freedom of movement.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
Thanks for answering.
Isn't the theory that lower paid Brits will, in the face of low-skilled immigration, move up the skills ladder?
Well, that was the pitch.
The way it turned out, low skilled immigrants were used, conveyor belt style, to reduce and hold wages at minimum wage levels in a number of jobs. The fact that the conditions of the jobs were horrible could be sustained by a steady stream of immigrants to replace the ones that were escaping from the shit jobs.
This resulted in chunks of the job market where pay was so low that it could only sustain living x adults in a room etc...
So what did the plucky Brits that were pushed out of such jobs do? And rightly or wrongly there is a minimum and national living wage that puts a floor under wages so where were all these jobs where the conditions were so horrible? Car washes?
You seem to view the minimum wage as a maximum. Why is that?
Where did the Brits go who were pushed out of these horrible jobs?
Many of them still do these jobs but the wages are suppressed by ensuring they're kept at the bottom.
To take one example that's been in the news a lot of care homes - 84% of care staff are actually British, but free movement has helped ensure that a job like care that really ought to not be a minimum wage job has been held down to being one.
If there were staff shortages seeing pay rise across the board that would see pay rises above the minimum for the 84% of Britons doing that job not just those attracted by higher wages.
Who is keeping them at the bottom?
If a worker in a care home felt they were being underpaid, why didn't they move jobs?
You of all people should be championing the market working in this way. You say you don't mind free movement of labour as long as there is ample housing but then cite an employment example as to why it's bad.
I never judged it as good or bad, I just understand actions have consequences. The consequences of free movement was suppressing the wages for the low-skilled because of the almost infinite amount of free movement from the East.
Now personally, I don't object to that. Others did. Those others had a point, it did have that consequence. It was simply a consequence I was prepared to live with.
The only thing that made it really unjustifiable is combining this wage suppression with increased demand for housing for which there was no quid pro quo free market.
So why didn't the low-skilled upskill?
The problem of meritocracy is that many are incapable of doing so, lacking the academic, economic and/or social skills to do so. A fair society needs to be able to provide a decent life to all, not just those with monetiseable skills.
One thing that really not understood by the highly educated, is that the concepts of future gain, risk taking etc are seen differently by the less educated.
A relative who went into the building business, after a serious academic career, could describe the process of trying to motivate people. He went through all the schemes of motivation to offer better rewards for better work - and was genuinely prepared to pay more for more.... The results were interesting. Oh, and cross cultural - you get the same issue with Polish brickies and Scottish brickies, it seems.
If you work in your local shop/factory with colleagues who have become good friends, and it suits your family/social life for it to stay that way, why would you want to retrain/up skill for a possible small pay rise? Maybe these people didn’t want an influx of competition for their low wage but reliable work. Is it the governments job to squeeze every bit of economic value out of the continents Labour market or do what makes the population content?
Conservatism (with a small 'c') is very comforting. People like to be able to predict their world.
But there's a problem.
Change and disruption correlate very strongly with economic performance.
If you ask "which US states have the highest rates of business failure", you might guess West Virginia or some place in the rust belt, or in the Deep South.
And you'd be wrong: business failures and economic growth are highly correlated. The less likely that your employer is to be in business next year, the more likely your wage packet is to grow and the more likely you are to be employed.
The challenge for governments is to maintain enough stability to avoid humans feeling all at sea (something that was clearly failed with regards to immigration in the UK), while allowing enough chaos for the economy to perform at a level that meets peoples' economic aspirations.
I think too that there are many reasons, good and bad that people don't re-skill.
Sometimes it is as simple as not being primarily motivated by money, and not interested in the material things in life. That can be a real formula for a happy and contented life.
Sometimes it is nor being able to defer gratification, either because of pressing needs, or sometimes just inability to resist. I see this in a lot of my diabetic patients.
Pagel is still peddling the line that 10-20% of people who get infection end up with long Covid.
Indie SAGE Friday afternoon briefing.
She is completely off the deep end.
A third of the people who get it are completely asymptomatic.
Any idea what the honest figure is? Especially post-vaccines?
I may have misunderstood you, but are you assuming that if a person has long Covid then they must have had symptoms caused by SARSCoV2, or in other words that they must have had Covid-19?
I don't think that's so. I think you can get long Covid even if your only SARSCoV2 infection was asymptomatic. Certainly the NHS advice is that your chance of getting long Covid doesn't depend on the severity of previous Covid-19 symptoms. That sounds as though it may well cover the case that the severity was zero, i.e. you got infected with SARSCoV2 and beat off the infection without getting Covid-19.
(That may be hard to find out. For example if you started tested 3 months ago and all your tests have been negative, but now you feel awfully fatigued much of the time, how would anyone know whether your fatigue is a result of a previous quickly-beaten asymptomatic SARSCoV2 infection?)
In general, I think those are fair points in the header.
That said, holding on (narrowly) to B & S is no more than the very first step towards Labour presenting an electoral challenge to this government. For Labour to hold this seat was a necessity, For the Conservatives to have gained it would have been nice to have, but no more than that.
On balance that is probably fair, but for reasons I pointed out previously it also asks a lot of questions about assumptions that have been made about the Tories and their ability to hold the so-called Red wall seats at the next GE. If Tories become a little less complacent that is better for all.
It's very variable. One can look at seats where the UKIP/Brexit Party vote has broken very heavily towards the Conservatives. Hartlepool is the obvious case, but also Heywood & Middleton, or Rother Valley.
Then, you get a seat like this, where a big vote for UKIP in 2015, divided pretty evenly between the big two in 2017.
Exactly. And therein lies the risk for those that are complacent about Tory performance at the next GE. I think the risk for the Conservatives is that those in the south that don't like populism think they have nothing to lose by voting LD as Mr Starmer is boring but harmless, while the Red Wall seats fully or partially revert to type and vote Lab.
You need to distinguish between the Northern marginals, and those seats which have shifted Conservative at a rate of knots. The latter won't be shifting back.
To complicate it further. You need to distinguish again amongst those seats which have shifted Conservative at a rate of knots. Some now have pretty large majorities, some have only recently become marginal. The former won't be coming back any time soon. The latter are still very much in play.
Maybe. One question is why the Red Wall shifted blue, which I think is partly due to culture war reasons, and also (of course) to economic decline and marginalisation as brilliantly identified and exploited by everyone's favourite psephological guru, Dominic Cummings. Trouble is, internationalist London lawyer Keir Starmer might be even more of a problem than was Jeremy Corbyn.
Why some but not others is another question? N Midlands, S Yorkshire, Teesside, Durham very much so. GM, Merseyside, Cheshire, Tyneside, W Yorks much less so. Even in demographically very similar seats.
There's a textile/coal line running through Yorkshire.
The textile side was traditionally more Conservative than might be expected **, the coal side much more Labour.
What we're seeing now is a change to voting on more 'normal; socioeconomic grounds.
** From The Almanac of British Politics of 1979 - Why are working class Pennine seats like Calder Valley so Conservative? Perhaps it is partly the result of the fact that the textiles industry has many female workers and little tradition of highly organised, militant trade unionism. But also it should be noted that there is a tradition of owner-occupation and relatively few council houses among the neat stone terraces. Finally there is now a scattering of commuters who prefer living in these small valley communities amongst the hills to the grime and bustle of the northern cities.
Owen Jones Rose @OwenJones84 Keir Starmer has been given breathing space to deal with two burning problems:
1) Labour currently lacks a political vision
2) Labour is currently headed for a significantly worse defeat than 2019.
Let’s hope he takes it.
I think he has bought himself a year, but he needs to do something useful with that time. The Johnson regime may implode, but that shouldn't be the only plan.
Hopefully the B&S result will water down some of the red wall generalising that has been doing the rounds in the media for too long. Tories took lots of seats and gained vote share in lots of seats in the North and Midlands in 2019, and that's a real phenomenon. But this has then become "the North is turning Tory", or at most "The North (apart from Manchester and Liverpool) is turning Tory. We've now had it confirmed that the North of England is, actually, a politically diverse and varied place. Who'd a thought it.
Same with the Blue wall in the South. Boris is not uniformly "losing the home counties", nor, where he is losing support, is it uniformly to the Lib Dems. In a large arc broadly speaking from the Chilterns through the Surrey hills and bagshot beds into the South downs of Hampshire that is happening. In certain other gentrifying spots in old seaside and university towns they have been losing votes to Labour and the Greens since the Brexit vote, and in large swathes of Herts, Essex, Kent and Sussex as well as much of the South West they are still doing very nicely.
Ah, but. "The North is turning Tory" enables journalists to spout this without having to visit one of those ghastly places and do some research. In fact, the North is the most heterogeneous of the broad regions, and thus currently the most politically interesting.
I doubt its just the journalists.
Hartlepool, Batley, Brexit party voters, Heavy Woollen voters - all the same isn't it.
Yes. Was amused to be assured the Nissan news would help in Batley. Sunderland may as well be the other side of the moon to Heavy Woollen.
EU migration has been bloody brilliant for this country. London became capital of the world in approximately 2001, in large part because of the influx of talented, young, skilled Europeans.
There’s very little evidence that migration has suppressed working class wages - and it’s not as if people haven’t looked. Rather, the evidence suggests that European migration has been of significant benefit to U.K. productivity.
I am sympathetic to the argument that “nobody asked us”, but sadly the alternative this country looks likely to face is slow economic decline and cultural stagnation.
And what happened to levels of home ownership and inequality in London since 2001 ?
Now some people might want to live in a self styled 'capital of the world' but what about the average person who wants an average job and to live in an average house with an average family and have an average life ?
Because London isn't a place for the averages but for the extremes.
And Mr Average isn't never going to reach the extreme at the top so that destines him to the extreme at the bottom.
Hopefully the B&S result will water down some of the red wall generalising that has been doing the rounds in the media for too long. Tories took lots of seats and gained vote share in lots of seats in the North and Midlands in 2019, and that's a real phenomenon. But this has then become "the North is turning Tory", or at most "The North (apart from Manchester and Liverpool) is turning Tory. We've now had it confirmed that the North of England is, actually, a politically diverse and varied place. Who'd a thought it.
Same with the Blue wall in the South. Boris is not uniformly "losing the home counties", nor, where he is losing support, is it uniformly to the Lib Dems. In a large arc broadly speaking from the Chilterns through the Surrey hills and bagshot beds into the South downs of Hampshire that is happening. In certain other gentrifying spots in old seaside and university towns they have been losing votes to Labour and the Greens since the Brexit vote, and in large swathes of Herts, Essex, Kent and Sussex as well as much of the South West they are still doing very nicely.
Ah, but. "The North is turning Tory" enables journalists to spout this without having to visit one of those ghastly places and do some research. In fact, the North is the most heterogeneous of the broad regions, and thus currently the most politically interesting.
I doubt its just the journalists.
Hartlepool, Batley, Brexit party voters, Heavy Woollen voters - all the same isn't it.
Yes. Was amused to be assured the Nissan news would help in Batley. Sunderland may as well be the other side of the moon to Heavy Woollen.
The Nissan news would be very helpful to the Tories in Newcastle, am I right @Gallowgate?
A very good even handed header Nick. I think Labour should be worried about fringe candidates like Galloway. There's only one Galloway but there could be clones if like minded left leaning voters find a cause. Why are there so many 'Labour Friends of Israel'?
Are there Labour Friends of Saudi Arabia or Gaza or Lebanon? They've had an ultra right wing government in Israel for years. It's easy to see why it pisses off Labour activists. What's the payback for being a friend of Israel?
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers. That likely wouldn’t have happened without EU freedom of movement.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
Thanks for answering.
Isn't the theory that lower paid Brits will, in the face of low-skilled immigration, move up the skills ladder?
Well, that was the pitch.
The way it turned out, low skilled immigrants were used, conveyor belt style, to reduce and hold wages at minimum wage levels in a number of jobs. The fact that the conditions of the jobs were horrible could be sustained by a steady stream of immigrants to replace the ones that were escaping from the shit jobs.
This resulted in chunks of the job market where pay was so low that it could only sustain living x adults in a room etc...
So what did the plucky Brits that were pushed out of such jobs do? And rightly or wrongly there is a minimum and national living wage that puts a floor under wages so where were all these jobs where the conditions were so horrible? Car washes?
You seem to view the minimum wage as a maximum. Why is that?
Where did the Brits go who were pushed out of these horrible jobs?
Many of them still do these jobs but the wages are suppressed by ensuring they're kept at the bottom.
To take one example that's been in the news a lot of care homes - 84% of care staff are actually British, but free movement has helped ensure that a job like care that really ought to not be a minimum wage job has been held down to being one.
If there were staff shortages seeing pay rise across the board that would see pay rises above the minimum for the 84% of Britons doing that job not just those attracted by higher wages.
Who is keeping them at the bottom?
If a worker in a care home felt they were being underpaid, why didn't they move jobs?
You of all people should be championing the market working in this way. You say you don't mind free movement of labour as long as there is ample housing but then cite an employment example as to why it's bad.
I never judged it as good or bad, I just understand actions have consequences. The consequences of free movement was suppressing the wages for the low-skilled because of the almost infinite amount of free movement from the East.
Now personally, I don't object to that. Others did. Those others had a point, it did have that consequence. It was simply a consequence I was prepared to live with.
The only thing that made it really unjustifiable is combining this wage suppression with increased demand for housing for which there was no quid pro quo free market.
So why didn't the low-skilled upskill?
The problem of meritocracy is that many are incapable of doing so, lacking the academic, economic and/or social skills to do so. A fair society needs to be able to provide a decent life to all, not just those with monetiseable skills.
One thing that really not understood by the highly educated, is that the concepts of future gain, risk taking etc are seen differently by the less educated.
A relative who went into the building business, after a serious academic career, could describe the process of trying to motivate people. He went through all the schemes of motivation to offer better rewards for better work - and was genuinely prepared to pay more for more.... The results were interesting. Oh, and cross cultural - you get the same issue with Polish brickies and Scottish brickies, it seems.
If you work in your local shop/factory with colleagues who have become good friends, and it suits your family/social life for it to stay that way, why would you want to retrain/up skill for a possible small pay rise? Maybe these people didn’t want an influx of competition for their low wage but reliable work. Is it the governments job to squeeze every bit of economic value out of the continents Labour market or do what makes the population content?
Conservatism (with a small 'c') is very comforting. People like to be able to predict their world.
But there's a problem.
Change and disruption correlate very strongly with economic performance.
If you ask "which US states have the highest rates of business failure", you might guess West Virginia or some place in the rust belt, or in the Deep South.
And you'd be wrong: business failures and economic growth are highly correlated. The less likely that your employer is to be in business next year, the more likely your wage packet is to grow and the more likely you are to be employed.
The challenge for governments is to maintain enough stability to avoid humans feeling all at sea (something that was clearly failed with regards to immigration in the UK), while allowing enough chaos for the economy to perform at a level that meets peoples' economic aspirations.
I think too that there are many reasons, good and bad that people don't re-skill.
Sometimes it is as simple as not being primarily motivated by money, and not interested in the material things in life. That can be a real formula for a happy and contented life.
Sometimes it is nor being able to defer gratification, either because of pressing needs, or sometimes just inability to resist. I see this in a lot of my diabetic patients.
For some upskilling can mean extra work and extra responsibility (and extra blame if things go wrong) for little extra money. If people think that the benefits of their extra skill level will go to someone else ('the bosses', the government or whoever) they'll soon become disillusioned with improving their skill levels.
That said I do think an opportunity has been wasted this last year to encourage people to improve their skillset. The attitude being 'go and watch Netflix' rather than in using increased free time more constructively.
Well, this will go a long way towards soothing Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish people, convince them that we really are a union of partners and Downing St has the interests of the whole UK at heart. *arches left eyebrow* https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1411000230070341636
EU migration has been bloody brilliant for this country. London became capital of the world in approximately 2001, in large part because of the influx of talented, young, skilled Europeans.
There’s very little evidence that migration has suppressed working class wages - and it’s not as if people haven’t looked. Rather, the evidence suggests that European migration has been of significant benefit to U.K. productivity.
I am sympathetic to the argument that “nobody asked us”, but sadly the alternative this country looks likely to face is slow economic decline and cultural stagnation.
And what happened to levels of home ownership and inequality in London since 2001 ?
Now some people might want to live in a self styled 'capital of the world' but what about the average person who wants an average job and to live in an average house with an average family and have an average life ?
Because London isn't a place for the averages but for the extremes.
And Mr Average isn't never going to reach the extreme at the top so that destines him to the extreme at the bottom.
Home ownership in London has also been negatively impacted by an inflow of foreign money. There are whole blocks of flats that are basically empty.
EU migration has been bloody brilliant for this country. London became capital of the world in approximately 2001, in large part because of the influx of talented, young, skilled Europeans.
There’s very little evidence that migration has suppressed working class wages - and it’s not as if people haven’t looked. Rather, the evidence suggests that European migration has been of significant benefit to U.K. productivity.
I am sympathetic to the argument that “nobody asked us”, but sadly the alternative this country looks likely to face is slow economic decline and cultural stagnation.
And what happened to levels of home ownership and inequality in London since 2001 ?
Now some people might want to live in a self styled 'capital of the world' but what about the average person who wants an average job and to live in an average house with an average family and have an average life ?
Because London isn't a place for the averages but for the extremes.
And Mr Average isn't never going to reach the extreme at the top so that destines him to the extreme at the bottom.
Home ownership in London has also been negatively impacted by an inflow of foreign money. There are whole blocks of flats that are basically empty.
And a lot of the rest are bought by BTL landlords.
Re the US, Delta, and places with low vaccination levels:
Mississippi - 30% of the population double jabbed, cases up 64% in the last 14 days Alabama - 33% and +34% Arkansas - 34% and +81%
The US is very fortunate that schools are now on break. And, of course, the most vulnerable are double jabbed. But there are still an awful lot of 50, 60 and even 70 year olds in the Deep South who have not had even a single vaccine dose.
In Europe, there are a couple of real laggards too, where there will be an almighty awful wave: Bulgaria has 16.6% of *adults* with a single dose, and Romania's at only 30%. Both of those countries could well get absolutely hammered.
If rednecks are too stupid to get vaccinated, let's hope they only spread it to each other in their rural backwaters and not to the larger cities.
Perhaps enough of them will die off such that the GOP will once again become sane.
Well, this will go a long way towards soothing Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish people, convince them that we really are a union of partners and Downing St has the interests of the whole UK at heart. *arches left eyebrow* https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1411000230070341636
He’s the head of the government of England as well as PM of the UK. That has become even more noticeable during COVID.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers. That likely wouldn’t have happened without EU freedom of movement.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
Thanks for answering.
Isn't the theory that lower paid Brits will, in the face of low-skilled immigration, move up the skills ladder?
Well, that was the pitch.
The way it turned out, low skilled immigrants were used, conveyor belt style, to reduce and hold wages at minimum wage levels in a number of jobs. The fact that the conditions of the jobs were horrible could be sustained by a steady stream of immigrants to replace the ones that were escaping from the shit jobs.
This resulted in chunks of the job market where pay was so low that it could only sustain living x adults in a room etc...
So what did the plucky Brits that were pushed out of such jobs do? And rightly or wrongly there is a minimum and national living wage that puts a floor under wages so where were all these jobs where the conditions were so horrible? Car washes?
You seem to view the minimum wage as a maximum. Why is that?
Where did the Brits go who were pushed out of these horrible jobs?
Many of them still do these jobs but the wages are suppressed by ensuring they're kept at the bottom.
To take one example that's been in the news a lot of care homes - 84% of care staff are actually British, but free movement has helped ensure that a job like care that really ought to not be a minimum wage job has been held down to being one.
If there were staff shortages seeing pay rise across the board that would see pay rises above the minimum for the 84% of Britons doing that job not just those attracted by higher wages.
Who is keeping them at the bottom?
If a worker in a care home felt they were being underpaid, why didn't they move jobs?
You of all people should be championing the market working in this way. You say you don't mind free movement of labour as long as there is ample housing but then cite an employment example as to why it's bad.
I never judged it as good or bad, I just understand actions have consequences. The consequences of free movement was suppressing the wages for the low-skilled because of the almost infinite amount of free movement from the East.
Now personally, I don't object to that. Others did. Those others had a point, it did have that consequence. It was simply a consequence I was prepared to live with.
The only thing that made it really unjustifiable is combining this wage suppression with increased demand for housing for which there was no quid pro quo free market.
So why didn't the low-skilled upskill?
The problem of meritocracy is that many are incapable of doing so, lacking the academic, economic and/or social skills to do so. A fair society needs to be able to provide a decent life to all, not just those with monetiseable skills.
One thing that really not understood by the highly educated, is that the concepts of future gain, risk taking etc are seen differently by the less educated.
A relative who went into the building business, after a serious academic career, could describe the process of trying to motivate people. He went through all the schemes of motivation to offer better rewards for better work - and was genuinely prepared to pay more for more.... The results were interesting. Oh, and cross cultural - you get the same issue with Polish brickies and Scottish brickies, it seems.
If you work in your local shop/factory with colleagues who have become good friends, and it suits your family/social life for it to stay that way, why would you want to retrain/up skill for a possible small pay rise? Maybe these people didn’t want an influx of competition for their low wage but reliable work. Is it the governments job to squeeze every bit of economic value out of the continents Labour market or do what makes the population content?
Quite - also the family network and being close to parents (crucial if you need two salaries and the bairns are small). Whcih was always the defect with the Tebbitian velocipedian solution.
Well, this will go a long way towards soothing Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish people, convince them that we really are a union of partners and Downing St has the interests of the whole UK at heart. *arches left eyebrow* https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1411000230070341636
He’s the head of the government of England as well as PM of the UK. That has become even more noticeable during COVID.
Oh yes, but not explicitly so. Which is why this bit of imagery is interesting.
EU migration has been bloody brilliant for this country. London became capital of the world in approximately 2001, in large part because of the influx of talented, young, skilled Europeans.
There’s very little evidence that migration has suppressed working class wages - and it’s not as if people haven’t looked. Rather, the evidence suggests that European migration has been of significant benefit to U.K. productivity.
I am sympathetic to the argument that “nobody asked us”, but sadly the alternative this country looks likely to face is slow economic decline and cultural stagnation.
what about the average person who wants an average job and to live in an average house with an average family and have an average life?
Hell I pay the price........
🎵🎵I always feel like somebody's watching me.......🎵
Well, this will go a long way towards soothing Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish people, convince them that we really are a union of partners and Downing St has the interests of the whole UK at heart. *arches left eyebrow* https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1411000230070341636
He’s the head of the government of England as well as PM of the UK. That has become even more noticeable during COVID.
Oh yes, but not explicitly so. Which is why this bit of imagery is interesting.
It’s something the media (especially the BBC) have got a lot better on in recent years, even before COVID. They are now very careful to talk about the NHS in England, for example.
Just thinking, it's interesting nobody powerful enough though to keep No 10 for UK-only imagery (UJ and so on). But that reflects the current Blairite settlement.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers. That likely wouldn’t have happened without EU freedom of movement.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
Thanks for answering.
Isn't the theory that lower paid Brits will, in the face of low-skilled immigration, move up the skills ladder?
Well, that was the pitch.
The way it turned out, low skilled immigrants were used, conveyor belt style, to reduce and hold wages at minimum wage levels in a number of jobs. The fact that the conditions of the jobs were horrible could be sustained by a steady stream of immigrants to replace the ones that were escaping from the shit jobs.
This resulted in chunks of the job market where pay was so low that it could only sustain living x adults in a room etc...
So what did the plucky Brits that were pushed out of such jobs do? And rightly or wrongly there is a minimum and national living wage that puts a floor under wages so where were all these jobs where the conditions were so horrible? Car washes?
You seem to view the minimum wage as a maximum. Why is that?
Where did the Brits go who were pushed out of these horrible jobs?
Many of them still do these jobs but the wages are suppressed by ensuring they're kept at the bottom.
To take one example that's been in the news a lot of care homes - 84% of care staff are actually British, but free movement has helped ensure that a job like care that really ought to not be a minimum wage job has been held down to being one.
If there were staff shortages seeing pay rise across the board that would see pay rises above the minimum for the 84% of Britons doing that job not just those attracted by higher wages.
Who is keeping them at the bottom?
If a worker in a care home felt they were being underpaid, why didn't they move jobs?
You of all people should be championing the market working in this way. You say you don't mind free movement of labour as long as there is ample housing but then cite an employment example as to why it's bad.
I never judged it as good or bad, I just understand actions have consequences. The consequences of free movement was suppressing the wages for the low-skilled because of the almost infinite amount of free movement from the East.
Now personally, I don't object to that. Others did. Those others had a point, it did have that consequence. It was simply a consequence I was prepared to live with.
The only thing that made it really unjustifiable is combining this wage suppression with increased demand for housing for which there was no quid pro quo free market.
So why didn't the low-skilled upskill?
The problem of meritocracy is that many are incapable of doing so, lacking the academic, economic and/or social skills to do so. A fair society needs to be able to provide a decent life to all, not just those with monetiseable skills.
One thing that really not understood by the highly educated, is that the concepts of future gain, risk taking etc are seen differently by the less educated.
A relative who went into the building business, after a serious academic career, could describe the process of trying to motivate people. He went through all the schemes of motivation to offer better rewards for better work - and was genuinely prepared to pay more for more.... The results were interesting. Oh, and cross cultural - you get the same issue with Polish brickies and Scottish brickies, it seems.
If you work in your local shop/factory with colleagues who have become good friends, and it suits your family/social life for it to stay that way, why would you want to retrain/up skill for a possible small pay rise? Maybe these people didn’t want an influx of competition for their low wage but reliable work. Is it the governments job to squeeze every bit of economic value out of the continents Labour market or do what makes the population content?
Quite - also the family network and being close to parents (crucial if you need two salaries and the bairns are small). Whcih was always the defect with the Tebbitian velocipedian solution.
Economic protectionism for low wage jobs never went out of fashion, the Labour party just decided to agree with the Tories that all that mattered was the bottom line of a balance sheet, and that a steady, reliable job and sense of community were some old fashioned notion. We had a period of overlap on that, where there was no real option to vote for an old school workers party and I think UKIP shook it up. Out of the debris came two parties split along those lines, and now we are in the somewhat absurd position of indoctrinated Labour voters (like me), brought up to believe the Trade Unions were our friends, feeling like the only option is to vote Tory, and lifelong Conservative members hoping Sir Keir sees off the Old Etonian Tory PM
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
It's potentially more than 10%. Some EU residents are now British Citizens so don't need to apply, and some have undoubtedly gone home over the last year so the peak figure would have been higher.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, there was a well publicized serge in people form the UK for a variety of EU passports, I don't know the total number, but have More EU nationals applied to live in the UK or vice versa?
Since 2016, more than 350,000 UK citizens have applied to acquire the nationality of another EU member state, with some giving up their British passports to keep their EU rights after Brexit.
Well, this will go a long way towards soothing Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish people, convince them that we really are a union of partners and Downing St has the interests of the whole UK at heart. *arches left eyebrow* https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1411000230070341636
The grinning double thumbs up at any and every opportunity is getting old. It works. It has worked. Will it continue to work? I don't really know. Psychologically it signals confidence and reassurance that everything will be fine. So, during the Brexit Wars and a pandemic it was a superbly effective piece of political semiotics. But, if the creeping inkling of a suspicion begins to grow that everything isn't actually all right, it risks looking inane at best. Downright ludicrous at worst.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
It's potentially more than 10%. Some EU residents are now British Citizens so don't need to apply, and some have undoubtedly gone home over the last year so the peak figure would have been higher.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, there was a well publicized serge in people form the UK for a variety of EU passports, I don't know the total number, but have More EU nationals applied to live in the UK or vice versa?
Since 2016, more than 350,000 UK citizens have applied to acquire the nationality of another EU member state, with some giving up their British passports to keep their EU rights after Brexit.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
It's potentially more than 10%. Some EU residents are now British Citizens so don't need to apply, and some have undoubtedly gone home over the last year so the peak figure would have been higher.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, there was a well publicized serge in people form the UK for a variety of EU passports, I don't know the total number, but have More EU nationals applied to live in the UK or vice versa?
Since 2016, more than 350,000 UK citizens have applied to acquire the nationality of another EU member state, with some giving up their British passports to keep their EU rights after Brexit.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
It's potentially more than 10%. Some EU residents are now British Citizens so don't need to apply, and some have undoubtedly gone home over the last year so the peak figure would have been higher.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, there was a well publicized serge in people form the UK for a variety of EU passports, I don't know the total number, but have More EU nationals applied to live in the UK or vice versa?
Since 2016, more than 350,000 UK citizens have applied to acquire the nationality of another EU member state, with some giving up their British passports to keep their EU rights after Brexit.
The case for a second referendum has just become unanswerable.
BBC1 are showing Italy v. Belgium whilst Andy Murray has been relegated to BBC2.
The BBC might actually be forced to pick a channel and stick with it for the tennis then. I've never quite understood their obsession with relentlessly shuffling the games round all the different channels and then back again.
The grinning double thumbs up at any and every opportunity is getting old. It works. It has worked. Will it continue to work? I don't really know. Psychologically it signals confidence and reassurance that everything will be fine. So, during the Brexit Wars and a pandemic it was a superbly effective piece of political semiotics. But, if the creeping inkling of a suspicion begins to grow that everything isn't actually all right, it risks looking inane at best. Downright ludicrous at worst.
Well, this will go a long way towards soothing Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish people, convince them that we really are a union of partners and Downing St has the interests of the whole UK at heart. *arches left eyebrow* https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1411000230070341636
He’s the head of the government of England as well as PM of the UK. That has become even more noticeable during COVID.
Oh yes, but not explicitly so. Which is why this bit of imagery is interesting.
It’s something the media (especially the BBC) have got a lot better on in recent years, even before COVID. They are now very careful to talk about the NHS in England, for example.
Still not perfect by any means, but it is better than it was.
I remember about 2013 we had a chat on PB about this issue in general and there emerged the tale of the DM (I think) and its legal advice which was based on English law but got cut and pasted for the Scottish edition too together with the usual other Femail, home improvement, etc. stuff in the middle (as it indeed was from my own observation at the time). A chap got done for incest as a result - he'd followed the DM's legal advice but come unstuck (so to speak) as he was doing it in Scotland ...
EU migration has been bloody brilliant for this country. London became capital of the world in approximately 2001, in large part because of the influx of talented, young, skilled Europeans.
There’s very little evidence that migration has suppressed working class wages - and it’s not as if people haven’t looked. Rather, the evidence suggests that European migration has been of significant benefit to U.K. productivity.
I am sympathetic to the argument that “nobody asked us”, but sadly the alternative this country looks likely to face is slow economic decline and cultural stagnation.
And what happened to levels of home ownership and inequality in London since 2001 ?
Now some people might want to live in a self styled 'capital of the world' but what about the average person who wants an average job and to live in an average house with an average family and have an average life ?
Because London isn't a place for the averages but for the extremes.
And Mr Average is never going to reach the extreme at the top so that destines him to the extreme at the bottom.
Double negative in the last line corrected.
To expand I'm a little intrigued that those for whom London works well struggle to see that it doesn't for many others living there and would work even less well for tens of millions living outside it.
It certainly didn't work well for Conservative electoral prospects yet the impression from the Cameron era was that the rest of the country should aspire to be 'more like London' or at least more like the gentrified posh bits of London (which wouldn't be easy without a privileged background).
Well, this will go a long way towards soothing Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish people, convince them that we really are a union of partners and Downing St has the interests of the whole UK at heart. *arches left eyebrow* https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1411000230070341636
The grinning double thumbs up at any and every opportunity is getting old. It works. It has worked. Will it continue to work? I don't really know. Psychologically it signals confidence and reassurance that everything will be fine. So, during the Brexit Wars and a pandemic it was a superbly effective piece of political semiotics. But, if the creeping inkling of a suspicion begins to grow that everything isn't actually all right, it risks looking inane at best. Downright ludicrous at worst.
It can smack of someone who is trying to communicate with a foreigner or a deaf person and can only think to treat them as utter morons.
EU migration has been bloody brilliant for this country. London became capital of the world in approximately 2001, in large part because of the influx of talented, young, skilled Europeans.
There’s very little evidence that migration has suppressed working class wages - and it’s not as if people haven’t looked. Rather, the evidence suggests that European migration has been of significant benefit to U.K. productivity.
I am sympathetic to the argument that “nobody asked us”, but sadly the alternative this country looks likely to face is slow economic decline and cultural stagnation.
And what happened to levels of home ownership and inequality in London since 2001 ?
Now some people might want to live in a self styled 'capital of the world' but what about the average person who wants an average job and to live in an average house with an average family and have an average life ?
Because London isn't a place for the averages but for the extremes.
And Mr Average isn't never going to reach the extreme at the top so that destines him to the extreme at the bottom.
Home ownership in London has also been negatively impacted by an inflow of foreign money. There are whole blocks of flats that are basically empty.
And a lot of the rest are bought by BTL landlords.
That's not so bad, though. At least people actually live in them.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
It's potentially more than 10%. Some EU residents are now British Citizens so don't need to apply, and some have undoubtedly gone home over the last year so the peak figure would have been higher.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, there was a well publicized serge in people form the UK for a variety of EU passports, I don't know the total number, but have More EU nationals applied to live in the UK or vice versa?
Since 2016, more than 350,000 UK citizens have applied to acquire the nationality of another EU member state, with some giving up their British passports to keep their EU rights after Brexit.
EU migration has been bloody brilliant for this country. London became capital of the world in approximately 2001, in large part because of the influx of talented, young, skilled Europeans.
There’s very little evidence that migration has suppressed working class wages - and it’s not as if people haven’t looked. Rather, the evidence suggests that European migration has been of significant benefit to U.K. productivity.
I am sympathetic to the argument that “nobody asked us”, but sadly the alternative this country looks likely to face is slow economic decline and cultural stagnation.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
It's potentially more than 10%. Some EU residents are now British Citizens so don't need to apply, and some have undoubtedly gone home over the last year so the peak figure would have been higher.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, there was a well publicized serge in people form the UK for a variety of EU passports, I don't know the total number, but have More EU nationals applied to live in the UK or vice versa?
Since 2016, more than 350,000 UK citizens have applied to acquire the nationality of another EU member state, with some giving up their British passports to keep their EU rights after Brexit.
I'm surprised the figure isn't higher than 350K in Northern Ireland alone, but there is no rush: ~2 million British citizens in NI can get Irish passports whenever they feel like moving to France, Spain, or anywhere else in the EU.
Well, this will go a long way towards soothing Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish people, convince them that we really are a union of partners and Downing St has the interests of the whole UK at heart. *arches left eyebrow* https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1411000230070341636
He’s the head of the government of England as well as PM of the UK. That has become even more noticeable during COVID.
Oh yes, but not explicitly so. Which is why this bit of imagery is interesting.
It’s something the media (especially the BBC) have got a lot better on in recent years, even before COVID. They are now very careful to talk about the NHS in England, for example.
Still not perfect by any means, but it is better than it was.
I remember about 2013 we had a chat on PB about this issue in general and there emerged the tale of the DM (I think) and its legal advice which was based on English law but got cut and pasted for the Scottish edition too together with the usual other Femail, home improvement, etc. stuff in the middle (as it indeed was from my own observation at the time). A chap got done for incest as a result - he'd followed the DM's legal advice but come unstuck (so to speak) as he was doing it in Scotland ...
The legal differences have always been there so really there should be no excuses for getting that wrong.
So sorry to hear about Mrs Foxy - hope the sense returns soon. It's a reminder to us all not to be too blase about catching the illness even if one doesn't die from it.
There's an interesting piece on a private WhatsApp group from a Muslim who was involved in the whole Batley campaign. Briefly, he says that the sense by Muslims of being taken for granted is real, and paradoxically what saved the campaign was the revulsion over the thuggish behaviour by the Birmingham group - a lot of people felt they couldn't reward that. But it doesn't stop them feeling forgotten.
So sorry to hear about Mrs Foxy - hope the sense returns soon. It's a reminder to us all not to be too blase about catching the illness even if one doesn't die from it.
There's an interesting piece on a private WhatsApp group from a Muslim who was involved in the whole Batley campaign. Briefly, he says that the sense by Muslims of being taken for granted is real, and paradoxically what saved the campaign was the revulsion over the thuggish behaviour by the Birmingham group - a lot of people felt they couldn't reward that. But it doesn't stop them feeling forgotten.
Ah, the Guardian. Sneer at the poor for eating Fish & Chips for lunch in Spain on their one holiday a year, but insist on taking nice British ski instructors on their own holidays. Can't have one of those foreign instructors near the children!
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
It's potentially more than 10%. Some EU residents are now British Citizens so don't need to apply, and some have undoubtedly gone home over the last year so the peak figure would have been higher.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, there was a well publicized serge in people form the UK for a variety of EU passports, I don't know the total number, but have More EU nationals applied to live in the UK or vice versa?
Since 2016, more than 350,000 UK citizens have applied to acquire the nationality of another EU member state, with some giving up their British passports to keep their EU rights after Brexit.
Or course, you need to add people who have applied for residency permits in EU countries.
Up to a million lived there (excluding Ireland) - I don't think the EU knows how may have settled there:
In 2019, according to UN data, 1.3 million people born in the UK lived in EU countries. Spain hosted the largest group, at 302,000, followed by Ireland, with 293,000. France was third with 177,000, Germany was fourth with 99,000 and Italy was fifth with 66,000.
Anyone not disturbed by this is not sentient. Western science has been entirely corrupted by China. The attempted suppression of the Lab Leak Hypothesis was just one expression of that
‘🚨🚨 SHOCKING → Expert witness tells Congress American scientists are scared to investigate the Wuhan lab leak because China will label them "enemies of China" and their laboratory will be "blacklisted."
The fact that we're still giving taxpayer money to China is outrageous.’
EU migration has been bloody brilliant for this country. London became capital of the world in approximately 2001, in large part because of the influx of talented, young, skilled Europeans.
There’s very little evidence that migration has suppressed working class wages - and it’s not as if people haven’t looked. Rather, the evidence suggests that European migration has been of significant benefit to U.K. productivity.
I am sympathetic to the argument that “nobody asked us”, but sadly the alternative this country looks likely to face is slow economic decline and cultural stagnation.
And what happened to levels of home ownership and inequality in London since 2001 ?
Now some people might want to live in a self styled 'capital of the world' but what about the average person who wants an average job and to live in an average house with an average family and have an average life ?
Because London isn't a place for the averages but for the extremes.
And Mr Average isn't never going to reach the extreme at the top so that destines him to the extreme at the bottom.
Home ownership in London has also been negatively impacted by an inflow of foreign money. There are whole blocks of flats that are basically empty.
It’s our openness to foreign investment, no questions asked, that is the problem.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
It's potentially more than 10%. Some EU residents are now British Citizens so don't need to apply, and some have undoubtedly gone home over the last year so the peak figure would have been higher.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, there was a well publicized serge in people form the UK for a variety of EU passports, I don't know the total number, but have More EU nationals applied to live in the UK or vice versa?
Since 2016, more than 350,000 UK citizens have applied to acquire the nationality of another EU member state, with some giving up their British passports to keep their EU rights after Brexit.
Or course, you need to add people who have applied for residency permits in EU countries.
Up to a million lived there (excluding Ireland) - I don't think the EU knows how may have settled there:
In 2019, according to UN data, 1.3 million people born in the UK lived in EU countries. Spain hosted the largest group, at 302,000, followed by Ireland, with 293,000. France was third with 177,000, Germany was fourth with 99,000 and Italy was fifth with 66,000.
However you cut it, more than four times as many EU citizens live in the UK as UK citizens live in the EU.
Hang on, the calculation is a little harder than that.
Not everyone who has applied for settled status is actually UK resident. It's somewhere between 3m and 6m, and we won't know for sure until we see the census data next year.
My gut is that it's probably 4.5-5.25m EU citizens in the UK and probably 1.5m abroad. There's also the additional calculation about what to do with people with dual nationalities. I know several people who have taken EU citizenship since 2016 - they're not immigrants, they are Brits who now also have an additional passport.
It's amazing how many people seem to catch these things on camera nowadays. Someone even caught the first stage of the Miami building collapse in the underground car park on camera, a few minutes before the main collapse.
To reach the final, Belgium have to beat Italy and Spain, both top European sides (unless it goes to penalties). England's side of the draw contains us and the three outsiders.
That said, I would have Belgium a couple of points shorter, and lengthen Italy and Spain slightly, following the de Bruyne news.
In other news… The Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, and the journalist Sarah Vine have announced their separation after 20 years of marriage and are in the process of getting divorced.
In a joint statement released on Friday, the couple said they remained “close friends” and would continue supporting their two children, but wanted privacy and would not be commenting further.
One in 260 people in England had Covid in the last week, said the ONS, a rate similar to that last seen in February. In Wales the figure was 1 in 450, in Northern Ireland it was 1 in 670, and in Scotland it was 1 in 150.
So sorry to hear about Mrs Foxy - hope the sense returns soon. It's a reminder to us all not to be too blase about catching the illness even if one doesn't die from it.
There's an interesting piece on a private WhatsApp group from a Muslim who was involved in the whole Batley campaign. Briefly, he says that the sense by Muslims of being taken for granted is real, and paradoxically what saved the campaign was the revulsion over the thuggish behaviour by the Birmingham group - a lot of people felt they couldn't reward that. But it doesn't stop them feeling forgotten.
I think there is something in that. No group likes to be taken for granted. Why should British Muslims be different?
Mrs Foxy isn't too bad, out with friends leaving me to the footy 🙂 Belgium the value IMO.
Covid is a nasty bug though. Even without mortality the complications are not to be ignored.
The statistics released today (Friday 2 July) show there were 6.02 million applications made to the scheme by 30 June with 5.1 million grants of status. There have been more than 5.3 million applications from England, 291,200 from Scotland, 98,600 from Wales, and 98,400 from Northern Ireland.
The surge in applications, including more than 400,000 in June alone, means that there are around 570,000 pending applications. The Government has repeatedly assured those who applied before the deadline that they will have their rights protected until their application is decided, as set out in law, and they have the means to prove their protected rights if needed.
Immigration levels were off the scale from 2004-2016, utterly extraordinary.
How did it affect you personally?
Personally? I got quite a bit of sex out of it. If we're going to have mass immigration then having young nubile blonde females emigrating en-mass from Poland and Lithuanian is as good as it gets. But, I live in an affluent rural area and my salary & prospects were unaffected.
I also saw very rapid social change in big towns and cities, including Basingstoke, that took place over a very short number of years, that changed the character of the town, and caused housing and wage pressures for many lower-earning locals and a friction and resentment that wasn't necessary.
I thought the immigration rates were crazy then and still do now.
The reality for me is complex.
On the one hand family wise, it’s been a great plus for me. I have a wonderful Finnish sister in law via my older brother - and my younger brother, with profound learning difficulties has undoubtedly benefitted from Eastern European carers.
But it’s probably come at a personal cost for me, employment wise - and the wider economic cost to lower paid Brits is obvious.
The key point is - that no one was asked, and anyone who objected to a 10% increase in the population via immigration was called racist.
That was profoundly unfair. Labour, the LDs and the liberal tories share the blame for this.
It's potentially more than 10%. Some EU residents are now British Citizens so don't need to apply, and some have undoubtedly gone home over the last year so the peak figure would have been higher.
In the wake of the Brexit vote, there was a well publicized serge in people form the UK for a variety of EU passports, I don't know the total number, but have More EU nationals applied to live in the UK or vice versa?
Since 2016, more than 350,000 UK citizens have applied to acquire the nationality of another EU member state, with some giving up their British passports to keep their EU rights after Brexit.
Or course, you need to add people who have applied for residency permits in EU countries.
Up to a million lived there (excluding Ireland) - I don't think the EU knows how may have settled there:
In 2019, according to UN data, 1.3 million people born in the UK lived in EU countries. Spain hosted the largest group, at 302,000, followed by Ireland, with 293,000. France was third with 177,000, Germany was fourth with 99,000 and Italy was fifth with 66,000.
In other news… The Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, and the journalist Sarah Vine have announced their separation after 20 years of marriage and are in the process of getting divorced.
In a joint statement released on Friday, the couple said they remained “close friends” and would continue supporting their two children, but wanted privacy and would not be commenting further.
Ummm... I don't know many divorced couples that are "close friends"
Comments
A fair country needs all demographic groups and geographic parts to feel they are contributing and are valued.
At some point the UK became, or at least appeared to be, focussed on the needs of the 1% in London.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW3e_1lZST4
I think Kim will be a huge asset to the House of Commons.
But there's a problem.
Change and disruption correlate very strongly with economic performance.
If you ask "which US states have the highest rates of business failure", you might guess West Virginia or some place in the rust belt, or in the Deep South.
And you'd be wrong: business failures and economic growth are highly correlated. The less likely that your employer is to be in business next year, the more likely your wage packet is to grow and the more likely you are to be employed.
The challenge for governments is to maintain enough stability to avoid humans feeling all at sea (something that was clearly failed with regards to immigration in the UK), while allowing enough chaos for the economy to perform at a level that meets peoples' economic aspirations.
Hartlepool, Batley, Brexit party voters, Heavy Woollen voters - all the same isn't it.
Sometimes it is as simple as not being primarily motivated by money, and not interested in the material things in life. That can be a real formula for a happy and contented life.
Sometimes it is nor being able to defer gratification, either because of pressing needs, or sometimes just inability to resist. I see this in a lot of my diabetic patients.
I don't think that's so. I think you can get long Covid even if your only SARSCoV2 infection was asymptomatic. Certainly the NHS advice is that your chance of getting long Covid doesn't depend on the severity of previous Covid-19 symptoms. That sounds as though it may well cover the case that the severity was zero, i.e. you got infected with SARSCoV2 and beat off the infection without getting Covid-19.
(That may be hard to find out. For example if you started tested 3 months ago and all your tests have been negative, but now you feel awfully fatigued much of the time, how would anyone know whether your fatigue is a result of a previous quickly-beaten asymptomatic SARSCoV2 infection?)
(Paging the medics here...)
@OwenJones84
Keir Starmer has been given breathing space to deal with two burning problems:
1) Labour currently lacks a political vision
2) Labour is currently headed for a significantly worse defeat than 2019.
Let’s hope he takes it.
The textile side was traditionally more Conservative than might be expected **, the coal side much more Labour.
What we're seeing now is a change to voting on more 'normal; socioeconomic grounds.
** From The Almanac of British Politics of 1979 - Why are working class Pennine seats like Calder Valley so Conservative? Perhaps it is partly the result of the fact that the textiles industry has many female workers and little tradition of highly organised, militant trade unionism. But also it should be noted that there is a tradition of owner-occupation and relatively few council houses among the neat stone terraces. Finally there is now a scattering of commuters who prefer living in these small valley communities amongst the hills to the grime and bustle of the northern cities.
Sunderland may as well be the other side of the moon to Heavy Woollen.
Now some people might want to live in a self styled 'capital of the world' but what about the average person who wants an average job and to live in an average house with an average family and have an average life ?
Because London isn't a place for the averages but for the extremes.
And Mr Average isn't never going to reach the extreme at the top so that destines him to the extreme at the bottom.
#SameAreaCodeSamePeople
#NeedToRewatchFatherTed
BBC1 are showing Italy v. Belgium whilst Andy Murray has been relegated to BBC2.
2) is a long, long way from being nailed on.
Are there Labour Friends of Saudi Arabia or Gaza or Lebanon? They've had an ultra right wing government in Israel for years. It's easy to see why it pisses off Labour activists. What's the payback for being a friend of Israel?
That said I do think an opportunity has been wasted this last year to encourage people to improve their skillset. The attitude being 'go and watch Netflix' rather than in using increased free time more constructively.
Perhaps enough of them will die off such that the GOP will once again become sane.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/02/uk-school-skiing-trips-to-eu-could-be-wiped-out-by-brexit-visa-rules
Nothing new. But sensible comment, all the same.
This could be very funny.
Writes an Englishman who has been desensitised to penalty shootout failures.
ETA I'm facing a loss of £1.40 following some frantic trading.
🎵🎵I always feel like somebody's watching me.......🎵
Fucking clown.
https://www.theweek.co.uk/73897/dual-citizenship-can-i-get-an-eu-passport-before-brexit
I don't really know.
Psychologically it signals confidence and reassurance that everything will be fine. So, during the Brexit Wars and a pandemic it was a superbly effective piece of political semiotics.
But, if the creeping inkling of a suspicion begins to grow that everything isn't actually all right, it risks looking inane at best. Downright ludicrous at worst.
Thats why FOM was a bad idea. It was like joining a car swap club when you have a Roller and the rest have a Skoda
I remember about 2013 we had a chat on PB about this issue in general and there emerged the tale of the DM (I think) and its legal advice which was based on English law but got cut and pasted for the Scottish edition too together with the usual other Femail, home improvement, etc. stuff in the middle (as it indeed was from my own observation at the time). A chap got done for incest as a result - he'd followed the DM's legal advice but come unstuck (so to speak) as he was doing it in Scotland ...
To expand I'm a little intrigued that those for whom London works well struggle to see that it doesn't for many others living there and would work even less well for tens of millions living outside it.
It certainly didn't work well for Conservative electoral prospects yet the impression from the Cameron era was that the rest of the country should aspire to be 'more like London' or at least more like the gentrified posh bits of London (which wouldn't be easy without a privileged background).
https://twitter.com/Ankaman616/status/1411032341968035844
Honest.
There's an interesting piece on a private WhatsApp group from a Muslim who was involved in the whole Batley campaign. Briefly, he says that the sense by Muslims of being taken for granted is real, and paradoxically what saved the campaign was the revulsion over the thuggish behaviour by the Birmingham group - a lot of people felt they couldn't reward that. But it doesn't stop them feeling forgotten.
1 England 3.2 31.2%
2 Spain 3.3 30.3%
3 Italy 6 16.7%
4 Belgium 8.8 11.4%
5 Denmark 13 7.7%
6 Czechia 36 2.8%
7 Ukraine 50 2.0%
A magnificently tense encounter
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57700749
Sounds like it's not new jobs, though, just a few years reprieve.
It seems like Australia has decided to abandon their "zero covid" policy.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-02/covid-lockdown-vaccination-phases-national-cabinet/100262808
In 2019, according to UN data, 1.3 million people born in the UK lived in EU countries. Spain hosted the largest group, at 302,000, followed by Ireland, with 293,000. France was third with 177,000, Germany was fourth with 99,000 and Italy was fifth with 66,000.
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/the-facts/how-many-british-citizens-live-in-the-eu/
However you cut it, more than four times as many EU citizens live in the UK as UK citizens live in the EU.
‘🚨🚨 SHOCKING → Expert witness tells Congress American scientists are scared to investigate the Wuhan lab leak because China will label them "enemies of China" and their laboratory will be "blacklisted."
The fact that we're still giving taxpayer money to China is outrageous.’
https://twitter.com/stevescalise/status/1410037859399180289?s=21
Not everyone who has applied for settled status is actually UK resident. It's somewhere between 3m and 6m, and we won't know for sure until we see the census data next year.
My gut is that it's probably 4.5-5.25m EU citizens in the UK and probably 1.5m abroad. There's also the additional calculation about what to do with people with dual nationalities. I know several people who have taken EU citizenship since 2016 - they're not immigrants, they are Brits who now also have an additional passport.
A Russian big bang.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i52Y8j-yZk&t=10s
It's amazing how many people seem to catch these things on camera nowadays. Someone even caught the first stage of the Miami building collapse in the underground car park on camera, a few minutes before the main collapse.
That said, I would have Belgium a couple of points shorter, and lengthen Italy and Spain slightly, following the de Bruyne news.
In a joint statement released on Friday, the couple said they remained “close friends” and would continue supporting their two children, but wanted privacy and would not be commenting further.
There was the the 2-0 Bucharest win over Barcelona in 1986 but has there ever been a 1-0 or a 0-0 with all ten missed ?
Mrs Foxy isn't too bad, out with friends leaving me to the footy 🙂 Belgium the value IMO.
Covid is a nasty bug though. Even without mortality the complications are not to be ignored.