One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
People can 'have a choice' to engage with modern day slavery, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Especially when employers have 'bonded' the people they've shipped in putting them in debt to pay for their shipping transport, accomodation etc and then make them work off their debts.
You're in complete denial if you think modern day slavery doesn't exist and that free movement didn't facilitate it. And the reason all the complaints now are coming from employers and not people show who is suffering now the flow of modern day slavery has been brought to a halt.
Slavery is illegal.
I hear plenty of people complaining about not being able to find petrol or products in the shops.
Slavery is illegal.
Modern day slavery absolutely does exist.
If you think it doesn't, you need to educate yourself.
There have been plenty of cases of trafficked women having their passports taken and forced to work as prostitutes. Literal sex slaves. "you need to educate yourself" - FFS why do you post this self-satisfied guff?
Yes and that's bad.
There's also been plenty of cases of dozens of people being flown over, put into debt to do so, been put into squalid conditions and made to work for the person who flew them over and repay their debts.
What do you call that? Is it only slavery when it involves sex?
On topic, Stephen Bush of Statesman's email this morning - an interesting comment:
"The central reason why Patel's stock is not as high as it once was among Conservative activists is the perception that her department is failing: that she is unable to prevent more people coming here on boats in search of a better life, that we have de facto decriminalised most crimes other than murder and speeding, that the Metropolitan Police is poorly run, and so on.
Now, the wheel of politics has plenty of turns and it's possible that this time next year we're once again talking about how much activists and MPs love Priti Patel. But the concern among some MPs who believe - rightly in my view - that Patel was integral to their 2019 re-election is that the fall in the Home Secretary's stock among party activists is the first sign that the government's advantage as far as crime and security is concerned might once again be about to come under serious threat in the country as a whole."
Well, when the police seem more interested in policing Twitter than street gangs, that catching speeding motorists appears to be more of a priority than stopping protesters blocking the roads, and when police themselves turn out to have a lot of bad eggs in their ranks, it’s hardly surprising that confidence in the Home Secretary is low.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Free Movement was a government’s policy. Ending it was the result of a referendum of the people.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
EU labour was exploitive to the locals who were unable to compete against it...
On topic, Stephen Bush of Statesman's email this morning - an interesting comment:
"The central reason why Patel's stock is not as high as it once was among Conservative activists is the perception that her department is failing: that she is unable to prevent more people coming here on boats in search of a better life, that we have de facto decriminalised most crimes other than murder and speeding, that the Metropolitan Police is poorly run, and so on.
Now, the wheel of politics has plenty of turns and it's possible that this time next year we're once again talking about how much activists and MPs love Priti Patel. But the concern among some MPs who believe - rightly in my view - that Patel was integral to their 2019 re-election is that the fall in the Home Secretary's stock among party activists is the first sign that the government's advantage as far as crime and security is concerned might once again be about to come under serious threat in the country as a whole."
Well, when the police seem more interested in policing Twitter, that catching speeding motorists appears to be more of a priority than stopping protesters blocking the roads, and when police themselves turn out to have a lot of bad eggs in their ranks, it’s hardly surprising that confidence in the Home Secretary is low.
Elements of the Tory target demographic were always rather reluctant to give up the right to speed, prefereably when pished. I can remember the arguments over the introduction of the breathalyser, etc.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
I'm not for one second suggesting that all Polish and Romanian people were exploited. Some definitely were though.
Your son's girlfriend did she (or her family with her) come over on their own terms?
There were many companies that paid to ship people over like they were a commodity then threw people into squalid residential conditions and made people indentured servants to work for them to pay off their debts from being brought over. What do you call that?
The reason that the complaints now are from companies and not people is because it isn't people being harmed by the end of the movement, its the companies who've found themselves unable to ship people like commodities.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
People can 'have a choice' to engage with modern day slavery, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Especially when employers have 'bonded' the people they've shipped in putting them in debt to pay for their shipping transport, accomodation etc and then make them work off their debts.
You're in complete denial if you think modern day slavery doesn't exist and that free movement didn't facilitate it. And the reason all the complaints now are coming from employers and not people show who is suffering now the flow of modern day slavery has been brought to a halt.
Slavery is illegal.
I hear plenty of people complaining about not being able to find petrol or products in the shops.
Slavery is illegal.
Modern day slavery absolutely does exist.
If you think it doesn't, you need to educate yourself.
There have been plenty of cases of trafficked women having their passports taken and forced to work as prostitutes. Literal sex slaves. "you need to educate yourself" - FFS why do you post this self-satisfied guff?
Yes and that's bad.
There's also been plenty of cases of dozens of people being flown over, put into debt to do so, been put into squalid conditions and made to work for the person who flew them over and repay their debts.
What do you call that? Is it only slavery when it involves sex?
Ending free movement to prevent this kind of exploitation is like banning men from going outside to prevent sex attacks.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
People can 'have a choice' to engage with modern day slavery, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Especially when employers have 'bonded' the people they've shipped in putting them in debt to pay for their shipping transport, accomodation etc and then make them work off their debts.
You're in complete denial if you think modern day slavery doesn't exist and that free movement didn't facilitate it. And the reason all the complaints now are coming from employers and not people show who is suffering now the flow of modern day slavery has been brought to a halt.
Slavery is illegal.
I hear plenty of people complaining about not being able to find petrol or products in the shops.
Slavery is illegal.
Modern day slavery absolutely does exist.
If you think it doesn't, you need to educate yourself.
There have been plenty of cases of trafficked women having their passports taken and forced to work as prostitutes. Literal sex slaves. "you need to educate yourself" - FFS why do you post this self-satisfied guff?
Yes and that's bad.
There's also been plenty of cases of dozens of people being flown over, put into debt to do so, been put into squalid conditions and made to work for the person who flew them over and repay their debts.
What do you call that? Is it only slavery when it involves sex?
In the building trade this has thankfully died back. But there were some pretty ugly cases where they recruited people with no English language skills, shipped them over, and treated them very, very badly.
There was one case where a seriously injured man was dumped in the countryside outside London, that I recall. Left to die - but was found in time by someone out for a walk...
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
EU labour was exploitive to the locals who were unable to compete against it...
They were unable to compete by working for the minimum wage?
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Its neither a government intervention, nor a form of taxation.
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
On topic, Stephen Bush of Statesman's email this morning - an interesting comment:
"The central reason why Patel's stock is not as high as it once was among Conservative activists is the perception that her department is failing: that she is unable to prevent more people coming here on boats in search of a better life, that we have de facto decriminalised most crimes other than murder and speeding, that the Metropolitan Police is poorly run, and so on.
Now, the wheel of politics has plenty of turns and it's possible that this time next year we're once again talking about how much activists and MPs love Priti Patel. But the concern among some MPs who believe - rightly in my view - that Patel was integral to their 2019 re-election is that the fall in the Home Secretary's stock among party activists is the first sign that the government's advantage as far as crime and security is concerned might once again be about to come under serious threat in the country as a whole."
Well, when the police seem more interested in policing Twitter, that catching speeding motorists appears to be more of a priority than stopping protesters blocking the roads, and when police themselves turn out to have a lot of bad eggs in their ranks, it’s hardly surprising that confidence in the Home Secretary is low.
Elements of the Tory target demographic were always rather reluctant to give up the right to speed, prefereably when pished. I can remember the arguments over the introduction of the breathalyser, etc.
If you want to find one point in recent history, where the general public started to lose faith in the police, the introduction of speed cameras is probably it.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
People can 'have a choice' to engage with modern day slavery, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Especially when employers have 'bonded' the people they've shipped in putting them in debt to pay for their shipping transport, accomodation etc and then make them work off their debts.
You're in complete denial if you think modern day slavery doesn't exist and that free movement didn't facilitate it. And the reason all the complaints now are coming from employers and not people show who is suffering now the flow of modern day slavery has been brought to a halt.
Slavery is illegal.
I hear plenty of people complaining about not being able to find petrol or products in the shops.
Slavery is illegal.
Modern day slavery absolutely does exist.
If you think it doesn't, you need to educate yourself.
There have been plenty of cases of trafficked women having their passports taken and forced to work as prostitutes. Literal sex slaves. "you need to educate yourself" - FFS why do you post this self-satisfied guff?
Yes and that's bad.
There's also been plenty of cases of dozens of people being flown over, put into debt to do so, been put into squalid conditions and made to work for the person who flew them over and repay their debts.
What do you call that? Is it only slavery when it involves sex?
In the building trade this has thankfully died back. But there were some pretty ugly cases where they recruited people with no English language skills, shipped them over, and treated them very, very badly.
There was one case where a seriously injured man was dumped in the countryside outside London, that I recall. Left to die - but was found in time by someone out for a walk...
Indeed.
For those who don't think this form of exploitation was a form of modern day slavery, all I can say is there are none so blind as those who do not wish to see. 🙈
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Free Movement was a government’s policy. Ending it was the result of a referendum of the people.
I didn't say it didn't have a mandate. I said it is a form of government intervention that is equivalent to taxation on British people. It is odd that Brexiteers can't acknowledge that.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
EU labour was exploitive to the locals who were unable to compete against it...
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
EU labour was exploitive to the locals who were unable to compete against it...
Well, unwilling anyway...
Nope - let me refer you back to my story from 1pm or so on the day of the Referendum.
Friend phones on her break to say the entire council estate in Leyland were voting (many who hadn't do so before) because Lidl had opened a local store and all the staff were eastern Europeans and not locals.
Everyone knew locals who had applied but none got as far as interviews.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Its neither a government intervention, nor a form of taxation.
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
Taxation is a government intervention that reduces economic welfare by reducing the choice set available to consumers given their budget constraint. Thanks to Brexit, I have a smaller range of choices available to me. Ergo I have been taxed.
On topic, Stephen Bush of Statesman's email this morning - an interesting comment:
"The central reason why Patel's stock is not as high as it once was among Conservative activists is the perception that her department is failing: that she is unable to prevent more people coming here on boats in search of a better life, that we have de facto decriminalised most crimes other than murder and speeding, that the Metropolitan Police is poorly run, and so on.
Now, the wheel of politics has plenty of turns and it's possible that this time next year we're once again talking about how much activists and MPs love Priti Patel. But the concern among some MPs who believe - rightly in my view - that Patel was integral to their 2019 re-election is that the fall in the Home Secretary's stock among party activists is the first sign that the government's advantage as far as crime and security is concerned might once again be about to come under serious threat in the country as a whole."
Well, when the police seem more interested in policing Twitter, that catching speeding motorists appears to be more of a priority than stopping protesters blocking the roads, and when police themselves turn out to have a lot of bad eggs in their ranks, it’s hardly surprising that confidence in the Home Secretary is low.
Elements of the Tory target demographic were always rather reluctant to give up the right to speed, prefereably when pished. I can remember the arguments over the introduction of the breathalyser, etc.
If you want to find one point in recent history, where the general public started to lose faith in the police, the introduction of speed cameras is probably it.
I would argue that the police in Oxford did a bang up job in convincing everyone who did PPE at Oxford in the 80s and 90s that they were institutionally corrupt.
Good thing those students didn't become influential, eh?
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
Beaker is no mug
Who is beaker?
The Prime Minister. He brought the Muppet Show into it, so a big flapping gob speaking unintelligible gibberish with mad hair is a great description of him.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
EU labour was exploitive to the locals who were unable to compete against it...
Well, unwilling anyway...
Nope - let me refer you back to my story from 1pm or so on the day of the Referendum.
Friend phones on her break to say the entire council estate in Leyland were voting (many who hadn't do so before) because Lidl had opened a local store and all the staff were eastern Europeans and not locals.
Everyone knew locals who had applied but none got as far as interviews.
Good effort in canvassing the entire estate. That's what I call thorough research.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
We do not have a free market solution. A free market would allow employers to recruit from wherever they wanted and pay whatever they wanted. We have a regulated market and a disorganised government that has failed to plan for entirely predictable and predicted challenges scrabbling around for a narrative that might buy them a bit of time.
A government that truly believed in a high wage economy in which employees enjoyed uniformly top class working conditions would not have the trade union laws this one does.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
Beaker is no mug
Who is beaker?
Ask RP its one of his quaint nicknames i believe
It used to be Danny Alexander in the Coalition years, but it may be another target now.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Its neither a government intervention, nor a form of taxation.
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
Taxation is a government intervention that reduces economic welfare by reducing the choice set available to consumers given their budget constraint. Thanks to Brexit, I have a smaller range of choices available to me. Ergo I have been taxed.
That's like saying being unable to drive at 70mph next to a school is taxation.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
EU labour was exploitive to the locals who were unable to compete against it...
Well, unwilling anyway...
Nope - let me refer you back to my story from 1pm or so on the day of the Referendum.
Friend phones on her break to say the entire council estate in Leyland were voting (many who hadn't do so before) because Lidl had opened a local store and all the staff were eastern Europeans and not locals.
Everyone knew locals who had applied but none got as far as interviews.
Good effort in canvassing the entire estate. That's what I call thorough research.
Nope she in charge of the polling station (as I said on her break and it was why she knew many hadn't voted because she was telling them what they needed to do )..
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
People can 'have a choice' to engage with modern day slavery, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Especially when employers have 'bonded' the people they've shipped in putting them in debt to pay for their shipping transport, accomodation etc and then make them work off their debts.
You're in complete denial if you think modern day slavery doesn't exist and that free movement didn't facilitate it. And the reason all the complaints now are coming from employers and not people show who is suffering now the flow of modern day slavery has been brought to a halt.
Slavery is illegal.
I hear plenty of people complaining about not being able to find petrol or products in the shops.
Slavery is illegal.
Modern day slavery absolutely does exist.
If you think it doesn't, you need to educate yourself.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
EU labour was exploitive to the locals who were unable to compete against it...
They were unable to compete by working for the minimum wage?
Back before people were exploited by FOM my supermarket assistant colleagues and I were all on £2.23 an hour. Now the equivalent job with exploitative FOM labour forcing down wages is on £8.91 an hour - more than double what it should be with inflation.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
We do not have a free market solution. A free market would allow employers to recruit from wherever they wanted and pay whatever they wanted. We have a regulated market and a disorganised government that has failed to plan for entirely predictable and predicted challenges scrabbling around for a narrative that might buy them a bit of time.
A government that truly believed in a high wage economy in which employees enjoyed uniformly top class working conditions would not have the trade union laws this one does.
Trade unions don't sustainably boost working conditions, markets do.
I was back in Rochdale yesterday managing the removers as my parents are moving up here (after 41 years in the same house). Whilst I've seen how busy the town is getting over the years, it really hit home yesterday with absurd traffic levels.
Quite simply there are too many cars, too many houses, too many people. For 20 years the council have allowed houses to be built and built and built along the Rochdale > Littleborough road to the point where its now ludicrously busy.
New houses means you need new roads. New schools. New infrastructure. But there has been none of that. Just people piled on top of people so that you can barely move. Yes I know my perspective has shifted having moved to the country. But at which point do councils have a requirement to actually stop and plan rather than just let developments go up everywhere?
I would say that the problems are largely a product of the last 10 years and could be summarised as:
1) local plans take years to develop and the law that governs it is byzantine and absurd. 2) Sites keep coming through being allowed despite not being in plans because of delays in making plans. 3) little regional co-ordination or direction in relation to plans and growth 4) There has been a government policy of growth to stimulate the economy over everything else resulting in the situation you describe 5) Inherent scepticism about any type of centralised funding for infrastructure on the part of the treasury (2010-2019) 6) Car ownership was allowed to increase substantially post 2010.
If Con Home represents the Tory Party membership a top 4 which includes Truss Frost and Rees Mogg tells you everything you need to know about to-day's Tory Party. At least as creepy as Momentum driven Labour
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
I'm not for one second suggesting that all Polish and Romanian people were exploited. Some definitely were though.
Your son's girlfriend did she (or her family with her) come over on their own terms?
There were many companies that paid to ship people over like they were a commodity then threw people into squalid residential conditions and made people indentured servants to work for them to pay off their debts from being brought over. What do you call that?
The reason that the complaints now are from companies and not people is because it isn't people being harmed by the end of the movement, its the companies who've found themselves unable to ship people like commodities.
Re the 2nd to last para do you have evidence of that PT? Again doesn't sound like EU immigration but illegal immigration to me. An EU person did not have to put up with that.
Re the last para I think that is back to front. Yes companies are complaining, but it is not because they are 'unable to ship people like commodities' it is because the people aren't commodities, but have free will and were happy to come before and now don't want to or can't, so don't. That is why the companies are complaining. They have lost their productive labour.
These EU labours are not slaves, they can work anywhere in the EU.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
People can 'have a choice' to engage with modern day slavery, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Especially when employers have 'bonded' the people they've shipped in putting them in debt to pay for their shipping transport, accomodation etc and then make them work off their debts.
You're in complete denial if you think modern day slavery doesn't exist and that free movement didn't facilitate it. And the reason all the complaints now are coming from employers and not people show who is suffering now the flow of modern day slavery has been brought to a halt.
Slavery is illegal.
I hear plenty of people complaining about not being able to find petrol or products in the shops.
Slavery is illegal.
Modern day slavery absolutely does exist.
If you think it doesn't, you need to educate yourself.
There have been plenty of cases of trafficked women having their passports taken and forced to work as prostitutes. Literal sex slaves. "you need to educate yourself" - FFS why do you post this self-satisfied guff?
Yes and that's bad.
There's also been plenty of cases of dozens of people being flown over, put into debt to do so, been put into squalid conditions and made to work for the person who flew them over and repay their debts.
What do you call that? Is it only slavery when it involves sex?
In the building trade this has thankfully died back. But there were some pretty ugly cases where they recruited people with no English language skills, shipped them over, and treated them very, very badly.
There was one case where a seriously injured man was dumped in the countryside outside London, that I recall. Left to die - but was found in time by someone out for a walk...
Indeed.
For those who don't think this form of exploitation was a form of modern day slavery, all I can say is there are none so blind as those who do not wish to see. 🙈
I think you're confusing EU free movement with people trafficking from places like the far East. I spoke to a lot of Poles when the first wave of recent Polish immigration took place. They seemed to regard it as something akin to an 18-30's holiday - lots of sex and drinking in crap bars.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
We do not have a free market solution. A free market would allow employers to recruit from wherever they wanted and pay whatever they wanted. We have a regulated market and a disorganised government that has failed to plan for entirely predictable and predicted challenges scrabbling around for a narrative that might buy them a bit of time.
A government that truly believed in a high wage economy in which employees enjoyed uniformly top class working conditions would not have the trade union laws this one does.
Trade unions don't sustainably boost working conditions, markets do.
Actually trade unions are associated with higher wages, known as the union wage premium. It's a well documented fact in labour economics.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
People can 'have a choice' to engage with modern day slavery, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do.
Especially when employers have 'bonded' the people they've shipped in putting them in debt to pay for their shipping transport, accomodation etc and then make them work off their debts.
You're in complete denial if you think modern day slavery doesn't exist and that free movement didn't facilitate it. And the reason all the complaints now are coming from employers and not people show who is suffering now the flow of modern day slavery has been brought to a halt.
Slavery is illegal.
I hear plenty of people complaining about not being able to find petrol or products in the shops.
Slavery is illegal.
Modern day slavery absolutely does exist.
If you think it doesn't, you need to educate yourself.
There have been plenty of cases of trafficked women having their passports taken and forced to work as prostitutes. Literal sex slaves. "you need to educate yourself" - FFS why do you post this self-satisfied guff?
Yes and that's bad.
There's also been plenty of cases of dozens of people being flown over, put into debt to do so, been put into squalid conditions and made to work for the person who flew them over and repay their debts.
What do you call that? Is it only slavery when it involves sex?
Ending free movement to prevent this kind of exploitation is like banning men from going outside to prevent sex attacks.
Yup. Philip must be running out of arguments if he's resorting to this kind of conflation.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Does rather remind me of "nothing done in X months" type of complaints, when the minimal process actually takes X+3 months. Often happens.
The PM says that they asked the hauliers to give them the names of the drivers they wanted visas for and the government would sort it. They provided 127. So far.
So where is the 27 from?
Are we in journos can't count territory? Or just reporting of very early numbers?
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
I'm not for one second suggesting that all Polish and Romanian people were exploited. Some definitely were though.
Your son's girlfriend did she (or her family with her) come over on their own terms?
There were many companies that paid to ship people over like they were a commodity then threw people into squalid residential conditions and made people indentured servants to work for them to pay off their debts from being brought over. What do you call that?
The reason that the complaints now are from companies and not people is because it isn't people being harmed by the end of the movement, its the companies who've found themselves unable to ship people like commodities.
Re the 2nd to last para do you have evidence of that PT? Again doesn't sound like EU immigration but illegal immigration to me. An EU person did not have to put up with that.
Re the last para I think that is back to front. Yes companies are complaining, but it is not because they are 'unable to ship people like commodities' it is because the people aren't commodities, but have free will and were happy to come before and now don't want to or can't, so don't. That is why the companies are complaining. They have lost their productive labour.
These EU labours are not slaves, they can work anywhere in the EU.
Yes there's plenty of evidence of EU migrants being shipped over by employers and thrown to live in squalid, shitty conditions. I don't have any links right now I can give you. And yes some people voluntarily did it too.
Again not all migration was like that, not by any means, but at the bottom end it absolutely was more common than it should be.
Moving forwards, if employers want to hire people they need to ensure they're offering good pay and good conditions. That's not a bad thing.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Does rather remind me of "nothing done in X months" type of complaints, when the minimal process actually takes X+3 months. Often happens.
The PM says that they asked the hauliers to give them the names of the drivers they wanted visas for and the government would sort it. They provided 127. So far.
So where is the 27 from?
Are we in journos can't count territory? Or just reporting of very early numbers?
5 live this morning said 127
The 27 comes from the front page of today's Times.
The top of those rankings is a real horror show. Apart from Ben Wallace, who I have never heard of, Nadhim Zahawi is the first in the list who is not a genuine fruitcake or appalling second rate hack. When did the politicians in this country become so poor quality?
Ben Wallace is the Defence secretary, who appears to be competent.
Yes I can't comment on him as I have never heard of him.
TBF I’m not sure I’d want the Defence Secretary on the front pages the whole time!
Yes maybe it's one of those jobs where it's a mark of success if you're not a household name.
Worth keeping an eye on Ben Wallace in terms of the leadership. This is the sort of thing that impresses party members (from wiki):
Wallace attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, before he was commissioned in 1991 into the Scots Guards.[4] From 1991 to 1998, he served in Germany, Cyprus, Belize, and Northern Ireland, rising to the rank of captain. During his time in Northern Ireland, he was mentioned in dispatches in 1992 for an incident in which the patrol he was commanding captured an entire IRA active service unit attempting to carry out a bomb attack against British troops.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
We do not have a free market solution. A free market would allow employers to recruit from wherever they wanted and pay whatever they wanted. We have a regulated market and a disorganised government that has failed to plan for entirely predictable and predicted challenges scrabbling around for a narrative that might buy them a bit of time.
A government that truly believed in a high wage economy in which employees enjoyed uniformly top class working conditions would not have the trade union laws this one does.
Trade unions don't sustainably boost working conditions, markets do.
Actually trade unions are associated with higher wages, known as the union wage premium. It's a well documented fact in labour economics.
And if wages go above the market equilibrium it ends up distorting the market and making companies unproductive, resulting in unemployment that can't be resolved by competition bringing wages back down. It also results in companies being unable to compete globally.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
Yes. FOM provides a labour pool when you can't attract local labour. The pay and conditions are not a direct result of FOM - we can still pay sane wages and not force 6 in a room conditions.
"Ah but an endless labour pool allows people to be exploited". Yes and no - a restricted labour pool also offers the same opportunity of the legislative and societal framework allows it to be so. Have workers of whatever origin unionised and protected by working time regulations and HSE laws and the exploitation doesn't have to be there. It isn't elsewhere in western Europe with FOM.
Yes the practices that (ultra free marketeer) PT is attacking are simply the results of unfettered free market capitalism. My first job, back in the day when Tories decried the minimum wage as a tax on jobs and an attack on freedom, paid £1.50 an hour. Not a Pole or a Romanian in sight. Just good old fashioned British exploitative employers. Free market capitalism at work.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
Yes. FOM provides a labour pool when you can't attract local labour. The pay and conditions are not a direct result of FOM - we can still pay sane wages and not force 6 in a room conditions.
"Ah but an endless labour pool allows people to be exploited". Yes and no - a restricted labour pool also offers the same opportunity of the legislative and societal framework allows it to be so. Have workers of whatever origin unionised and protected by working time regulations and HSE laws and the exploitation doesn't have to be there. It isn't elsewhere in western Europe with FOM.
Yes the practices that (ultra free marketeer) PT is attacking are simply the results of unfettered free market capitalism. My first job, back in the day when Tories decried the minimum wage as a tax on jobs and an attack on freedom, paid £1.50 an hour. Not a Pole or a Romanian in sight. Just good old fashioned British exploitative employers. Free market capitalism at work.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Its neither a government intervention, nor a form of taxation.
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
Taxation is a government intervention that reduces economic welfare by reducing the choice set available to consumers given their budget constraint. Thanks to Brexit, I have a smaller range of choices available to me. Ergo I have been taxed.
That's like saying being unable to drive at 70mph next to a school is taxation.
Laws are not taxation.
Actually your example is a kind of taxation. If you think about taxes and non-tax restrictions on freedom from first principles from a consumer choice point of view they are functionally equivalent, or at least very similar. In your example the restriction or tax on drivers can be motivated by externality arguments - by driving at 70mph I create the risk of killing a child outside the school, a risk I may inadequately factor into my decision making from the POV of the child or its parents. The speed limit is an effective and proportionate response that probably increases overall social welfare by reducing the incidence of dead kids. The question is whether ending FoM, and withdrawing from the EU SM, is a welfare-increasing, proportionate and well targeted response to the problems of labour exploitation that you mention. Since you are resorting to arguments like FoM is the same as slavery, I would deduce that the answer to that question is no.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Does rather remind me of "nothing done in X months" type of complaints, when the minimal process actually takes X+3 months. Often happens.
The PM says that they asked the hauliers to give them the names of the drivers they wanted visas for and the government would sort it. They provided 127. So far.
So where is the 27 from?
Are we in journos can't count territory? Or just reporting of very early numbers?
5 live this morning said 127
The 27 comes from the front page of today's Times.
Which is wrong according to the PM. But he might by lying, or miss-informed...
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Its neither a government intervention, nor a form of taxation.
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
Taxation is a government intervention that reduces economic welfare by reducing the choice set available to consumers given their budget constraint. Thanks to Brexit, I have a smaller range of choices available to me. Ergo I have been taxed.
That's like saying being unable to drive at 70mph next to a school is taxation.
Laws are not taxation.
Actually your example is a kind of taxation. If you think about taxes and non-tax restrictions on freedom from first principles from a consumer choice point of view they are functionally equivalent, or at least very similar. In your example the restriction or tax on drivers can be motivated by externality arguments - by driving at 70mph I create the risk of killing a child outside the school, a risk I may inadequately factor into my decision making from the POV of the child or its parents. The speed limit is an effective and proportionate response that probably increases overall social welfare by reducing the incidence of dead kids. The question is whether ending FoM, and withdrawing from the EU SM, is a welfare-increasing, proportionate and well targeted response to the problems of labour exploitation that you mention. Since you are resorting to arguments like FoM is the same as slavery, I would deduce that the answer to that question is no.
I've always seen FoM as allowing businesses to get all the benefits but without any of the costs. The Left usually whinge about the Right wanting to privatise the profit and nationalise the losses. That's pretty much what FoM was.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
Yes. FOM provides a labour pool when you can't attract local labour. The pay and conditions are not a direct result of FOM - we can still pay sane wages and not force 6 in a room conditions.
"Ah but an endless labour pool allows people to be exploited". Yes and no - a restricted labour pool also offers the same opportunity of the legislative and societal framework allows it to be so. Have workers of whatever origin unionised and protected by working time regulations and HSE laws and the exploitation doesn't have to be there. It isn't elsewhere in western Europe with FOM.
Yes the practices that (ultra free marketeer) PT is attacking are simply the results of unfettered free market capitalism. My first job, back in the day when Tories decried the minimum wage as a tax on jobs and an attack on freedom, paid £1.50 an hour. Not a Pole or a Romanian in sight. Just good old fashioned British exploitative employers. Free market capitalism at work.
My first job paid £3.50 a week !!!!
Did you get paid in farthings or groats?
Actually in Scottish pound notes and it was paid monthly
At the time (1961) the average wage was £14 per week (£728) pa and remember my father coming home having been promoted to £1,000 pa
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
Yes. FOM provides a labour pool when you can't attract local labour. The pay and conditions are not a direct result of FOM - we can still pay sane wages and not force 6 in a room conditions.
"Ah but an endless labour pool allows people to be exploited". Yes and no - a restricted labour pool also offers the same opportunity of the legislative and societal framework allows it to be so. Have workers of whatever origin unionised and protected by working time regulations and HSE laws and the exploitation doesn't have to be there. It isn't elsewhere in western Europe with FOM.
Yes the practices that (ultra free marketeer) PT is attacking are simply the results of unfettered free market capitalism. My first job, back in the day when Tories decried the minimum wage as a tax on jobs and an attack on freedom, paid £1.50 an hour. Not a Pole or a Romanian in sight. Just good old fashioned British exploitative employers. Free market capitalism at work.
My first job paid £3.50 a week !!!!
We are Monty Python's Yorkshiremen and I claim my thruppence ha'penny.
The top of those rankings is a real horror show. Apart from Ben Wallace, who I have never heard of, Nadhim Zahawi is the first in the list who is not a genuine fruitcake or appalling second rate hack. When did the politicians in this country become so poor quality?
Ben Wallace is the Defence secretary, who appears to be competent.
Yes I can't comment on him as I have never heard of him.
TBF I’m not sure I’d want the Defence Secretary on the front pages the whole time!
Yes maybe it's one of those jobs where it's a mark of success if you're not a household name.
Worth keeping an eye on Ben Wallace in terms of the leadership. This is the sort of thing that impresses party members (from wiki):
Wallace attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, before he was commissioned in 1991 into the Scots Guards.[4] From 1991 to 1998, he served in Germany, Cyprus, Belize, and Northern Ireland, rising to the rank of captain. During his time in Northern Ireland, he was mentioned in dispatches in 1992 for an incident in which the patrol he was commanding captured an entire IRA active service unit attempting to carry out a bomb attack against British troops.
Wallace is plausible as a "Conservatives have come down off the sugar rush" candidate.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
I'm not for one second suggesting that all Polish and Romanian people were exploited. Some definitely were though.
Your son's girlfriend did she (or her family with her) come over on their own terms?
There were many companies that paid to ship people over like they were a commodity then threw people into squalid residential conditions and made people indentured servants to work for them to pay off their debts from being brought over. What do you call that?
The reason that the complaints now are from companies and not people is because it isn't people being harmed by the end of the movement, its the companies who've found themselves unable to ship people like commodities.
My son's girlfriend is doing a Ph.D at Cambridge (as is my son) so not typical I grant you. However it is another area where Brexit has buggered up our and their lives nicely.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
Beaker is no mug
Who is beaker?
The Prime Minister. He brought the Muppet Show into it, so a big flapping gob speaking unintelligible gibberish with mad hair is a great description of him.
It's just confusing. People used to call Ed Miliband beaker, which was itself confusing at a time when Danny Alexander was in government.
I was back in Rochdale yesterday managing the removers as my parents are moving up here (after 41 years in the same house). Whilst I've seen how busy the town is getting over the years, it really hit home yesterday with absurd traffic levels.
Quite simply there are too many cars, too many houses, too many people. For 20 years the council have allowed houses to be built and built and built along the Rochdale > Littleborough road to the point where its now ludicrously busy.
New houses means you need new roads. New schools. New infrastructure. But there has been none of that. Just people piled on top of people so that you can barely move. Yes I know my perspective has shifted having moved to the country. But at which point do councils have a requirement to actually stop and plan rather than just let developments go up everywhere?
This is one of the problems. I've posted before about the likelihood of houses being built on the fields behind our house. I'm (really*) not against that in principle, but it does require upgrading facilities. It needs a new road in from the bypass. It needs at least a local shop or two. It needs a school or drastic expansion of the nearest school. The town would benefit from management of the floodplain (which only floods 1-2 times per year) to put in some nice parkland/playing fields (the town lacks this, just a few small play parks) and some good cycling/walking infrastructure to get from the new houses to the town centre in the most direct way. Those - even some of those - could make the development a net plus for us. The proposal is however houses only.
*I'll be a bit sad about it. There's a barn owl will lose its home/hunting ground, the deer will no longer wander through in the early morning, the hares won't be running across the field... But we do need houses and the flood plain means that the houses won't be that close and won't really impact on us in terms of privacy etc. It will be a less nice view, but I'd trade that if it led to new amenities for the town.
The 27 is for fuel tanker drivers , the 127 is for normal HGV drivers .
The policy was delusional as unless you give visas for a much longer period of time why would a driver take a job for just a few months and then be told to bugger off.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Its neither a government intervention, nor a form of taxation.
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
Taxation is a government intervention that reduces economic welfare by reducing the choice set available to consumers given their budget constraint. Thanks to Brexit, I have a smaller range of choices available to me. Ergo I have been taxed.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
Yes. FOM provides a labour pool when you can't attract local labour. The pay and conditions are not a direct result of FOM - we can still pay sane wages and not force 6 in a room conditions.
"Ah but an endless labour pool allows people to be exploited". Yes and no - a restricted labour pool also offers the same opportunity of the legislative and societal framework allows it to be so. Have workers of whatever origin unionised and protected by working time regulations and HSE laws and the exploitation doesn't have to be there. It isn't elsewhere in western Europe with FOM.
Yes the practices that (ultra free marketeer) PT is attacking are simply the results of unfettered free market capitalism. My first job, back in the day when Tories decried the minimum wage as a tax on jobs and an attack on freedom, paid £1.50 an hour. Not a Pole or a Romanian in sight. Just good old fashioned British exploitative employers. Free market capitalism at work.
My first job paid £3.50 a week !!!!
Did you get paid in farthings or groats?
Actually in Scottish pound notes and it was paid monthly
...."of just exactly forty pounds!" This last he rapped out with a sidelong glance over his shoulder; and the next moment added, almost with a scream, "Scots!"
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Its neither a government intervention, nor a form of taxation.
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
Taxation is a government intervention that reduces economic welfare by reducing the choice set available to consumers given their budget constraint. Thanks to Brexit, I have a smaller range of choices available to me. Ergo I have been taxed.
That's like saying being unable to drive at 70mph next to a school is taxation.
Laws are not taxation.
Actually your example is a kind of taxation. If you think about taxes and non-tax restrictions on freedom from first principles from a consumer choice point of view they are functionally equivalent, or at least very similar. In your example the restriction or tax on drivers can be motivated by externality arguments - by driving at 70mph I create the risk of killing a child outside the school, a risk I may inadequately factor into my decision making from the POV of the child or its parents. The speed limit is an effective and proportionate response that probably increases overall social welfare by reducing the incidence of dead kids. The question is whether ending FoM, and withdrawing from the EU SM, is a welfare-increasing, proportionate and well targeted response to the problems of labour exploitation that you mention. Since you are resorting to arguments like FoM is the same as slavery, I would deduce that the answer to that question is no.
I've always seen FoM as allowing businesses to get all the benefits but without any of the costs. The Left usually whinge about the Right wanting to privatise the profit and nationalise the losses. That's pretty much what FoM was.
People from Bulgaria were happy to live 6 to a room to earn £8.70 an hour when locally their earnt £2...
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Its neither a government intervention, nor a form of taxation.
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
Taxation is a government intervention that reduces economic welfare by reducing the choice set available to consumers given their budget constraint. Thanks to Brexit, I have a smaller range of choices available to me. Ergo I have been taxed.
All oaks are trees, therefore all trees are oaks.
A good point. But I think the argument that taxes and non-tax restrictions are equivalent from a consumer choice point of view is a reasonable one. Eg non tariff barriers are sometimes converted to tariff equivalents.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
Giving people the right to live, work and study in 30 European countries is in no conceivable way comparable to slavery.
Shipping people in so that 12 working adults live in a 3 bedroom home, in order to pay them a pittance because they're desperate and evade having to offer good terms and conditions is the same mindset and is comparable though.
Shipping in implies those who came had no choice. They did. Slaves didn't. As a country, we chose to allow 12 adults to live in three bedroom houses and to make it as hard as possible for employees to organise collectively in order to secure good wages and working conditions. That had nothing to do with freedom of movement.
Yes. FOM provides a labour pool when you can't attract local labour. The pay and conditions are not a direct result of FOM - we can still pay sane wages and not force 6 in a room conditions.
"Ah but an endless labour pool allows people to be exploited". Yes and no - a restricted labour pool also offers the same opportunity of the legislative and societal framework allows it to be so. Have workers of whatever origin unionised and protected by working time regulations and HSE laws and the exploitation doesn't have to be there. It isn't elsewhere in western Europe with FOM.
Yes the practices that (ultra free marketeer) PT is attacking are simply the results of unfettered free market capitalism. My first job, back in the day when Tories decried the minimum wage as a tax on jobs and an attack on freedom, paid £1.50 an hour. Not a Pole or a Romanian in sight. Just good old fashioned British exploitative employers. Free market capitalism at work.
My first job paid £3.50 a week !!!!
Did you get paid in farthings or groats?
Actually in Scottish pound notes and it was paid monthly
...."of just exactly forty pounds!" This last he rapped out with a sidelong glance over his shoulder; and the next moment added, almost with a scream, "Scots!"
"O, think again, sir! Pounds sterling, I believe!" "That's what I said," returned my uncle: "pounds sterling!."
How come the Magnificent Muscly Man is so low in these ratings? Is he not loved by his own?
Yes, I thought the same. We're always told, with some justification, that Boris's lovable rogue persona tickles the fancy of vast swathes of the country. And yet the most ardent Tories in this poll seem not to be as enamoured as the voters. I can only guess that the Tories polled are skewed to the fiscally dry, traditional values branch of the party.
They must have no sense of humour. I mean, how can anybody resist this sort of thing? -
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Its neither a government intervention, nor a form of taxation.
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
Taxation is a government intervention that reduces economic welfare by reducing the choice set available to consumers given their budget constraint. Thanks to Brexit, I have a smaller range of choices available to me. Ergo I have been taxed.
That's like saying being unable to drive at 70mph next to a school is taxation.
Laws are not taxation.
Actually your example is a kind of taxation. If you think about taxes and non-tax restrictions on freedom from first principles from a consumer choice point of view they are functionally equivalent, or at least very similar. In your example the restriction or tax on drivers can be motivated by externality arguments - by driving at 70mph I create the risk of killing a child outside the school, a risk I may inadequately factor into my decision making from the POV of the child or its parents. The speed limit is an effective and proportionate response that probably increases overall social welfare by reducing the incidence of dead kids. The question is whether ending FoM, and withdrawing from the EU SM, is a welfare-increasing, proportionate and well targeted response to the problems of labour exploitation that you mention. Since you are resorting to arguments like FoM is the same as slavery, I would deduce that the answer to that question is no.
I've always seen FoM as allowing businesses to get all the benefits but without any of the costs. The Left usually whinge about the Right wanting to privatise the profit and nationalise the losses. That's pretty much what FoM was.
People from Bulgaria were happy to live 6 to a room to earn £8.70 an hour when locally their earnt £2...
And in many cases, their employer was happy to rent the room for £1k a month, and charge the six employees £100 a week each in rent.
The 27 is for fuel tanker drivers , the 127 is for normal HGV drivers .
The policy was delusional as unless you give visas for a much longer period of time why would a driver take a job for just a few months and then be told to bugger off.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Who would have thought Brexit and the associated rhetoric would put off people coming to the UK.
The problem for the government is that they have both caved into pressure to make the points-based migration system offer visas to people we need, and have made it so appallingly unattractive that nobody is interested.
The clear aim of the new migration system is not to allow migration. Hence all the comments over the last few days about the need to transition the economy. But rhetoric doesn't put fuel in petrol tanks or turkeys on the Christmas table, so better use the new migration system.
The problem is that by making it 5,000 only and fuck off at Christmas, we are being shunned. Saying "we need a painful transition, suck it up for Britain" would be one thing. But instead they panicked, tried to open the door and nobody is coming. Which makes it their fault. Had they toed the line and said no, they could have tried to blame industry. Now they can't as they have accepted that people are needed.
No wonder he quoted the Muppet Show. They really are.
Who's that a problem for?
Its a problem for Remoaners who wanted freedom of movement restored. Its a problem for employers who wanted a return to people being shipped like a commodity in a 21st century triangular trade.
For those who want employers to improve both pay and conditions for their employees - and conditions are reportedly just as critical as pay - this is not a problem.
The 'door' to bringing people in as a solution has been opened and behind that door was a goat not a car. Time for those who were calling for movement as the solution to switch.
Deal with pay and conditions. Quit whining.
EU freedom of movement = the Atlantic slave trade. Well, it's a view, as they say.
Treating people as a commodity and shipping them around for minimum wage is a modern day comparable mindset, yes.
They tend to ship themselves, though. As someone said, the only thing worse for poor countries than being exploited, is not being exploited. And it doesn't look like minimum wage when you turn it into zlotys.
Yes getting a dozen plus people in a tiny shitty flat in order to all work for minimum wage were willingly shipped.
But employers were facilitating the shipping. There were companies who were not even bothering to look in this country for staff as it was cheaper and easier to fly in staff from abroad and given them shitty beds in crowded flats and they had to work in conditions not exactly far from modern day slavery.
That's why now that such migration has been halted the largest squealing is from employers who can't get away with shipping people like commodities instead of from people themselves.
Is that really an accurate description of EU labour coming over to the UK? Sounds more like a description of illegal immigrants being exploited.
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
I'm not for one second suggesting that all Polish and Romanian people were exploited. Some definitely were though.
Your son's girlfriend did she (or her family with her) come over on their own terms?
There were many companies that paid to ship people over like they were a commodity then threw people into squalid residential conditions and made people indentured servants to work for them to pay off their debts from being brought over. What do you call that?
The reason that the complaints now are from companies and not people is because it isn't people being harmed by the end of the movement, its the companies who've found themselves unable to ship people like commodities.
My son's girlfriend is doing a Ph.D at Cambridge (as is my son) so not typical I grant you. However it is another area where Brexit has buggered up our and their lives nicely.
Fucking over people doing PhDs at Cambridge is probably viewed as part of the Brexit dividend though, sticking it to the liberal metropolitan elite innit.
I was back in Rochdale yesterday managing the removers as my parents are moving up here (after 41 years in the same house). Whilst I've seen how busy the town is getting over the years, it really hit home yesterday with absurd traffic levels.
Quite simply there are too many cars, too many houses, too many people. For 20 years the council have allowed houses to be built and built and built along the Rochdale > Littleborough road to the point where its now ludicrously busy.
New houses means you need new roads. New schools. New infrastructure. But there has been none of that. Just people piled on top of people so that you can barely move. Yes I know my perspective has shifted having moved to the country. But at which point do councils have a requirement to actually stop and plan rather than just let developments go up everywhere?
This is one of the problems. I've posted before about the likelihood of houses being built on the fields behind our house. I'm (really*) not against that in principle, but it does require upgrading facilities. It needs a new road in from the bypass. It needs at least a local shop or two. It needs a school or drastic expansion of the nearest school. The town would benefit from management of the floodplain (which only floods 1-2 times per year) to put in some nice parkland/playing fields (the town lacks this, just a few small play parks) and some good cycling/walking infrastructure to get from the new houses to the town centre in the most direct way. Those - even some of those - could make the development a net plus for us. The proposal is however houses only.
*I'll be a bit sad about it. There's a barn owl will lose its home/hunting ground, the deer will no longer wander through in the early morning, the hares won't be running across the field... But we do need houses and the flood plain means that the houses won't be that close and won't really impact on us in terms of privacy etc. It will be a less nice view, but I'd trade that if it led to new amenities for the town.
Is there a coordination of planning between councils and national government? In Scotland there is a duty on councils to produce a plan which is then reviewed by national gmt. I haven't looked into this in detail but for instance in my home area it is pretty clear what the plans are for new houses and where, and one can put one's views to the review. And, I assume, the total of plans bears some relation to government planninbg for new houses, new social/council housing, etc.
I'm wondering if this explains the otherwise bizarre map of Nimbyism in the UK we were discussing in PB a few weeks ago - total contrast across the Anglo-Scottish border.
One thought I have had for years is that the government could have driven the kind of industrial transformation that Beaker is now such an advocate of. Instead of just piling on a Corporation Tax cut they could have made it conditional.
Let big companies only pay 19% tax if they are a living wage employer. If they maintain no forced waiving of working time rules. If they give proper maternity and sick pay. That would have had a huge impact on pay and working conditions.
Instead we have people like Johnson triumphing the slashing of both corporation taxes and corporate responsibility, then working why companies are paying low wages and imposing poor conditions as direct result of their own policies to deliver exactly that.
That shows your short thinking and is typical of Champagne Socialists like yourself.
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
Ending free movement isn't a free market solution, it's a government intervention just like anything else. In fact, it's a form of taxation.
Its neither a government intervention, nor a form of taxation.
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
Taxation is a government intervention that reduces economic welfare by reducing the choice set available to consumers given their budget constraint. Thanks to Brexit, I have a smaller range of choices available to me. Ergo I have been taxed.
That's like saying being unable to drive at 70mph next to a school is taxation.
Laws are not taxation.
Actually your example is a kind of taxation. If you think about taxes and non-tax restrictions on freedom from first principles from a consumer choice point of view they are functionally equivalent, or at least very similar. In your example the restriction or tax on drivers can be motivated by externality arguments - by driving at 70mph I create the risk of killing a child outside the school, a risk I may inadequately factor into my decision making from the POV of the child or its parents. The speed limit is an effective and proportionate response that probably increases overall social welfare by reducing the incidence of dead kids. The question is whether ending FoM, and withdrawing from the EU SM, is a welfare-increasing, proportionate and well targeted response to the problems of labour exploitation that you mention. Since you are resorting to arguments like FoM is the same as slavery, I would deduce that the answer to that question is no.
I've always seen FoM as allowing businesses to get all the benefits but without any of the costs. The Left usually whinge about the Right wanting to privatise the profit and nationalise the losses. That's pretty much what FoM was.
People from Bulgaria were happy to live 6 to a room to earn £8.70 an hour when locally their earnt £2...
Yep, and the rest of us had to take the hit on increased housing costs.
Also, I'd point out that those Eastern Europeans very much "got on their bike", something the Left also don't much like.
Insulate Britain apologising for their actions but will carry on blocking roads
They really have lost the plot and their cause
Lock them up Patel
Terrorism: the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives.
How come the Magnificent Muscly Man is so low in these ratings? Is he not loved by his own?
Yes, I thought the same. We're always told, with some justification, that Boris's lovable rogue persona tickles the fancy of vast swathes of the country. And yet the most ardent Tories in this poll seem not to be as enamoured as the voters. I can only guess that the Tories polled are skewed to the fiscally dry, traditional values branch of the party.
They must have no sense of humour. I mean, how can anybody resist this sort of thing? -
So fortunate we are in these challenging times to have this man at the helm.
He spends a few seconds making a terrible build back batter pun . . . and leftwingers ensure its viewed millions of times sharing his build back better message.
How productive were those few seconds? No wonder he's Prime Minister.
Mr. Boy, you may be right. And you might wonder why some want that.
Free movement means more opportunities if you're in a well-paying field. If you're not, the opportunities come from being able to earn more from the same basic job if other countries pay more and have a non-contributory benefits programme.
There's not a huge number of Britons in Romania serving coffee, or doing plumbing in Poland.
Lack of accession controls on migration coupled with not even bothering to engage with those worried about migration and attacking them as racists is a major reason why UKIP rose in popularity and Leave ended up winning. It's far from the only reason, but it's something worth remembering.
Only 27 fuel tanker drivers from the EU have applied to work in Britain under the government’s emergency scheme to tackle the petrol crisis, ministers have been told.
It means only a fraction of the 300 visas available for HGV drivers in the fuel industry are set to be taken up in a setback to efforts to replenish supplies.
Does rather remind me of "nothing done in X months" type of complaints, when the minimal process actually takes X+3 months. Often happens.
The PM says that they asked the hauliers to give them the names of the drivers they wanted visas for and the government would sort it. They provided 127. So far.
So where is the 27 from?
Are we in journos can't count territory? Or just reporting of very early numbers?
5 live this morning said 127
The 27 comes from the front page of today's Times.
So we are in "Times Journos can't count" territory, or "why did we sack all the subeditors?"
Was there a timescale on that. If it is 127 tanker drivers per week, that will fix the London-SE Crisis in fairly short order. Not that it will get reported.
Insulate Britain apologising for their actions but will carry on blocking roads
They really have lost the plot and their cause
Lock them up Patel
Terrorism: the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives.
The response of the Police and the government has been inept and merely emboldened them. As I said yesterday. They are fanatics. They cannot be reasoned with. Access to their demands and there will be something else and every other fringe group will do the same.
Insulate Britain apologising for their actions but will carry on blocking roads
They really have lost the plot and their cause
Lock them up Patel
Go on admit it you would have said the same about the Suffragettes.
Campaigning for the enfranchisement of just over half the adult population hardly compares to people deliberately causing economic disruption to get the govt to spend a fortune on putting lagging in peoples lofts
Insulate Britain apologising for their actions but will carry on blocking roads
They really have lost the plot and their cause
Lock them up Patel
Terrorism: the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives.
Not seen them using violence or threatening people.
Their direct action is no more than the Suffragettes did.
Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years
Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
Their demand is every house in UK is fully insulated? Putting aside the cost and the practicalities of delivering, how much CO2 would this actually save? It's a generally laudable goal but is it a screaming must all be done in next year emergency priority?
A better target might be get on a build more nuclear so we can switch from gas faster?
Insulate Britain apologising for their actions but will carry on blocking roads
They really have lost the plot and their cause
Lock them up Patel
Terrorism: the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives.
The response of the Police and the government has been inept and merely emboldened them. As I said yesterday. They are fanatics. They cannot be reasoned with. Access to their demands and there will be something else and every other fringe group will do the same.
Exactly. If the police don’t get a grip on these demonstrators soon, it probably ends with someone getting killed.
Imagine being on the jury, at the trial of the motorist charged with running over someone who was deliberately blocking the road.
Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years
Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
Well the Party of govt and the Police seem either incapable or unwilling to stop this disruption and it is only going to spread. The Tories as they party of law and order. What a joke that is.
They have already said they won’t let any vehicles through.
They are laughing at the inept response of the authorities who just need to enforce the existing laws. Fairly and proportionately.
Insulate Britain apologising for their actions but will carry on blocking roads
They really have lost the plot and their cause
Lock them up Patel
Terrorism: the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives.
Not seen them using violence or threatening people.
Their direct action is no more than the Suffragettes did.
Terrorism my arse
The difference is that they are preventing both men and women going about their business and stopped a woman going to see her sick elderly mother and saying they would not let an ambulance through even with a dying patient
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Actually pretty good for a 800sqm Grade 2* listed Jacobean manor.
Goes up in my estimation. There are a couple more things to do in addition to the light bulbs, but they are really tricky ones.
EPC
Detail
The state setting a "living wage" becomes a ceiling rather than a floor. So you expect people can earn that and not a penny more, even if they're skilled.
Having a free market solution to raise wages like we're seeing now isn't simply about getting people to a "living wage" . . . it means skilled workers who graft and apply themselves absolutely should be able to earn more than a living wage.
Remove the ceiling on salaries. Do you have an alternative solution that doesn't have a ceiling to pay rates?
We have used Polish and Romanian people. They certainly are not being exploited. My son's girlfriend is Romanian. She isn't either. An area where you might expect it is piece work in fields, although I understand some of them earn very high wages because of their productivity whereas locals who are less productive get the minimum wage which is actually more expensive because they haven't hit the quota to get any higher pay, hence the attraction of the imported labour. I assume this is because the imported labour is skilled and willing to work it's socks off for a few months at a time before moving on, whereas for local labour it is an endless drudge (with which I can sympathise).
I think it is wrong to assume EU labour was exploitive, unlike illegal labour which certainly is.
There's also been plenty of cases of dozens of people being flown over, put into debt to do so, been put into squalid conditions and made to work for the person who flew them over and repay their debts.
What do you call that? Is it only slavery when it involves sex?
Your son's girlfriend did she (or her family with her) come over on their own terms?
There were many companies that paid to ship people over like they were a commodity then threw people into squalid residential conditions and made people indentured servants to work for them to pay off their debts from being brought over. What do you call that?
The reason that the complaints now are from companies and not people is because it isn't people being harmed by the end of the movement, its the companies who've found themselves unable to ship people like commodities.
There was one case where a seriously injured man was dumped in the countryside outside London, that I recall. Left to die - but was found in time by someone out for a walk...
There is freedom to move still anywhere you want within our market. We're just not in the Single Market anymore.
For those who don't think this form of exploitation was a form of modern day slavery, all I can say is there are none so blind as those who do not wish to see. 🙈
Friend phones on her break to say the entire council estate in Leyland were voting (many who hadn't do so before) because Lidl had opened a local store and all the staff were eastern Europeans and not locals.
Everyone knew locals who had applied but none got as far as interviews.
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Westminster voting intention:
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@RedfieldWilton
, 04 Oct
Chgs. w/ 27 Sep
Good thing those students didn't become influential, eh?
A government that truly believed in a high wage economy in which employees enjoyed uniformly top class working conditions would not have the trade union laws this one does.
Laws are not taxation.
1) local plans take years to develop and the law that governs it is byzantine and absurd.
2) Sites keep coming through being allowed despite not being in plans because of delays in making plans.
3) little regional co-ordination or direction in relation to plans and growth
4) There has been a government policy of growth to stimulate the economy over everything else resulting in the situation you describe
5) Inherent scepticism about any type of centralised funding for infrastructure on the part of the treasury (2010-2019)
6) Car ownership was allowed to increase substantially post 2010.
Re the last para I think that is back to front. Yes companies are complaining, but it is not because they are 'unable to ship people like commodities' it is because the people aren't commodities, but have free will and were happy to come before and now don't want to or can't, so don't. That is why the companies are complaining. They have lost their productive labour.
These EU labours are not slaves, they can work anywhere in the EU.
Again not all migration was like that, not by any means, but at the bottom end it absolutely was more common than it should be.
Moving forwards, if employers want to hire people they need to ensure they're offering good pay and good conditions. That's not a bad thing.
Wallace attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, before he was commissioned in 1991 into the Scots Guards.[4] From 1991 to 1998, he served in Germany, Cyprus, Belize, and Northern Ireland, rising to the rank of captain. During his time in Northern Ireland, he was mentioned in dispatches in 1992 for an incident in which the patrol he was commanding captured an entire IRA active service unit attempting to carry out a bomb attack against British troops.
See the 70s.
In your example the restriction or tax on drivers can be motivated by externality arguments - by driving at 70mph I create the risk of killing a child outside the school, a risk I may inadequately factor into my decision making from the POV of the child or its parents. The speed limit is an effective and proportionate response that probably increases overall social welfare by reducing the incidence of dead kids.
The question is whether ending FoM, and withdrawing from the EU SM, is a welfare-increasing, proportionate and well targeted response to the problems of labour exploitation that you mention. Since you are resorting to arguments like FoM is the same as slavery, I would deduce that the answer to that question is no.
At the time (1961) the average wage was £14 per week (£728) pa and remember my father coming home having been promoted to £1,000 pa
So his hour, if it comes, is a way off yet.
*I'll be a bit sad about it. There's a barn owl will lose its home/hunting ground, the deer will no longer wander through in the early morning, the hares won't be running across the field... But we do need houses and the flood plain means that the houses won't be that close and won't really impact on us in terms of privacy etc. It will be a less nice view, but I'd trade that if it led to new amenities for the town.
The policy was delusional as unless you give visas for a much longer period of time why would a driver take a job for just a few months and then be told to bugger off.
"That's what I said," returned my uncle: "pounds sterling!."
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1445104926431006722?t=1p6lV3D-iT_E417kB2JYwg&s=19
So fortunate we are in these challenging times to have this man at the helm.
I have a farthing or two. They're not too big/heavy but as there's 960 of them to pound that'd be a bit hefty.
I'm wondering if this explains the otherwise bizarre map of Nimbyism in the UK we were discussing in PB a few weeks ago - total contrast across the Anglo-Scottish border.
Insulate Britain apologising for their actions but will carry on blocking roads
They really have lost the plot and their cause
Lock them up Patel
Also, I'd point out that those Eastern Europeans very much "got on their bike", something the Left also don't much like.
How productive were those few seconds? No wonder he's Prime Minister.
Free movement means more opportunities if you're in a well-paying field. If you're not, the opportunities come from being able to earn more from the same basic job if other countries pay more and have a non-contributory benefits programme.
There's not a huge number of Britons in Romania serving coffee, or doing plumbing in Poland.
Lack of accession controls on migration coupled with not even bothering to engage with those worried about migration and attacking them as racists is a major reason why UKIP rose in popularity and Leave ended up winning. It's far from the only reason, but it's something worth remembering.
Jaw-dropping.
People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
Was there a timescale on that. If it is 127 tanker drivers per week, that will fix the London-SE Crisis in fairly short order. Not that it will get reported.
I do not see it as something to joke about
Their direct action is no more than the Suffragettes did.
Terrorism my arse
A better target might be get on a build more nuclear so we can switch from gas faster?
Imagine being on the jury, at the trial of the motorist charged with running over someone who was deliberately blocking the road.
I foresee many decades ahead for these lads of whining about why cool, sexy, liberal elite Remoaners won’t shag them.
They have already said they won’t let any vehicles through.
They are laughing at the inept response of the authorities who just need to enforce the existing laws. Fairly and proportionately.
They have lost the plot and the public totally