The current bind the Republicans find themselves in – politicalbetting.com

System · April 30

The current bind the Republicans find themselves in – politicalbetting.com

I know this is a Trafalgar but it does the issues facing America which sees Marjorie Taylor Greene winning the Republican primary race for the Senate seat then losing in the actual election to the Democratic Party candidate and incumbentJon Ossoff.

Read the full story here

DecrepiterJohnL · April 30

Trouble is, the actual election will be forced choice so a lot of GOP voters will hold their noses to vote for a MAGA loon rather than risk one of Crooked Joe's henchmen.

rcs1000 · April 30

OK.

Trafalgar just makes up their numbers, and this is the Trafalgar founder guy simply trying to stop the Republican Party from committing suicide.

I don't believe for a second that MTG would win the Republican primary by 22 percentage points. But I also don't really think that Georgia is in play - even though it was a Trump win in 2024.

Next year will be a midterm, and even if Donald Trump wasn't massively unpopular, the Republicans would struggle to unseat a sitting Senator under those circumstances. Given that Donald Trump actually is massively unpopular, I suspect Jon Ossoff will hold Georgia fairly comfortably irrespective of who the Republican nominee is.

Battlebus · April 30

I'm on 9/4 Trump doesn't make it to 2028. He's really just a front for ideologues who intend to create a new reality to suit their aims. If he fumbles, he'll be out - and he's fumbling.

Casino_Royale · April 30

Next up, Thursday 1st May.

Oh, Andrea Jenkyns.

Taz · April 30

System said:
The current bind the Republicans find themselves in – politicalbetting.com
I know this is a Trafalgar but it does the issues facing America which sees Marjorie Taylor Greene winning the Republican primary race for the Senate seat then losing in the actual election to the Democratic Party candidate and incumbentJon Ossoff.

Read the full story here

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

viewcode · April 30

Also, https://bsky.app/profile/usapolling.bsky.social/post/3lnyle3m6nk27

glw · April 30

"If you strip out the opposition goals then we won the match."

Leon · April 30

Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave

rcs1000 · April 30

The *only* way the Republicans could win Georgia would be if Brian Kemp stood for the Senate, and even then it would be a massive stretch. I think he would be well advised to wait until 2028, when Warnock (who I think is less popular than Ossoff) is the candidate, and when it's not a midterm. I think Kemp could win then. But against Ossoff in a midterm, he simply wouldn't get enough cross-over votes from Dems, and he wouldn't get the MAGA coalition to turn out.

A_View_From_Cumbria5 · April 30

glw said:
"If you strip out the opposition goals then we won the match."

There will be a lot of interviews taking that tack on Friday.

Casino_Royale · April 30

rcs1000 said:
The *only* way the Republicans could win Georgia would be if Brian Kemp stood for the Senate, and even then it would be a massive stretch. I think he would be well advised to wait until 2028, when Warnock (who I think is less popular than Ossoff) is the candidate, and when it's not a midterm. I think Kemp could win then. But against Ossoff in a midterm, he simply wouldn't get enough cross-over votes from Dems, and he wouldn't get the MAGA coalition to turn out.

Why, whenever I see Ossoff, do I think General Orlov?

Why can't he stand? And, would he win..?

bondegezou · April 30

FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.

You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.

rottenborough · April 30

‪David Frum‬
‪@davidfrum.bsky.social‬

"Be patient" is what no president has ever said when things are going well.

https://bsky.app/profile/davidfrum.bsky.social/post/3lnzzykvp5s2n

rottenborough · April 30

Leon said:
Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave

At least it wont be dark by 3pm.

Casino_Royale · April 30

rottenborough said:

Leon said:
Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave
At least it wont be dark by 3pm.

Fuxxsake etc

Foss · April 30

rottenborough said:

Leon said:
Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave
At least it wont be dark by 3pm.

Until they let Ed scorch the sky...

theProle · April 30

FTP

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.

Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

williamglenn · April 30

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.

No-one is being oppressed but you are engaging in gaslighting by suggesting that people don't know their own minds: "People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems."

Scott_xP · April 30

@kyledcheney.bsky.social‬

BREAKING: A judge has ordered the immediate release of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student detained amid Trump administration crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists.

@liz_crampton was in the Vermont courthouse where the decision just camedown.

https://bsky.app/profile/kyledcheney.bsky.social/post/3lnzzn44h6b2j

Selebian · April 30

glw said:
"If you strip out the opposition goals then we won the match."

To be fair, I often tell the U7 team I coach that we won quarters 2-4. Shame about the five goals we let in during Q1

AnneJGP · April 30

Leon said:
Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave

At least it's not dark at 4pm.

turbotubbs · April 30

rottenborough said:

Leon said:
Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave
At least it wont be dark by 3pm.

With an over-excited 2 year old it not being dark by 8 is a huge issue... Fuxxsake,

AnneJGP · April 30

rottenborough said:

Leon said:
Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave
At least it wont be dark by 3pm.

Nearly snap.

Andy_JS · April 30

The "Trump effect" certainly doesn't seem to have influenced British voters. RefUK have led or tied for 1st place in 9 of the latest 10 polls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election#2025

Scott_xP · April 30

glw said:
"If you strip out the opposition goals then we won the match."

Apart from the Iceberg, the Titanic had a great maiden voyage

carnforth · April 30

Leon said:
Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave

Be poorer, like me, and live on the lower ground floor. 20 degrees inside here, with a breeze running through the house.

MattW · April 30

viewcode said:

Scott_xP said:
Took me a moment to parse all the affiliations on this graphic

https://x.com/bbcdebatenight/status/1917583469808607287
How many seats are Belle and Sebastian predicted to win?

I wondered about that.

Then I wondered who Belle and Sebastian were.

Then I thought they reminded me of Crystal Tips & Alistair.
(CT & A includes a dog for scale.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGuRVthDrPo

rcs1000 · April 30

Casino_Royale said:

rcs1000 said:
The *only* way the Republicans could win Georgia would be if Brian Kemp stood for the Senate, and even then it would be a massive stretch. I think he would be well advised to wait until 2028, when Warnock (who I think is less popular than Ossoff) is the candidate, and when it's not a midterm. I think Kemp could win then. But against Ossoff in a midterm, he simply wouldn't get enough cross-over votes from Dems, and he wouldn't get the MAGA coalition to turn out.
Why, whenever I see Ossoff, do I think General Orlov?

Why can't he stand? And, would he win..?

I love the way Steven Berkoff play Orlov: wonderfully demented. Octopussy is a Bond that should be terrible, but is actually surprisingly good fun.

turbotubbs · April 30

carnforth said:

Leon said:
Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave
Be poorer, like me, and live on the lower ground floor. 20 degrees inside here, with a breeze running through the house.

Our new extension has an upstairs lounge with balcony and huge doors. Really easy to cool the house down once the outside temp drops below 20. Not great when its super hot outside and the greenhouse effect is running with the huge south facing windows.

bondegezou · April 30

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.

williamglenn · April 30

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.

Excess housing demand is caused by immigrants being in this country rather than somewhere else.

dixiedean · April 30

Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.

rcs1000 · April 30

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.

I always find it funny how people project what *they* want onto everybody else. Personally, I'd rather live in a 600 square foot flat in a bustling urban metropolis with no balcony, but great restaurants in walking distance, than in a 3,000 square foot house with a big garden, in a prosperous market town.

People want different things.

And that's OK.

bondegezou · April 30

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
No-one is being oppressed but you are engaging in gaslighting by suggesting that people don't know their own minds: "People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems."

That's not gaslighting. Gaslighting would be if I hacked into PB and edited your old posts to say something different, and when people pointed to them, you'd be really confused what was going on.

dixiedean · April 30

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
Excess housing demand is caused by immigrants being in this country rather than somewhere else.

And folk with flats in North London who are
never in them, but always somewhere else.

Leon · April 30

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.

“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause

turbotubbs · April 30

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.

People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).

bondegezou · April 30

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
Excess housing demand is caused by immigrants being in this country rather than somewhere else.

There is supply and demand and multiple factors affect both. Changes in household composition and size have had a big impact on housing demand. Economic inequality between different parts of the country is often what's driving local housing demand. Housebuilding is low, and the building of social housing particularly low. There are challenges around planning rules.

Pretending immigration is the root cause of all ills is incorrect. Parties that bang on about immigration do not then fix the real problems. Trump's deportations aren't going to make the US a better place.

turbotubbs · April 30

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.

I'm gonna need another clue please.

bondegezou · April 30

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).

It remains one of the great mysteries in political history why the Conservatives campaigned on bringing immigration down while greatly increasing immigration. Whether you think immigration should be higher or lower, it makes no sense. Either argue it's a good thing and have it higher, or argue it should be lower and make it lower. But why did they make it higher while saying it needed to be lower?

PS: Healthcare funding rose much lower under the Tories than under the previous Labour government.

Leon · April 30

dixiedean said:

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
Excess housing demand is caused by immigrants being in this country rather than somewhere else.
And folk with flats in North London who are
never in them, but always somewhere else.

I generously let friends and family stay in my flat - for free - while I’m away. As it’s a nice flat in a great location I get lots of requests and it’s seldom empty for long

Apart from that, good point

dixiedean · April 30

turbotubbs said:

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.
I'm gonna need another clue please.

A cartoon from my long ago youth mentioned upthread.

turbotubbs · April 30

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).
It remains one of the great mysteries in political history why the Conservatives campaigned on bringing immigration down while greatly increasing immigration. Whether you think immigration should be higher or lower, it makes no sense. Either argue it's a good thing and have it higher, or argue it should be lower and make it lower. But why did they make it higher while saying it needed to be lower?

PS: Healthcare funding rose much lower under the Tories than under the previous Labour government.

I know that healthcare funding rose more slowly - it still increased though. In reality there will never be enough funding for the NHS.

I also cannot understand why the Tories did what they did with immigration other than sheer incompetence. Its electoral suicide - its partly what has enabled Reform to thrive. And its just so stupid. Make the case for it and say how you will welcome people to the UK and what will be done for housing and services. Or say it will be less than 100,000 a year and deliver that.

I am stuck in the locals. The Greens have a candidate who did not turn up to hustings, nor have they given any information on what they would do. Literally an empty space in the paper. The Tories are idiots nationally, and need to look at why they lost. Labour are not even standing and that leaves Reform and the Lib Dems, who haven't bothered to leaflet us. I genuinely might spoil my ballot.

Taz · April 30

dixiedean said:

turbotubbs said:

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.
I'm gonna need another clue please.
A cartoon from my long ago youth mentioned upthread.

Of a similar generation to Mary, Mungo and Midge and Mr Benn. Released on DVD yonks ago.

I, the same generation but preferred Roobarb and Noah & Nelly

bondegezou · April 30

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).
It remains one of the great mysteries in political history why the Conservatives campaigned on bringing immigration down while greatly increasing immigration. Whether you think immigration should be higher or lower, it makes no sense. Either argue it's a good thing and have it higher, or argue it should be lower and make it lower. But why did they make it higher while saying it needed to be lower?

PS: Healthcare funding rose much lower under the Tories than under the previous Labour government.
I know that healthcare funding rose more slowly - it still increased though. In reality there will never be enough funding for the NHS.

I also cannot understand why the Tories did what they did with immigration other than sheer incompetence. Its electoral suicide - its partly what has enabled Reform to thrive. And its just so stupid. Make the case for it and say how you will welcome people to the UK and what will be done for housing and services. Or say it will be less than 100,000 a year and deliver that.

I am stuck in the locals. The Greens have a candidate who did not turn up to hustings, nor have they given any information on what they would do. Literally an empty space in the paper. The Tories are idiots nationally, and need to look at why they lost. Labour are not even standing and that leaves Reform and the Lib Dems, who haven't bothered to leaflet us. I genuinely might spoil my ballot.

A number of people on PB have suggested that they, or spouses, won't vote for a party that hasn't leafletted them. It's good if a party does leaflet you, but that leafletting is done by volunteers. It seems to me overly harsh to rule out a party that hasn't managed to leaflet you.

You as a voter don't have to be passive and await leaflets. I'm sure your local Reform UK and LibDem parties have some sort of web presence. The national parties have websites with their general principles. Even without a leaflet through the door (or hustings appearance), you can work out what candidates believe in.

Taz · April 30

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).
It remains one of the great mysteries in political history why the Conservatives campaigned on bringing immigration down while greatly increasing immigration. Whether you think immigration should be higher or lower, it makes no sense. Either argue it's a good thing and have it higher, or argue it should be lower and make it lower. But why did they make it higher while saying it needed to be lower?

.

Exactly the effing point I made to you the other week to which you offered your regulation dose of condescension.

bondegezou · April 30

Taz said:

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).
It remains one of the great mysteries in political history why the Conservatives campaigned on bringing immigration down while greatly increasing immigration. Whether you think immigration should be higher or lower, it makes no sense. Either argue it's a good thing and have it higher, or argue it should be lower and make it lower. But why did they make it higher while saying it needed to be lower?

.
Exactly the effing point I made to you the other week to which you offered your regulation dose of condescension.

Sorry, Taz, I don't remember that particular interaction. I 100% agree with you. And I claim no uniqueness in this view: I know lots of us here have said the same.

Mexicanpete · April 30

bondegezou said:

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
Excess housing demand is caused by immigrants being in this country rather than somewhere else.
There is supply and demand and multiple factors affect both. Changes in household composition and size have had a big impact on housing demand. Economic inequality between different parts of the country is often what's driving local housing demand. Housebuilding is low, and the building of social housing particularly low. There are challenges around planning rules.

Pretending immigration is the root cause of all ills is incorrect. Parties that bang on about immigration do not then fix the real problems. Trump's deportations aren't going to make the US a better place.

Blaming immigrants or other people one doesn't like is a very simple if disingenuous solution to a genuine conundrum.That Austrian fellow with the Charlie Chaplin moustache in 1930s Germany promoted a similarly simple programme.

MattW · April 30

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.

I can't see quite how the dog-for-scale is walking.

One positive portayal of a Tower Block was in Mary, Mungo and Midge. The architectural tour at the start is quite a masterpiece.

1960s optimism caught in a children's programme. Note the limited place for cycles and pedestrians, following the Traffic in Towns report; design them out in the minds of the young !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOwzE20Vlag

Mexicanpete · April 30

Leon said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause

When I was at school I tried convoluted comedy until someone one day told me to stfu as I was not remotely funny.

Take a tip. Keep it simple squire.

Mortimer · April 30

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).
It remains one of the great mysteries in political history why the Conservatives campaigned on bringing immigration down while greatly increasing immigration. Whether you think immigration should be higher or lower, it makes no sense. Either argue it's a good thing and have it higher, or argue it should be lower and make it lower. But why did they make it higher while saying it needed to be lower?

PS: Healthcare funding rose much lower under the Tories than under the previous Labour government.
I know that healthcare funding rose more slowly - it still increased though. In reality there will never be enough funding for the NHS.

I also cannot understand why the Tories did what they did with immigration other than sheer incompetence. Its electoral suicide - its partly what has enabled Reform to thrive. And its just so stupid. Make the case for it and say how you will welcome people to the UK and what will be done for housing and services. Or say it will be less than 100,000 a year and deliver that.

I am stuck in the locals. The Greens have a candidate who did not turn up to hustings, nor have they given any information on what they would do. Literally an empty space in the paper. The Tories are idiots nationally, and need to look at why they lost. Labour are not even standing and that leaves Reform and the Lib Dems, who haven't bothered to leaflet us. I genuinely might spoil my ballot.
A number of people on PB have suggested that they, or spouses, won't vote for a party that hasn't leafletted them. It's good if a party does leaflet you, but that leafletting is done by volunteers. It seems to me overly harsh to rule out a party that hasn't managed to leaflet you.

You as a voter don't have to be passive and await leaflets. I'm sure your local Reform UK and LibDem parties have some sort of web presence. The national parties have websites with their general principles. Even without a leaflet through the door (or hustings appearance), you can work out what candidates believe in.

Not always true. Quite a lot of paid leaflet delivery these days

SandyRentool · April 30

Taz said:

dixiedean said:

turbotubbs said:

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.
I'm gonna need another clue please.
A cartoon from my long ago youth mentioned upthread.
Of a similar generation to Mary, Mungo and Midge and Mr Benn. Released on DVD yonks ago.

I, the same generation but preferred Roobarb and Noah & Nelly

Bod.

I am whistling the theme tune as I type.

JosiasJessop · April 30

rcs1000 said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
I always find it funny how people project what *they* want onto everybody else. Personally, I'd rather live in a 600 square foot flat in a bustling urban metropolis with no balcony, but great restaurants in walking distance, than in a 3,000 square foot house with a big garden, in a prosperous market town.

People want different things.

And that's OK.

People also often want different things at different times of their life. When I was a student, a small shared flat in London was ideal. when I got a job, I got a self-contained granny flat in a house belonging to a lovely couple. Then when a gf moved in with me, we got a rented house. When I got married and we decided we'd try to have kids, I wanted the security of a house we owned, with garden, in a good area for kids. And I daresay when he moves out and Mrs J retires, we'll move again.

I certainly would not want to live in the middle of a city now, although I loved that when I was in my twenties. And I daresay when I'm a little older and a little less mobile, a small place in the country with a large 'hobby' room would be ideal, but pointless atm.

SandyRentool · April 30

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).
It remains one of the great mysteries in political history why the Conservatives campaigned on bringing immigration down while greatly increasing immigration. Whether you think immigration should be higher or lower, it makes no sense. Either argue it's a good thing and have it higher, or argue it should be lower and make it lower. But why did they make it higher while saying it needed to be lower?

PS: Healthcare funding rose much lower under the Tories than under the previous Labour government.
I know that healthcare funding rose more slowly - it still increased though. In reality there will never be enough funding for the NHS.

I also cannot understand why the Tories did what they did with immigration other than sheer incompetence. Its electoral suicide - its partly what has enabled Reform to thrive. And its just so stupid. Make the case for it and say how you will welcome people to the UK and what will be done for housing and services. Or say it will be less than 100,000 a year and deliver that.

I am stuck in the locals. The Greens have a candidate who did not turn up to hustings, nor have they given any information on what they would do. Literally an empty space in the paper. The Tories are idiots nationally, and need to look at why they lost. Labour are not even standing and that leaves Reform and the Lib Dems, who haven't bothered to leaflet us. I genuinely might spoil my ballot.
A number of people on PB have suggested that they, or spouses, won't vote for a party that hasn't leafletted them. It's good if a party does leaflet you, but that leafletting is done by volunteers. It seems to me overly harsh to rule out a party that hasn't managed to leaflet you.

You as a voter don't have to be passive and await leaflets. I'm sure your local Reform UK and LibDem parties have some sort of web presence. The national parties have websites with their general principles. Even without a leaflet through the door (or hustings appearance), you can work out what candidates believe in.

I did a leafleting round recently - one resident came to their door and demanded that I take the leaflet back.

As I was a few leaflets short, this meant that someone else got to receive the Socialist propaganda instead.

carnforth · April 30

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).
It remains one of the great mysteries in political history why the Conservatives campaigned on bringing immigration down while greatly increasing immigration. Whether you think immigration should be higher or lower, it makes no sense. Either argue it's a good thing and have it higher, or argue it should be lower and make it lower. But why did they make it higher while saying it needed to be lower?

PS: Healthcare funding rose much lower under the Tories than under the previous Labour government.

It's possible it was partly just incompetence - of ministers or modellers or both. For example, the huge rise in students with dependents. Boris certainly loosened the rules - but with no quotas, you can easily end up with double what you think before you notice what's happened. It's good we don't have quotas or lotteries though, I think. Just clear rules.

squareroot2 · April 30

I've just read that Gatwick airport management are putting up the drop off charge to 7quid from 2 May. There is no possible justification apart from some bullshit about the eco footprint bollocks so often spoken about.
If Gatwick was worried about it's eco footprintbolocks they'd reduce the no of flights not try for a second runway.
The whole business is shambolic and designed to fleece the traveller.

Leon · April 30

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause
When I was at school I tried convoluted comedy until someone one day told me to stfu as I was not remotely funny.

Take a tip. Keep it simple squire.

We’re having a political discussion, William

MattW · April 30

SandyRentool said:

Taz said:

dixiedean said:

turbotubbs said:

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.
I'm gonna need another clue please.
A cartoon from my long ago youth mentioned upthread.
Of a similar generation to Mary, Mungo and Midge and Mr Benn. Released on DVD yonks ago.

I, the same generation but preferred Roobarb and Noah & Nelly
Bod.

I am whistling the theme tune as I type.

I did give a clue, and linked to an episode.

You need to follow my links. I don't put them there to be ignored

.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGuRVthDrPo

Bod was another one that was the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Here Comes Bod. Dig PC Copper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4IiktFp3p4

Scott_xP · April 30

cult

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lo24zag34b2d

IanB2 · April 30

It’s a beautiful afternoon in Doncaster.

I’ve never seen anywhere with quite so many hairdressers and barbers. There must be something in the water up here that makes their hair grow quick.

Mexicanpete · April 30

Leon said:

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause
When I was at school I tried convoluted comedy until someone one day told me to stfu as I was not remotely funny.

Take a tip. Keep it simple squire.
We’re having a political discussion, William

That bit was fine. You teed up your comic intervention perfectly. It was after that it all fell away.

rcs1000 · April 30

bondegezou said:

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
No-one is being oppressed but you are engaging in gaslighting by suggesting that people don't know their own minds: "People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems."
That's not gaslighting. Gaslighting would be if I hacked into PB and edited your old posts to say something different, and when people pointed to them, you'd be really confused what was going on.

You could always just ask me. I am happy to edit people's comments for a small fee.

eek · April 30

IanB2 said:
It’s a beautiful afternoon in Doncaster.

I’ve never seen anywhere with quite so many hairdressers and barbers. There must be something in the water up here that makes their hair grow quick.

If you think Doncaster has a lot visit Darlington we have more than anywhere else in the country

DM_Andy · April 30

MattW said:

SandyRentool said:

Taz said:

dixiedean said:

turbotubbs said:

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.
I'm gonna need another clue please.
A cartoon from my long ago youth mentioned upthread.
Of a similar generation to Mary, Mungo and Midge and Mr Benn. Released on DVD yonks ago.

I, the same generation but preferred Roobarb and Noah & Nelly
Bod.

I am whistling the theme tune as I type.
I did give a clue, and linked to an episode.

You need to follow my links. I don't put them there to be ignored .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGuRVthDrPo

Bod was another one that was the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Here Comes Bod. Dig PC Copper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4IiktFp3p4

How Derek Griffiths hasn't got a knighthood escapes me.

eek · April 30

squareroot2 said:
I've just read that Gatwick airport management are putting up the drop off charge to 7quid from 2 May. There is no possible justification apart from some bullshit about the eco footprint bollocks so often spoken about.
If Gatwick was worried about it's eco footprintbolocks they'd reduce the no of flights not try for a second runway.
The whole business is shambolic and designed to fleece the traveller.

To get the runway they need to increase the number of people arriving by train which means it’s going to get even more expensive as time as go

Taz · April 30

SandyRentool said:

Taz said:

dixiedean said:

turbotubbs said:

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.
I'm gonna need another clue please.
A cartoon from my long ago youth mentioned upthread.
Of a similar generation to Mary, Mungo and Midge and Mr Benn. Released on DVD yonks ago.

I, the same generation but preferred Roobarb and Noah & Nelly
Bod.

I am whistling the theme tune as I type.

God tier children’s TV, with the great John Le Mesurier narrating.

Taz · April 30

Leon said:

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause
When I was at school I tried convoluted comedy until someone one day told me to stfu as I was not remotely funny.

Take a tip. Keep it simple squire.
We’re having a political discussion, William

William, it was really nothing.

Mexicanpete · April 30

rcs1000 said:

bondegezou said:

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
No-one is being oppressed but you are engaging in gaslighting by suggesting that people don't know their own minds: "People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems."
That's not gaslighting. Gaslighting would be if I hacked into PB and edited your old posts to say something different, and when people pointed to them, you'd be really confused what was going on.
You could always just ask me. I am happy to edit people's comments for a small fee.

Perhaps you wouldn't mind proof reading some of @williamglenn 's more confused posts and then edit them so they made some sense. That would be very helpful.

Leon · April 30

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause
When I was at school I tried convoluted comedy until someone one day told me to stfu as I was not remotely funny.

Take a tip. Keep it simple squire.
We’re having a political discussion, William
That bit was fine. You teed up your comic intervention perfectly. It was after that it all fell away.

What I particularly like is your surprise, to this day, that someone once told you “you’re not remotely
funny”

You act like discovering your total lack of humour and wit came as a shock, rather than a cold hard certainty about your personality, constantly proven true on an hourly basis for all your life

rcs1000 · April 30

squareroot2 said:
I've just read that Gatwick airport management are putting up the drop off charge to 7quid from 2 May. There is no possible justification apart from some bullshit about the eco footprint bollocks so often spoken about.
If Gatwick was worried about it's eco footprintbolocks they'd reduce the no of flights not try for a second runway.
The whole business is shambolic and designed to fleece the traveller.

I think it's designed to maximize the profits of whoever it is these days who owns British Airports Authority (is it Ferrovial, still?).

Mexicanpete · April 30

Leon said:

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause
When I was at school I tried convoluted comedy until someone one day told me to stfu as I was not remotely funny.

Take a tip. Keep it simple squire.
We’re having a political discussion, William
That bit was fine. You teed up your comic intervention perfectly. It was after that it all fell away.
What I particularly like is your surprise, to this day, that someone once told you “you’re not remotely
funny”

You act like discovering your total lack of humour and wit came as a shock, rather than a cold hard certainty about your personality, constantly proven true on an hourly basis for all your life

At the time it did. I have never subsequently made the same mistake. When the penny drops it is most enlightening. Be prepared to be enlightened sometime soon.

MattW · April 30

DM_Andy said:

MattW said:

SandyRentool said:

Taz said:

dixiedean said:

turbotubbs said:

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.
I'm gonna need another clue please.
A cartoon from my long ago youth mentioned upthread.
Of a similar generation to Mary, Mungo and Midge and Mr Benn. Released on DVD yonks ago.

I, the same generation but preferred Roobarb and Noah & Nelly
Bod.

I am whistling the theme tune as I type.
I did give a clue, and linked to an episode.

You need to follow my links. I don't put them there to be ignored .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGuRVthDrPo

Bod was another one that was the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Here Comes Bod. Dig PC Copper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4IiktFp3p4
How Derek Griffiths hasn't got a knighthood escapes me.

Mary, Mungo and Midge was narrated by Richard Baker.

Scott_xP · April 30

Senile

@atrupar.com‬

Trump: "We took over on January 20. These are quarterly reports. The tariffs haven't kicked in yet. I know that -- and I don't want this to happen -- I know that China is doing very poorly right now ... the biggest boats in the world carrying cargo like nobody has ever seen are turning around."

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lo25elwox62y

Nigelb · April 30

rottenborough said:

‪David Frum‬
‪@davidfrum.bsky.social‬

"Be patient" is what no president has ever said when things are going well.

https://bsky.app/profile/davidfrum.bsky.social/post/3lnzzykvp5s2n

“Some people who voted for you are saying, 'I didn't sign up for this.” - Reporter

“Well, they did sign up for it actually.” - Trump
https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/1917377279753175109

williamglenn · April 30

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).
It remains one of the great mysteries in political history why the Conservatives campaigned on bringing immigration down while greatly increasing immigration. Whether you think immigration should be higher or lower, it makes no sense. Either argue it's a good thing and have it higher, or argue it should be lower and make it lower. But why did they make it higher while saying it needed to be lower?

PS: Healthcare funding rose much lower under the Tories than under the previous Labour government.

There was a very prevalent school of thought among right-wing think tanks which paid lip-service to people's concerns about immigration while actually pushing for big increases. You might expect such organisations to be thinly-disguised pressure groups for the interests of big business, so it's perhaps not surprising that they pushed to increase the availability of cheap labour.

This thinking reached its apotheosis with the Boriswave when they convinced themselves that having finally achieved 'control' of immigration, people wouldn't mind if it was increased even more.

MattW · April 30

Taz said:

Leon said:

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause
When I was at school I tried convoluted comedy until someone one day told me to stfu as I was not remotely funny.

Take a tip. Keep it simple squire.
We’re having a political discussion, William
William, it was really nothing.

That was in the tone of William Brown being taken for a bath by his mother.

Or Lady Forbes-Hamilton talking about "the grocer".

DM_Andy · April 30

MattW said:

DM_Andy said:

MattW said:

SandyRentool said:

Taz said:

dixiedean said:

turbotubbs said:

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.
I'm gonna need another clue please.
A cartoon from my long ago youth mentioned upthread.
Of a similar generation to Mary, Mungo and Midge and Mr Benn. Released on DVD yonks ago.

I, the same generation but preferred Roobarb and Noah & Nelly
Bod.

I am whistling the theme tune as I type.
I did give a clue, and linked to an episode.

You need to follow my links. I don't put them there to be ignored .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGuRVthDrPo

Bod was another one that was the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Here Comes Bod. Dig PC Copper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4IiktFp3p4
How Derek Griffiths hasn't got a knighthood escapes me.
Mary, Mungo and Midge was narrated by Richard Baker.

I was talking about Bod.

bondegezou · April 30

carnforth said:

bondegezou said:

turbotubbs said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
People want different lifestyles shock.

The Tories poured more money than ever into the NHS and it still wasn't enough because we are older, fatter, lazier, sicker than ever and there are more of us. No-one asked the country if they wanted us to have immigration running at the rates it is now. The Tories promised to cut it to the tens of thousands. Its this kind of dishonesty that leads to the rise of reform. Don't get me wrong - Reform are a bunch of racist fuckwits with no answers to the countries problems, but they will still get votes because the common people of the country have had enough of the main parties (and that includes the Lib Dems).
It remains one of the great mysteries in political history why the Conservatives campaigned on bringing immigration down while greatly increasing immigration. Whether you think immigration should be higher or lower, it makes no sense. Either argue it's a good thing and have it higher, or argue it should be lower and make it lower. But why did they make it higher while saying it needed to be lower?

PS: Healthcare funding rose much lower under the Tories than under the previous Labour government.
It's possible it was partly just incompetence - of ministers or modellers or both. For example, the huge rise in students with dependents. Boris certainly loosened the rules - but with no quotas, you can easily end up with double what you think before you notice what's happened. It's good we don't have quotas or lotteries though, I think. Just clear rules.

I'm not one generally to accuse the Conservatives of competence, but I find it hard to believe that they were that incompetent!

kjh · April 30

squareroot2 said:
I've just read that Gatwick airport management are putting up the drop off charge to 7quid from 2 May. There is no possible justification apart from some bullshit about the eco footprint bollocks so often spoken about.
If Gatwick was worried about it's eco footprintbolocks they'd reduce the no of flights not try for a second runway.
The whole business is shambolic and designed to fleece the traveller.

You get 2 hrs pick up and drop off at the long stay foc and the airport buses are every few minutes and only take a few minutes so it is a bit of an unnecessary luxury to be delivered or picked up directly from the terminal to be honest.

Nigelb · April 30

turbotubbs said:

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.
I'm gonna need another clue please.

Tips...

MattW · April 30

DM_Andy said:

MattW said:

DM_Andy said:

MattW said:

SandyRentool said:

Taz said:

dixiedean said:

turbotubbs said:

dixiedean said:
Crystal Tips and Alastair.
Blimey.
I'm gonna need another clue please.
A cartoon from my long ago youth mentioned upthread.
Of a similar generation to Mary, Mungo and Midge and Mr Benn. Released on DVD yonks ago.

I, the same generation but preferred Roobarb and Noah & Nelly
Bod.

I am whistling the theme tune as I type.
I did give a clue, and linked to an episode.

You need to follow my links. I don't put them there to be ignored .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGuRVthDrPo

Bod was another one that was the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Here Comes Bod. Dig PC Copper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4IiktFp3p4
How Derek Griffiths hasn't got a knighthood escapes me.
Mary, Mungo and Midge was narrated by Richard Baker.
I was talking about Bod.

Yes. Sorry for any confusion.

Andy_JS · April 30

Leon said:
Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave

What happened to the air conditioner you bought during the 2022 heatwave?

bondegezou · April 30

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause
When I was at school I tried convoluted comedy until someone one day told me to stfu as I was not remotely funny.

Take a tip. Keep it simple squire.

I wrote a condescending post to William, which seems the best response when he's being so silly. Leon noticed it was condescending. I think he wants some sort of gold star for basic reading comprehension because of this?

Mexicanpete · April 30

Andy_JS said:

Leon said:
Fucking boiling to death in my flat in Camden. This never happened before the Boriswave
What happened to the air conditioner you bought during the 2022 heatwave?

Perhaps he meant "hair conditioner" and he subsequently ran out.

Mexicanpete · April 30

bondegezou said:

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause
When I was at school I tried convoluted comedy until someone one day told me to stfu as I was not remotely funny.

Take a tip. Keep it simple squire.
I wrote a condescending post to William, which seems the best response when he's being so silly. Leon noticed it was condescending. I think he wants some sort of gold star for basic reading comprehension because of this?

I wasn't critical of Leon's admonishment of your condescending post, and if you feel the cap fits, wear it. It was the woeful attempt at comedy that raised my eyebrow.

Flatlander · April 30

IanB2 said:
It’s a beautiful afternoon in Doncaster.

I’ve never seen anywhere with quite so many hairdressers and barbers. There must be something in the water up here that makes their hair grow quick.

Money laundering, obviously. Top tip - avoid the "city centre".

Do we get a dog for scale in the local woods, or is the pooch languishing on South Island?

BartholomewRoberts · April 30

PMSL at the ridiculous suggestion by william that we're building houses at a fast rate.

We built more houses in the 1930s, proportionately, than we are now - or have at any point since the disastrous 1948 planning act was passed.

We have never post-war built at as fast a rate as we did pre-war in the 1930s - or the 1900s and times in the 19th century too.

theProle · April 30

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.

I'm pretty sure you're the outlier here, I'm quite confident that far more of those living in North London would live in the Derbyshire Dales (work permitting, which is why they don't) than the other way round. Anyway, if you want to pile more immigrants into North London, be my guest, but we need to start issuing visas before any of you North Londoners are allowed to flee outside the M25 as a result. We don't want or need either you or them.

My point is that there aren't hold ups in house building - my town is currently growing by about 10% every five years, which is raging insanity, considering that it probably only grew by 20% over the whole 20th century. The problem is that demand massively outsrips supply (in no small part southerners fleeing the dump that is the SE, based at least on who all the new people rocking up at church at the moment), because we have too many people for the availabile housing stock.

There aren't less roads in my town now than ten years ago - but now they are all snarled up. Why? Too many people. There isn't room for any new roads, so it's now all just permanently stuffed. And they are still building houses and importing people like crazy.

Do you not get why people are angry? My quality is life is being downgraded, because of bleeding heart liberals like you, filling the country with people we neither want or need.

And because the government is run by people like you, who don't understand this either, it looks increasingly likely Reform will win the next GE. I hope you all enjoy the ride.

williamglenn · April 30

BartholomewRoberts said:
PMSL at the ridiculous suggestion by william that we're building houses at a fast rate.

We built more houses in the 1930s, proportionately, than we are now - or have at any point since the disastrous 1948 planning act was passed.

We have never post-war built at as fast a rate as we did pre-war in the 1930s - or the 1900s and times in the 19th century too.

I haven't said anything today about the rate of housebuilding.

nico67 · April 30

Maybe the firefighters might help save Labour tomorrow .

https://www.fbu.org.uk/news/2025/04/30/firefighters-dont-trust-reform-fbu-takes-fight-reform-runcorn-election

BartholomewRoberts · April 30

Nigelb said:

rottenborough said:

‪David Frum‬
‪@davidfrum.bsky.social‬

"Be patient" is what no president has ever said when things are going well.

https://bsky.app/profile/davidfrum.bsky.social/post/3lnzzykvp5s2n
“Some people who voted for you are saying, 'I didn't sign up for this.” - Reporter

“Well, they did sign up for it actually.” - Trump
https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/1917377279753175109

To be fair, he's right on that one.

They were warned, they knew what he was like, they voted for him anyway.

BartholomewRoberts · April 30

williamglenn said:

BartholomewRoberts said:
PMSL at the ridiculous suggestion by william that we're building houses at a fast rate.

We built more houses in the 1930s, proportionately, than we are now - or have at any point since the disastrous 1948 planning act was passed.

We have never post-war built at as fast a rate as we did pre-war in the 1930s - or the 1900s and times in the 19th century too.
I haven't said anything today about the rate of housebuilding.

My apologies, I misread the chain, it was @theProle who wrote it.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

Astonishing is how few houses we are building. We built more in the 19th century and the 1900s and the 1930s than we are now. Its not an astonishing pace.

Cookie · April 30

Mexicanpete said:

bondegezou said:

Mexicanpete said:

Leon said:

bondegezou said:
FTP...

williamglenn said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
It's legitimate for people to oppose immigration regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat.
You could respond to half the posts on PB by saying, "It's legitimate for people to oppose X regardless of whether it is or isn't causing some particular economic problem. If you don't accept this then you are not a democrat." We're having a political discussion, William. People are putting forward different views. That's how democracy works. We talk about immigration here, and in wider political discourse, all the bloody time. No-one is being oppressed by what I've posted.
“We’re having a political discussion, William”

Why do I imagine this being said by the most annoying, half witted woman in the History of Condescension?

Sometime in the tone of voice. The voice of a deputy head mistress halfway through the menopause
When I was at school I tried convoluted comedy until someone one day told me to stfu as I was not remotely funny.

Take a tip. Keep it simple squire.
I wrote a condescending post to William, which seems the best response when he's being so silly. Leon noticed it was condescending. I think he wants some sort of gold star for basic reading comprehension because of this?
I wasn't critical of Leon's admonishment of your condescending post, and if you feel the cap fits, wear it. It was the woeful attempt at comedy that raised my eyebrow.

Hello thread. I'm only just joining,and it's hard amongst the nesting to pick out who said what,but can I take issue with whoever said 'plenty of countries have a higher population density'? If we consider England countries with a higher population density include Bangladesh, and then some microstates like Singapore. I don't think that counts as 'plenty'.
Granted Scotland and Wales have plenty of space. But that's not much consolation if you're English.

PoodleInASlipstream · April 30

kjh said:

squareroot2 said:
I've just read that Gatwick airport management are putting up the drop off charge to 7quid from 2 May. There is no possible justification apart from some bullshit about the eco footprint bollocks so often spoken about.
If Gatwick was worried about it's eco footprintbolocks they'd reduce the no of flights not try for a second runway.
The whole business is shambolic and designed to fleece the traveller.
You get 2 hrs pick up and drop off at the long stay foc and the airport buses are every few minutes and only take a few minutes so it is a bit of an unnecessary luxury to be delivered or picked up directly from the terminal to be honest.

I would have put the charge up even further. People complaining about this probably have a bad case of CarBrain, they can't comprehend doing anything but using a car to drive right to the door of the place they need to be.

Nigelb · April 30

.

BartholomewRoberts said:

Nigelb said:

rottenborough said:

‪David Frum‬
‪@davidfrum.bsky.social‬

"Be patient" is what no president has ever said when things are going well.

https://bsky.app/profile/davidfrum.bsky.social/post/3lnzzykvp5s2n
“Some people who voted for you are saying, 'I didn't sign up for this.” - Reporter

“Well, they did sign up for it actually.” - Trump
https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/1917377279753175109
To be fair, he's right on that one.

They were warned, they knew what he was like, they voted for him anyway.

Indeed he's right, but not in the way either he or his supporters intend.

Here's a good poser for wiliam.
https://x.com/krassenstein/status/1917580601139384754

BartholomewRoberts · April 30

theProle said:

bondegezou said:

theProle said:
FTP
bondegezou said:

theProle said:

PJH said:

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.

theProle said:
.
bondegezou said:

noneoftheabove said:

nico67 said:
You have to laugh . Reform saying we should give preference to immigrants who are net beneficiaries to the treasury and are less likely to put a strain on services.

So basically that would be people from Europe !
As has been pointed out repeatedly people are against immigration.

But they are not against immigration for high earners who contribute high taxes.
They are not against immigration for students who pay high fees and tend to leave after 3 years.
They are not against immigration for care workers looking after their parents or grandparents.
They are not against immigration for doctors and nurses who can speed up their hip operation.

The above is about 80% of the immigration that people are against........governments can't fix the incoherent and inconsistent policy preferences of voters.
The reality is that people are not against immigration. Immigration is just people moving around and people have always moved around.

People think they are against immigration because they have been riled up and led to believe that immigrants are the source of all problems. They're not.
The argument that "People believe immigration is the source of all the problems" thing is an attempt to engage in a fallacy which says "this thing isn't the whole cause of the problem, therefore we shouldn't bother fixing it". This is nonsense on stilts - even if immigration is only the cause of 5% of our problems, a 5% improvement is much better than a 0% improvement.
I wonder whether the only way to resolve this argument is to give the Ultras what they want. Announce a moratorium on immigration for say 2 years, No Immigration At All, and use the time to clear the entire backlog, reduce the pressure on housing and identify those areas where we really do need immigration.

But I think the most useful thing will be to hear the screams of the Ultras as they can't get GP appointments, have to pay double for social care, or they or their (grand)children can't bring their Australian partners into the country.

Then we can have a proper grown up discussion about what sort of immigration is beneficial, and what isn't. Probably we will find we still need a lot of what we currently have. Maybe we will also find out that if employers pay a proper wage rate for delivery drivers and baristas in places like London, they might be able to recruit locally after all.

But we do have to find all this out, because until we do, no level of reduction of immigration will be enough for Reform and the extreme right.
Even I don't think we should have zero immigration - that's unworkable for lots of reasons.

However, the country is fundamentally full. We're building houses at an astonishing pace, the infrastructure is creaking at the seams, and we're not even keeping up with the growth in demand driven by immigration alone. We already have too many people for the country to remain a pleasant place to live, so we should stop adding more.

The fix? We should have an net zero immigration rule - for simplicity we permit in as a maximum, the number of people who left the year before. The best part of half a million people left last year, so it's not like we won't have many spaces available.

We then prioritise for visas relatives/partners of British citizens, probably once they've been British citizens for a minimum qualifying period (say 15 years) to make it really difficult to game the system by immigrating, aquiring citizenship and then importing your extended family.

And then we should auction the remaining visas to the highest bidder, with a substantial price floor (£50k?). If your business really needs someone high value to come from abroad, you'll pay. But it won't be worth it to import Deliveroo Drivers.

Oh and the students, before people raise that boggieman. Take them out of the system, and the numbers, but three conditions.
1) No dependants
2) The cannot work or access social security
3) There is no route for them to remain once their course is finished other than bidding for visas like everyone else.

None of this is hard to do. Yes, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those whose business model is run on cheap imported labour, or who expect a McDonald's delivered in 5 mins at and time of the day or night - but tough. We're currently running an immigration ponzi scheme. It always hurts to drop out of one, but the longer you stay in, the worse the pain when it finally ends.
The number of people in the country depends on multiple factors: immigration, emigration, birth rate, death rate. If the real problem is that we're "creaking at the seams" (and it isn't), then having a policy that tackles immigration but ignores births and deaths doesn't make sense. Why not discourage births? Or, why not encourage emigration?

But the bigger issue is that we're not creaking at the seams. That's just a story that those opposed to immigration have propagated. Plenty of countries have higher population densities and work fine. We are not remotely building houses "at an astonishing pace". That's laughable. We're building way fewer than at many points in the past.

We should be building more houses. We should be investing in infrastructure. Those are real problems. Fix those. Stop blaming immigration.
Of course we're too full. Look at the really nice parts of the country, (eg. Derbyshire Dales) and they have one thing in common. Low population density. I've lived in umpteen different places, the pleasantness of every place has been pretty much inversely proportional to the number of people who get to live there.

My attractive market town of around 20k inhabitants has gained over 1000 new houses in the last 5 years. That's an extraordinary rate of growth, and completely unsustainable. The result has been to collapse the transport infrastructure (ten years ago I never sat in traffic ever - now half the day it's a snarled up hell-hole).

There have been zero new doctors surgeries, they've run down and partially closed the cottage hospital (so for anything serious, including maternity services it's a 45 min drive). No new supermarkets. We are apparently getting a McDonald's though, so it's all good. Oh, and house prices have doubled in ten years, which would be great for a homeowner like me, if it wasn't for the fact that I need a house to live in, so the notional value is meaningless.

The problem is simple - too many people for the space. The fix - stop letting more in.

And yes, birth rates, death rates etc are relevant. But when we're importing a net million people a year, that's the place to look first and most urgently.

I don't think net zero immigration it will even fix much - it's going to take years of building masses of houses to make them affordable again even with the population static, but it will at least reduce the rate at which time are getting rapidly worse, which is where it is headed at the moment.

I live in north London. It's fantastic. I'd hate to live in the Derbyshire Dales. Just because you like living in places of lower population density doesn't prove anything.

Your NHS services are poorer because the Tories underfunded the NHS. The hold-ups in house building are not caused by immigrants existing.
I'm pretty sure you're the outlier here, I'm quite confident that far more of those living in North London would live in the Derbyshire Dales (work permitting, which is why they don't) than the other way round. Anyway, if you want to pile more immigrants into North London, be my guest, but we need to start issuing visas before any of you North Londoners are allowed to flee outside the M25 as a result. We don't want or need either you or them.

My point is that there aren't hold ups in house building - my town is currently growing by about 10% every five years, which is raging insanity, considering that it probably only grew by 20% over the whole 20th century. The problem is that demand massively outsrips supply (in no small part southerners fleeing the dump that is the SE, based at least on who all the new people rocking up at church at the moment), because we have too many people for the availabile housing stock.

There aren't less roads in my town now than ten years ago - but now they are all snarled up. Why? Too many people. There isn't room for any new roads, so it's now all just permanently stuffed. And they are still building houses and importing people like crazy.

Do you not get why people are angry? My quality is life is being downgraded, because of bleeding heart liberals like you, filling the country with people we neither want or need.

And because the government is run by people like you, who don't understand this either, it looks increasingly likely Reform will win the next GE. I hope you all enjoy the ride.

Why is 10% insanity?

We need massively more housing, millions more across the country. That means some places growing by hundreds or thousands of percent as we build new towns, or villages grow into towns, or towns grow into cities.

There's very few towns or cities that couldn't grow outwards to build new roads and new homes and businesses.

JohnLilburne · April 30

PoodleInASlipstream said:

kjh said:

squareroot2 said:
I've just read that Gatwick airport management are putting up the drop off charge to 7quid from 2 May. There is no possible justification apart from some bullshit about the eco footprint bollocks so often spoken about.
If Gatwick was worried about it's eco footprintbolocks they'd reduce the no of flights not try for a second runway.
The whole business is shambolic and designed to fleece the traveller.
You get 2 hrs pick up and drop off at the long stay foc and the airport buses are every few minutes and only take a few minutes so it is a bit of an unnecessary luxury to be delivered or picked up directly from the terminal to be honest.
I would have put the charge up even further. People complaining about this probably have a bad case of CarBrain, they can't comprehend doing anything but using a car to drive right to the door of the place they need to be.

I normally get the train to Gatwick, unless I have a particularly early flight - and I tend not to book those. Partly because I can't get there, partly because getting up in the middle of the night starts a trip on a bum note

Casino_Royale · April 30

Oh, extra £60 in my Ladbrokes account because I placed a bet on Liberal most seats in November 2024 at 5/1, and forgot about it.

Win.

Nigelb · April 30

Heckuva job, Donald.

Fox Host: The new GDP number shows a drop in growth and contraction in the economy, the first we've seen in years. It's a sharp reversal from the 2.4% growth in Q4 of 2024. Q3 was 3.1%. Q2 was 3.4%. Now we're at -0.3%
https://x.com/factpostnews/status/1917605236157436211

williamglenn · April 30

Stats For Lefties is predicting a Reform win in Runcorn but the methodology seems to involve a degree of voodoo.

https://x.com/leftiestats/status/1917604692223213643

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