Just imagine how unbearably smug I will be if a 100/1 winner comes in.
No chance he becomes leader again . Why on earth would Labour want that loser to return. Indeed he’s partly to blame for Brexit , backstabbing his brother . If David Miliband had won the leadership the Tories wouldn’t have got that majority and there would never have been that idiotic referendum.
I've never cared that Ed backstabbed his brother. Indeed, I don't think he did backstab him, bad choice or not. And it's impressive he's returned to senior level after all the years of opposition.
But politics moves fast now. He's been involved in it at one level or another for 20 years as an MP already, and for many years before that as an adviser and bag carrier. Unless there was something transformative about him I don't think he's the answer.
Update, he's now 110... It's an election, he got more votes than his brother from those eligible who voted. Given the voters were Labour members, that DM is currently a highly remunerated CEO of an NGO in the US and EM is Labour minister, attempting to enact Labour manifesto commitments for a Green Industrial Revolution (hampered by the cowardly leadership), then their choice was understandable. Brexit is Cameron's fault, put it to a binary referendum with no thresholds when arguably best-placed to know how much money from his party donors would put behind Brexit.
He could well be transformative, if his party (Starmer, Reeves etc) let him, and he's displaying more convictions and backbone than the others who are so keen to ape Reform.
The Lib Dem’s and Greens really should be holding their nose and voting for Labour tomorrow .
This is not the time for self indulgence .
In Runcorn?
Ironically, on purely party political grounds, perhaps it's more the Tories who should be holding their noses and voting Labour in Runcorn.
RefUK are an existential threat to the Tories. It's more of a mixed picture for the Lib Dems (and Greens) - absolutely no doubt those parties don't want Farage getting the keys to Number 10. But for RefUK to split the right wing vote and drag the Tories to the right leaving the centre clear... well, that's a different story.
I'm not saying that as a prediction, by the way. On the ground, a lot of Lib Dem inclined voters will vote tactically to stop Farage, and that's understandable. And I doubt people will be trooping out of the Conservative Club to back Keir in practice. I'm just saying that, looking at the wider political advantage, perhaps that'd be the better play.
I have a few pints on tomorrow's elections, but one is for Greens to beat LDs (at evens on Ladbrokes). The logic is that LD voters are much more willing to support Labour and keep out Reform. I think the Greens are less tactical and also much less willing to support Starmer, even if it risks Reform getting in.. Think BJO on here.
Yet the LibDems’ campaigning nouse, especially in a by-election and even in first gear, knocks the Greens into the shade. And whereas the LDs have at least started to carve out some distinctive stances in opposition to the government, the Greens haven’t, and find themselves on the less popular side of the toilets farrago.
Judging by the last Parliament, Lib Dem campaigns in Parliamentary by-elections have two speed settings - 100mph in a Ferrari and parked/rolling backwards down hill in a Reliant Robin. Other than the miss in Mid Beds, they scored utterly spectacular wins in all the ones they decided they could win and threw the kitchen sink at. In all the ones Ed Davey and his team essentially passed on, they were absolutely nowhere.
That's not a criticism - it's good tactics. But which of those two speed settings do you think they are on in Runcorn? I think we all know.
Reeves under investigation over 'registration of interests'
Why do you sensationalise like this!!!!
For context.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is being investigated by the parliamentary standards watchdog over one of her registrations of interest.
Sky News understands the probe relates to the receipt of tickets from the National Theatre, which were declared late on the MPs register.
It is understood they were declared on time on a separate register for government ministers.
An investigation being launched does not necessarily mean rules have been broken, and a spokesperson for Reeves said: "The chancellor's interests are fully declared and up to date."
Simultaneously late and up to date? Interesting.
Schrödinger's declaration.
I have this at work, I have to declare all hospitality I receive and give out, I also I have to register it to the ethics team (of which I am on) also to the payroll and accounts team who have update my P11D.
It took them six years to have a single reporting system.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
The Lib Dem’s and Greens really should be holding their nose and voting for Labour tomorrow .
This is not the time for self indulgence .
In Runcorn?
Ironically, on purely party political grounds, perhaps it's more the Tories who should be holding their noses and voting Labour in Runcorn.
RefUK are an existential threat to the Tories. It's more of a mixed picture for the Lib Dems (and Greens) - absolutely no doubt those parties don't want Farage getting the keys to Number 10. But for RefUK to split the right wing vote and drag the Tories to the right leaving the centre clear... well, that's a different story.
I'm not saying that as a prediction, by the way. On the ground, a lot of Lib Dem inclined voters will vote tactically to stop Farage, and that's understandable. And I doubt people will be trooping out of the Conservative Club to back Keir in practice. I'm just saying that, looking at the wider political advantage, perhaps that'd be the better play.
I have a few pints on tomorrow's elections, but one is for Greens to beat LDs (at evens on Ladbrokes). The logic is that LD voters are much more willing to support Labour and keep out Reform. I think the Greens are less tactical and also much less willing to support Starmer, even if it risks Reform getting in.. Think BJO on here.
Yet the LibDems’ campaigning nouse, especially in a by-election and even in first gear, knocks the Greens into the shade. And whereas the LDs have at least started to carve out some distinctive stances in opposition to the government, the Greens haven’t, and find themselves on the less popular side of the toilets farrago.
Judging by the last Parliament, Lib Dem campaigns in Parliamentary by-elections have two speed settings - 100mph in a Ferrari and parked/rolling backwards down hill in a Reliant Robin. Other than the miss in Mid Beds, they scored utterly spectacular wins in all the ones they decided they could win and threw the kitchen sink at. In all the ones Ed Davey and his team essentially passed on, they were absolutely nowhere.
That's not a criticism - it's good tactics. But which of those two speed settings do you think they are on in Runcorn? I think we all know.
For sure.
But I haven’t been a member for eight years now, and I’ve received a few invitations to go help in Runcorn. So someone there is doing something, at least. And having experienced the calculated chaos of a supposed Green top target campaign here in the IOW, I’d wager that the LDs effort in first gear is better than the Greens’ at top speed.
Looking at the bigger picture, a couple of elections back, the LDs were prepared to do a (limited) seat sharing deal with the Greens. Now, I sense they’re waking up to the risk of ceding the position of “progressive opposition to Labour in their own seats” to the Greens, and risk finding themselves left as merely the opposition to the Tories in the shires. If they have any sense, this is something they need to start thinking about sooner rather than later, since giving up on the long tradition of English urban non conformist liberalism would be a sad thing indeed.
Reeves under investigation over 'registration of interests'
Why do you sensationalise like this!!!!
For context.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is being investigated by the parliamentary standards watchdog over one of her registrations of interest.
Sky News understands the probe relates to the receipt of tickets from the National Theatre, which were declared late on the MPs register.
It is understood they were declared on time on a separate register for government ministers.
An investigation being launched does not necessarily mean rules have been broken, and a spokesperson for Reeves said: "The chancellor's interests are fully declared and up to date."
Simultaneously late and up to date? Interesting.
Simples, if this is the case (no idea but probable): At the time of the spokesman speaking the relevant interest has been declared, though apparently in some aspect declared late. This brings her up to date - just as someone declaring income in the year 2023-2024 only in 2025 will then be 'fully declared and up to date'. The issue of whether it is late, illegal or whatever is quite different. It's all in the drafting, and what you put in and what you leave out. The skill of spotting this is part of the art of fisking. Ask any lawyer.
SFAICS all senior politicians have been trained in all this, and it's second nature in how they always speak in public.
I'm not one for grandiosity, but I can't help feeling a certain similarity - almost fraternality - with a certain young Israeli chap, name of "Jesus", nigh on 2000 years ago
Reeves under investigation over 'registration of interests'
Why do you sensationalise like this!!!!
For context.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is being investigated by the parliamentary standards watchdog over one of her registrations of interest.
Sky News understands the probe relates to the receipt of tickets from the National Theatre, which were declared late on the MPs register.
It is understood they were declared on time on a separate register for government ministers.
An investigation being launched does not necessarily mean rules have been broken, and a spokesperson for Reeves said: "The chancellor's interests are fully declared and up to date."
Simultaneously late and up to date? Interesting.
Schrödinger's declaration.
I have this at work, I have to declare all hospitality I receive and give out, I also I have to register it to the ethics team (of which I am on) also to the payroll and accounts team who have update my P11D.
It took them six years to have a single reporting system.
You were lucky they were so efficient and speedy then.
Actually Tony Blair shows how lots of money from Saudi Arabia to his institute leads to a conclusion we need more fossil fuels.
Nah, I think that's a conspiracy theory. A fair few people are quizzing if this is possible, now, or if we're just fruitlessly beggaring ourselves.
The catch with that question is that solar/wind/battery are cheaper than fossil fuels + CCS right now and have the massive advantage of already existing at scale. The price factor has changed a lot in recent years, as OGH Jr points out; and lots of people haven't noticed yet.
The main downside is the balance of initial and ongoing costs. Gas is like an inkjet printer; cheap upfront but expensive to run (which is why it's OK to keep them as backup for a few days a year). Renewable + storage is a laser printer- more expensive upfront, but cheaper over the lifetime.
Getting that sort of decision right is something humans find hard and British humans almost impossible. Hence the scrambling by some for other reasons not to do this.
Sorry but that is simply not true. The strike price of gas is artificially elevated by being on constant stop start due to the intermittency of shite renewables of the type you describe. You don't do your side any favours when you speciously omit key facts because the don't support 'the transition'.
Are you saying if we used more gas the gas would be cheaper?
I am saying that if we used gas consistently it would be cheaper. The cost of constantly restarting gas plants is high, and that cost is placed artificially on the strike price of gas.
If we got rid of "shite renewables" we'd have to produce that electricity in another way. Suggestions?
Also - do you have a citation for how much restarting gas plants adds to the cost of gas?
Dependable renewables like tidal. SMR nuclear. UK produced oil, gas, and potentially coal. And ensure that unreliable intermittent sources (which are a feature now whether I would like it or not) are incentivised to store energy to even out their supply.
No, I don't have prices figures on what percent of the gas price is due to renewable intermittency, but I will try to get some later.
Nuclear is unreliably intermittent...
"The outages of four reactors - two at Heysham and two in Hartlepool - were unplanned, prompted by a part failure in the boiler pipework at Heysham 1 in Lancashire."
I'm in favour of nuclear. I'm in favour of O&G. I'm in favour of renewables. We need a mix, not one thing, all working together to get us security of supply.
And O&G does *not* give us security of supply, and AIUI will automagically not even if we maximise North Sea output. And the thought of going back to coal is laughable.
Large nuclear plants going offline is going to cause an issue (though it's nothing like as intermittent as wind or solar). Many more smaller SMR stations would provide a far more even supply not affected catastrophically by outages (would be my surmise). We need to pivot toward SMRs and away from costly too-big-to-fail nuclear projects with France and China.
I agree we need a mix.
I disagree. There are huge reserves in the North Sea - we need to properly incentivise getting it out. We also need to progress with fracking.
Coal is not 'laughable' when the world's biggest industrial economy is opening coal stations at a rate of knots to supply our windmills. And when even Germany has added more coal to its mix. Neither have particularly laughable approaches to their needs. The only laughable energy policy is our energy policy.
Coal is laughable for a number of reasons: We have zero mines, and they are massively costly to open (and controversial...) we have zero coal-fire power stations left. We have zero coal-handling infrastructure left (even the old MGR trains...)
I'd strongly argue that money spent correcting these would be much better spent elsewhere; even nuclear.
But my main reason is environmental, but not the gasses. I was born and raised a couple of miles from a large coal-fired power station, and it was impossible to hang washing out if the wind was blowing from that direction, as it would get covered in particles from the coal burning. IMV one of the best pieces of post-war legislation were the various clean air acts, and burning coal - even in power stations - is bad for air quality. (*)
You appear to hate renewables; but going back to coal would be the worst of all worlds.
(*) Orders of magnitude more radiation is released into the environment from burning coal than from nuclear power stations, for the same power generated...
Things not existing doesn't make them laughable - otherwise anything new would be laughable. There was a big plan for a large clean coal power station 15 years or so ago. Alec Salmond was interested for Scotland.
Clearly I don't hate renewables, because tidal is included in my list. I hate undependable, intermittent, and unsuitable renewables whose primary purpose is to farm subsidies.
Tidal is predictable. It's still super intermittent; you have slack tides that change time during the week, and the difference in generation between a spring and neap tide is over 50%. There is very little scope for storage even with lagoons, and utilising the Severn estuary to its full extent would only generate about 10 GW.
To put that into perspective, Scotland alone currently has nearly 50 GW of renewables operating, under construction or in planning. Only 5% of UK households have solar, yet we're generating 12 GW right now.
Perhaps my understanding of this is flawed, and @MarqueeMark may wish to weigh in, but don't the lagoons create electricity both when the water is flooding into it, and when it's flooding out of it? To me that doesn't leave a huge gap in service, and it is, as you say, utterly predictable. There really is no case against it, except that there's little subsidy cash to be spaffed around, due to the inherent workability of the concept. It is certainly nothing like the intermittency, unreliability and unsuitability (solar power at its highest when it's least needed/wind dropping down when it's cold) of wind and solar.
As for that 50GW, how much is actually providing power, not being constrained, or becalmed because the weather isn't right? We have abundant oil and gas, we have coal, we have tides for days. So we're using solar and wind.
The lagoons spread the generation a fair bit. Depends on capacity, but most design don’t actually merge high and low generation - there is a gap.
But the offset between locations is pretty much fixed. So you can site your lagoons around the coast to “fill in” each others generating gaps.
I'm not one for grandiosity, but I can't help feeling a certain similarity - almost fraternality - with a certain young Israeli chap, name of "Jesus", nigh on 2000 years ago
Reeves under investigation over 'registration of interests'
Why do you sensationalise like this!!!!
For context.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is being investigated by the parliamentary standards watchdog over one of her registrations of interest.
Sky News understands the probe relates to the receipt of tickets from the National Theatre, which were declared late on the MPs register.
It is understood they were declared on time on a separate register for government ministers.
An investigation being launched does not necessarily mean rules have been broken, and a spokesperson for Reeves said: "The chancellor's interests are fully declared and up to date."
Simultaneously late and up to date? Interesting.
Schrödinger's declaration.
I have this at work, I have to declare all hospitality I receive and give out, I also I have to register it to the ethics team (of which I am on) also to the payroll and accounts team who have update my P11D.
It took them six years to have a single reporting system.
You were lucky they were so efficient and speedy then.
I'm not one for grandiosity, but I can't help feeling a certain similarity - almost fraternality - with a certain young Israeli chap, name of "Jesus", nigh on 2000 years ago
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
Just imagine how unbearably smug I will be if a 100/1 winner comes in.
No chance he becomes leader again . Why on earth would Labour want that loser to return. Indeed he’s partly to blame for Brexit , backstabbing his brother . If David Miliband had won the leadership the Tories wouldn’t have got that majority and there would never have been that idiotic referendum.
I've never cared that Ed backstabbed his brother. Indeed, I don't think he did backstab him, bad choice or not. And it's impressive he's returned to senior level after all the years of opposition.
But politics moves fast now. He's been involved in it at one level or another for 20 years as an MP already, and for many years before that as an adviser and bag carrier. Unless there was something transformative about him I don't think he's the answer.
Update, he's now 110... It's an election, he got more votes than his brother from those eligible who voted. Given the voters were Labour members, that DM is currently a highly remunerated CEO of an NGO in the US and EM is Labour minister, attempting to enact Labour manifesto commitments for a Green Industrial Revolution (hampered by the cowardly leadership), then their choice was understandable. Brexit is Cameron's fault, put it to a binary referendum with no thresholds when arguably best-placed to know how much money from his party donors would put behind Brexit.
He could well be transformative, if his party (Starmer, Reeves etc) let him, and he's displaying more convictions and backbone than the others who are so keen to ape Reform.
Always very heartwarming when people have principled convictions and backbone in favour of generous Labour donors like Dale Vince and at the expense of cold grannies. If only there were more like him.
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
How does the quote go?
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
I don't feel that "I'll do what is in my short-term interests and screw everyone else" is a good way to live and if we were all like that, we would be in a poor state. That goes for countries too, we can still do our best, our friends in Europe will do their best and it might not solve climate change but we can make it less bad than it would otherwise be.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
It hasn't been great these last few years. Hopefully next time you'll have a clear preference. That's all you need, a clear preference.
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
(Snip)
You might be right. You might also be incorrect.
There is a vast amount of work to be done to get anywhere near net-zero, and a lot of that work is frontloaded. As an example, you cannot really start implementing battery storage solutions at the scale required until the battery tech is mature enough and suitable factories are built. These are all frontloaded, but when they are done, you can ramp up very quickly.
Ditto many other areas, e.g. EV cars (though there are other infrastructure issues that need solving with those; it is not just building the cars).
If you look at the way wind power in the UK has increased over the years (1), then you can see how quickly things can be ramped up, given the will. (If you like renewables, it is also a great credit to the coalition and Conservative governments...). But you cannot start that ramp-up until the tech is there and scalable.
But there are still very large technological problems that need solving, let alone being in a position to scale up.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
How does the quote go?
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
That does not however mean our form of democracy is fit for purpose....our politicians dont care about the country, our parties dont either or they care about is the gravy train and self aggrandizement. Pretty much all of them have no idea how the bottom half of the country lives nor do they care. The rise of the career politician that never had another job has fucked our democracy as they will never understand nor care, nor will they ever do anything that will actually help the bottom 50% as they have shown consistently for the last 3 decades or more.
There is a difference between being anti democracy and being anti this democracy.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
On reflection, perhaps you were right the first time, and should stay at home.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
On reflection, perhaps you were right the first time, and should stay at home.
Don't worry I will turn up in the unlikely event there enough stupid people thinking the lib dems are a good idea in my constituency
Actually Tony Blair shows how lots of money from Saudi Arabia to his institute leads to a conclusion we need more fossil fuels.
Nah, I think that's a conspiracy theory. A fair few people are quizzing if this is possible, now, or if we're just fruitlessly beggaring ourselves.
The catch with that question is that solar/wind/battery are cheaper than fossil fuels + CCS right now and have the massive advantage of already existing at scale. The price factor has changed a lot in recent years, as OGH Jr points out; and lots of people haven't noticed yet.
The main downside is the balance of initial and ongoing costs. Gas is like an inkjet printer; cheap upfront but expensive to run (which is why it's OK to keep them as backup for a few days a year). Renewable + storage is a laser printer- more expensive upfront, but cheaper over the lifetime.
Getting that sort of decision right is something humans find hard and British humans almost impossible. Hence the scrambling by some for other reasons not to do this.
Sorry but that is simply not true. The strike price of gas is artificially elevated by being on constant stop start due to the intermittency of shite renewables of the type you describe. You don't do your side any favours when you speciously omit key facts because the don't support 'the transition'.
Are you saying if we used more gas the gas would be cheaper?
I am saying that if we used gas consistently it would be cheaper. The cost of constantly restarting gas plants is high, and that cost is placed artificially on the strike price of gas.
If we got rid of "shite renewables" we'd have to produce that electricity in another way. Suggestions?
Also - do you have a citation for how much restarting gas plants adds to the cost of gas?
Dependable renewables like tidal. SMR nuclear. UK produced oil, gas, and potentially coal. And ensure that unreliable intermittent sources (which are a feature now whether I would like it or not) are incentivised to store energy to even out their supply.
No, I don't have prices figures on what percent of the gas price is due to renewable intermittency, but I will try to get some later.
Nuclear is unreliably intermittent...
"The outages of four reactors - two at Heysham and two in Hartlepool - were unplanned, prompted by a part failure in the boiler pipework at Heysham 1 in Lancashire."
I'm in favour of nuclear. I'm in favour of O&G. I'm in favour of renewables. We need a mix, not one thing, all working together to get us security of supply.
And O&G does *not* give us security of supply, and AIUI will automagically not even if we maximise North Sea output. And the thought of going back to coal is laughable.
Large nuclear plants going offline is going to cause an issue (though it's nothing like as intermittent as wind or solar). Many more smaller SMR stations would provide a far more even supply not affected catastrophically by outages (would be my surmise). We need to pivot toward SMRs and away from costly too-big-to-fail nuclear projects with France and China.
I agree we need a mix.
I disagree. There are huge reserves in the North Sea - we need to properly incentivise getting it out. We also need to progress with fracking.
Coal is not 'laughable' when the world's biggest industrial economy is opening coal stations at a rate of knots to supply our windmills. And when even Germany has added more coal to its mix. Neither have particularly laughable approaches to their needs. The only laughable energy policy is our energy policy.
Coal is laughable for a number of reasons: We have zero mines, and they are massively costly to open (and controversial...) we have zero coal-fire power stations left. We have zero coal-handling infrastructure left (even the old MGR trains...)
I'd strongly argue that money spent correcting these would be much better spent elsewhere; even nuclear.
But my main reason is environmental, but not the gasses. I was born and raised a couple of miles from a large coal-fired power station, and it was impossible to hang washing out if the wind was blowing from that direction, as it would get covered in particles from the coal burning. IMV one of the best pieces of post-war legislation were the various clean air acts, and burning coal - even in power stations - is bad for air quality. (*)
You appear to hate renewables; but going back to coal would be the worst of all worlds.
(*) Orders of magnitude more radiation is released into the environment from burning coal than from nuclear power stations, for the same power generated...
Things not existing doesn't make them laughable - otherwise anything new would be laughable. There was a big plan for a large clean coal power station 15 years or so ago. Alec Salmond was interested for Scotland.
Clearly I don't hate renewables, because tidal is included in my list. I hate undependable, intermittent, and unsuitable renewables whose primary purpose is to farm subsidies.
Tidal is predictable. It's still super intermittent; you have slack tides that change time during the week, and the difference in generation between a spring and neap tide is over 50%. There is very little scope for storage even with lagoons, and utilising the Severn estuary to its full extent would only generate about 10 GW.
To put that into perspective, Scotland alone currently has nearly 50 GW of renewables operating, under construction or in planning. Only 5% of UK households have solar, yet we're generating 12 GW right now.
Perhaps my understanding of this is flawed, and @MarqueeMark may wish to weigh in, but don't the lagoons create electricity both when the water is flooding into it, and when it's flooding out of it? To me that doesn't leave a huge gap in service, and it is, as you say, utterly predictable. There really is no case against it, except that there's little subsidy cash to be spaffed around, due to the inherent workability of the concept. It is certainly nothing like the intermittency, unreliability and unsuitability (solar power at its highest when it's least needed/wind dropping down when it's cold) of wind and solar.
As for that 50GW, how much is actually providing power, not being constrained, or becalmed because the weather isn't right? We have abundant oil and gas, we have coal, we have tides for days. So we're using solar and wind.
The lagoons spread the generation a fair bit. Depends on capacity, but most design don’t actually merge high and low generation - there is a gap.
But the offset between locations is pretty much fixed. So you can site your lagoons around the coast to “fill in” each others generating gaps.
Tidal lagoon power stations are a seawall with gaps, the gaps filled with turbines. As the sea comes in, turbines turn until high tide. You then hold the water until the tide has dropped sufficiently on the other side, then open the sluices and the turbines turn as the water exits. They operate to generate electricity for about 14 hours a day, catching the power of the moon via the tides. It delivers power to our door, twice a day, regardless.
The power of the tides vary on a daily, monthly and 18 year cycle. But they are utterly predictable. You could have a series of lagoons around the west coast of England and Wales. Plus if you really wanted an eco war to end all eco wars, The Wash too. But because of the varying time of high tide around the coast, you can have a significant distribution of 14 hour production daily.
Collect, trap, release, twice a day. For maybe 180 years. Requires no fuel, creates no waste.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
On reflection, perhaps you were right the first time, and should stay at home.
Don't worry I will turn up in the unlikely event there enough stupid people thinking the lib dems are a good idea in my constituency
God Pagan, lighten up. Anybody would think Ed Davey pissed on your chips or something.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
On reflection, perhaps you were right the first time, and should stay at home.
Don't worry I will turn up in the unlikely event there enough stupid people thinking the lib dems are a good idea in my constituency
God Pagan, lighten up. Anybody would think Ed Davey pissed on your chips or something.
When people express their contempt for tories or labour do you tell them to lighten up? No you don't. My absolute contempt for the lib dems has never been a secret and I have been consistent through the years
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
On reflection, perhaps you were right the first time, and should stay at home.
Don't worry I will turn up in the unlikely event there enough stupid people thinking the lib dems are a good idea in my constituency
God Pagan, lighten up. Anybody would think Ed Davey pissed on your chips or something.
I think that was one of the rejected ideas for the "Silly things for Ed to do" in the 2024 election.
Actually Tony Blair shows how lots of money from Saudi Arabia to his institute leads to a conclusion we need more fossil fuels.
Nah, I think that's a conspiracy theory. A fair few people are quizzing if this is possible, now, or if we're just fruitlessly beggaring ourselves.
The catch with that question is that solar/wind/battery are cheaper than fossil fuels + CCS right now and have the massive advantage of already existing at scale. The price factor has changed a lot in recent years, as OGH Jr points out; and lots of people haven't noticed yet.
The main downside is the balance of initial and ongoing costs. Gas is like an inkjet printer; cheap upfront but expensive to run (which is why it's OK to keep them as backup for a few days a year). Renewable + storage is a laser printer- more expensive upfront, but cheaper over the lifetime.
Getting that sort of decision right is something humans find hard and British humans almost impossible. Hence the scrambling by some for other reasons not to do this.
Sorry but that is simply not true. The strike price of gas is artificially elevated by being on constant stop start due to the intermittency of shite renewables of the type you describe. You don't do your side any favours when you speciously omit key facts because the don't support 'the transition'.
Are you saying if we used more gas the gas would be cheaper?
I am saying that if we used gas consistently it would be cheaper. The cost of constantly restarting gas plants is high, and that cost is placed artificially on the strike price of gas.
If we got rid of "shite renewables" we'd have to produce that electricity in another way. Suggestions?
Also - do you have a citation for how much restarting gas plants adds to the cost of gas?
Dependable renewables like tidal. SMR nuclear. UK produced oil, gas, and potentially coal. And ensure that unreliable intermittent sources (which are a feature now whether I would like it or not) are incentivised to store energy to even out their supply.
No, I don't have prices figures on what percent of the gas price is due to renewable intermittency, but I will try to get some later.
Nuclear is unreliably intermittent...
"The outages of four reactors - two at Heysham and two in Hartlepool - were unplanned, prompted by a part failure in the boiler pipework at Heysham 1 in Lancashire."
I'm in favour of nuclear. I'm in favour of O&G. I'm in favour of renewables. We need a mix, not one thing, all working together to get us security of supply.
And O&G does *not* give us security of supply, and AIUI will automagically not even if we maximise North Sea output. And the thought of going back to coal is laughable.
Large nuclear plants going offline is going to cause an issue (though it's nothing like as intermittent as wind or solar). Many more smaller SMR stations would provide a far more even supply not affected catastrophically by outages (would be my surmise). We need to pivot toward SMRs and away from costly too-big-to-fail nuclear projects with France and China.
I agree we need a mix.
I disagree. There are huge reserves in the North Sea - we need to properly incentivise getting it out. We also need to progress with fracking.
Coal is not 'laughable' when the world's biggest industrial economy is opening coal stations at a rate of knots to supply our windmills. And when even Germany has added more coal to its mix. Neither have particularly laughable approaches to their needs. The only laughable energy policy is our energy policy.
Coal is laughable for a number of reasons: We have zero mines, and they are massively costly to open (and controversial...) we have zero coal-fire power stations left. We have zero coal-handling infrastructure left (even the old MGR trains...)
I'd strongly argue that money spent correcting these would be much better spent elsewhere; even nuclear.
But my main reason is environmental, but not the gasses. I was born and raised a couple of miles from a large coal-fired power station, and it was impossible to hang washing out if the wind was blowing from that direction, as it would get covered in particles from the coal burning. IMV one of the best pieces of post-war legislation were the various clean air acts, and burning coal - even in power stations - is bad for air quality. (*)
You appear to hate renewables; but going back to coal would be the worst of all worlds.
(*) Orders of magnitude more radiation is released into the environment from burning coal than from nuclear power stations, for the same power generated...
Things not existing doesn't make them laughable - otherwise anything new would be laughable. There was a big plan for a large clean coal power station 15 years or so ago. Alec Salmond was interested for Scotland.
Clearly I don't hate renewables, because tidal is included in my list. I hate undependable, intermittent, and unsuitable renewables whose primary purpose is to farm subsidies.
Tidal is predictable. It's still super intermittent; you have slack tides that change time during the week, and the difference in generation between a spring and neap tide is over 50%. There is very little scope for storage even with lagoons, and utilising the Severn estuary to its full extent would only generate about 10 GW.
To put that into perspective, Scotland alone currently has nearly 50 GW of renewables operating, under construction or in planning. Only 5% of UK households have solar, yet we're generating 12 GW right now.
Perhaps my understanding of this is flawed, and @MarqueeMark may wish to weigh in, but don't the lagoons create electricity both when the water is flooding into it, and when it's flooding out of it? To me that doesn't leave a huge gap in service, and it is, as you say, utterly predictable. There really is no case against it, except that there's little subsidy cash to be spaffed around, due to the inherent workability of the concept. It is certainly nothing like the intermittency, unreliability and unsuitability (solar power at its highest when it's least needed/wind dropping down when it's cold) of wind and solar.
As for that 50GW, how much is actually providing power, not being constrained, or becalmed because the weather isn't right? We have abundant oil and gas, we have coal, we have tides for days. So we're using solar and wind.
The lagoons spread the generation a fair bit. Depends on capacity, but most design don’t actually merge high and low generation - there is a gap.
But the offset between locations is pretty much fixed. So you can site your lagoons around the coast to “fill in” each others generating gaps.
Tidal lagoon power stations are a seawall with gaps, the gaps filled with turbines. As the sea comes in, turbines turn until high tide. You then hold the water until the tide has dropped sufficiently on the other side, then open the sluices and the turbines turn as the water exits. They operate to generate electricity for about 14 hours a day, catching the power of the moon via the tides. It delivers power to our door, twice a day, regardless.
The power of the tides vary on a daily, monthly and 18 year cycle. But they are utterly predictable. You could have a series of lagoons around the west coast of England and Wales. Plus if you really wanted an eco war to end all eco wars, The Wash too. But because of the varying time of high tide around the coast, you can have a significant distribution of 14 hour production daily.
Collect, trap, release, twice a day. For maybe 180 years. Requires no fuel, creates no waste.
Ah but probably won't result in tasty directorships, freebies etc for politicians and senior civil service
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
On reflection, perhaps you were right the first time, and should stay at home.
Don't worry I will turn up in the unlikely event there enough stupid people thinking the lib dems are a good idea in my constituency
God Pagan, lighten up. Anybody would think Ed Davey pissed on your chips or something.
When people express their contempt for tories or labour do you tell them to lighten up? No you don't. My absolute contempt for the lib dems has never been a secret and I have been consistent through the years
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
On reflection, perhaps you were right the first time, and should stay at home.
Don't worry I will turn up in the unlikely event there enough stupid people thinking the lib dems are a good idea in my constituency
God Pagan, lighten up. Anybody would think Ed Davey pissed on your chips or something.
When people express their contempt for tories or labour do you tell them to lighten up? No you don't. My absolute contempt for the lib dems has never been a secret and I have been consistent through the years
Oh dear, I pity you...
No need to pity me isn't me that has spent decades pining for a dead socialist horse to win the fptp race
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
How does the quote go?
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
The US is a democracy. (For the time being anyway)
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
How does the quote go?
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
The US is a democracy. (For the time being anyway)
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
That's quite unusual, voting tactically against the Lib Dems.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
That's quite unusual, voting tactically against the Lib Dems.
I may vote next time, either greens, or reform whoever is best placed to win here. Not because I think either party would be good if they won a majority or that I would like either to have a majority nor because I endorse their policies....purely because it is the only way open to me to send a message to the supposedly serious parties to stop and rethink what they are meant to be getting elected for which is to try and improve life for the whole of the country not just their donors
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
That's quite unusual, voting tactically against the Lib Dems.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
How does the quote go?
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
The US is a democracy. (For the time being anyway)
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
How does the quote go?
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
The US is a democracy. (For the time being anyway)
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
How does the quote go?
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
The US is a democracy. (For the time being anyway)
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
That's quite unusual, voting tactically against the Lib Dems.
Admittedly, the early steps are easier than the later ones. But there's still a decent amount of lowish-hanging fruit. And globally, if we aim for Net Zero by 2050 we will get an awful lot closer than if we don't try.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
How does the quote go?
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
The US is a democracy. (For the time being anyway)
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.
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 mean altering William’s old posts so that it praised the EU?
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.
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.
No rule is hard and fast, so there is something in what you say. But if they cannot get any volunteers to hand out leaflets for them at all, especially as parties manage it all the time, does still say something. Independents get elected all the time, sometimes without any meaningful support, as they can put in the work themselves too.
You're also not entirely correct about web presence, as they often done have any. I tried to find out things about my local parties and websites were usually dead or clearly abandoned, and even Facebook pages were usually thin on information if they existed at all - some of my local parties still don't even list all their candidates in the election taking place tomorrow!
So the power of the leaflet remains, as you really cannot work out what candidates believe in in many cases - especially if they are a paper candidate.
Getting a leaflet is an approximate proxy for a party having local strength, although to be honest you can have little chance and few local members but still do a solid leaflet campaign. That was the story of my first election campaign!
Actually Tony Blair shows how lots of money from Saudi Arabia to his institute leads to a conclusion we need more fossil fuels.
Nah, I think that's a conspiracy theory. A fair few people are quizzing if this is possible, now, or if we're just fruitlessly beggaring ourselves.
The catch with that question is that solar/wind/battery are cheaper than fossil fuels + CCS right now and have the massive advantage of already existing at scale. The price factor has changed a lot in recent years, as OGH Jr points out; and lots of people haven't noticed yet.
The main downside is the balance of initial and ongoing costs. Gas is like an inkjet printer; cheap upfront but expensive to run (which is why it's OK to keep them as backup for a few days a year). Renewable + storage is a laser printer- more expensive upfront, but cheaper over the lifetime.
Getting that sort of decision right is something humans find hard and British humans almost impossible. Hence the scrambling by some for other reasons not to do this.
Sorry but that is simply not true. The strike price of gas is artificially elevated by being on constant stop start due to the intermittency of shite renewables of the type you describe. You don't do your side any favours when you speciously omit key facts because the don't support 'the transition'.
Are you saying if we used more gas the gas would be cheaper?
I am saying that if we used gas consistently it would be cheaper. The cost of constantly restarting gas plants is high, and that cost is placed artificially on the strike price of gas.
If we got rid of "shite renewables" we'd have to produce that electricity in another way. Suggestions?
Also - do you have a citation for how much restarting gas plants adds to the cost of gas?
Dependable renewables like tidal. SMR nuclear. UK produced oil, gas, and potentially coal. And ensure that unreliable intermittent sources (which are a feature now whether I would like it or not) are incentivised to store energy to even out their supply.
No, I don't have prices figures on what percent of the gas price is due to renewable intermittency, but I will try to get some later.
Nuclear is unreliably intermittent...
"The outages of four reactors - two at Heysham and two in Hartlepool - were unplanned, prompted by a part failure in the boiler pipework at Heysham 1 in Lancashire."
I'm in favour of nuclear. I'm in favour of O&G. I'm in favour of renewables. We need a mix, not one thing, all working together to get us security of supply.
And O&G does *not* give us security of supply, and AIUI will automagically not even if we maximise North Sea output. And the thought of going back to coal is laughable.
Large nuclear plants going offline is going to cause an issue (though it's nothing like as intermittent as wind or solar). Many more smaller SMR stations would provide a far more even supply not affected catastrophically by outages (would be my surmise). We need to pivot toward SMRs and away from costly too-big-to-fail nuclear projects with France and China.
I agree we need a mix.
I disagree. There are huge reserves in the North Sea - we need to properly incentivise getting it out. We also need to progress with fracking.
Coal is not 'laughable' when the world's biggest industrial economy is opening coal stations at a rate of knots to supply our windmills. And when even Germany has added more coal to its mix. Neither have particularly laughable approaches to their needs. The only laughable energy policy is our energy policy.
Coal is laughable for a number of reasons: We have zero mines, and they are massively costly to open (and controversial...) we have zero coal-fire power stations left. We have zero coal-handling infrastructure left (even the old MGR trains...)
I'd strongly argue that money spent correcting these would be much better spent elsewhere; even nuclear.
But my main reason is environmental, but not the gasses. I was born and raised a couple of miles from a large coal-fired power station, and it was impossible to hang washing out if the wind was blowing from that direction, as it would get covered in particles from the coal burning. IMV one of the best pieces of post-war legislation were the various clean air acts, and burning coal - even in power stations - is bad for air quality. (*)
You appear to hate renewables; but going back to coal would be the worst of all worlds.
(*) Orders of magnitude more radiation is released into the environment from burning coal than from nuclear power stations, for the same power generated...
Things not existing doesn't make them laughable - otherwise anything new would be laughable. There was a big plan for a large clean coal power station 15 years or so ago. Alec Salmond was interested for Scotland.
Clearly I don't hate renewables, because tidal is included in my list. I hate undependable, intermittent, and unsuitable renewables whose primary purpose is to farm subsidies.
Tidal is predictable. It's still super intermittent; you have slack tides that change time during the week, and the difference in generation between a spring and neap tide is over 50%. There is very little scope for storage even with lagoons, and utilising the Severn estuary to its full extent would only generate about 10 GW.
To put that into perspective, Scotland alone currently has nearly 50 GW of renewables operating, under construction or in planning. Only 5% of UK households have solar, yet we're generating 12 GW right now.
Perhaps my understanding of this is flawed, and @MarqueeMark may wish to weigh in, but don't the lagoons create electricity both when the water is flooding into it, and when it's flooding out of it? To me that doesn't leave a huge gap in service, and it is, as you say, utterly predictable. There really is no case against it, except that there's little subsidy cash to be spaffed around, due to the inherent workability of the concept. It is certainly nothing like the intermittency, unreliability and unsuitability (solar power at its highest when it's least needed/wind dropping down when it's cold) of wind and solar.
As for that 50GW, how much is actually providing power, not being constrained, or becalmed because the weather isn't right? We have abundant oil and gas, we have coal, we have tides for days. So we're using solar and wind.
The lagoons spread the generation a fair bit. Depends on capacity, but most design don’t actually merge high and low generation - there is a gap.
But the offset between locations is pretty much fixed. So you can site your lagoons around the coast to “fill in” each others generating gaps.
Tidal lagoon power stations are a seawall with gaps, the gaps filled with turbines. As the sea comes in, turbines turn until high tide. You then hold the water until the tide has dropped sufficiently on the other side, then open the sluices and the turbines turn as the water exits. They operate to generate electricity for about 14 hours a day, catching the power of the moon via the tides. It delivers power to our door, twice a day, regardless.
The power of the tides vary on a daily, monthly and 18 year cycle. But they are utterly predictable. You could have a series of lagoons around the west coast of England and Wales. Plus if you really wanted an eco war to end all eco wars, The Wash too. But because of the varying time of high tide around the coast, you can have a significant distribution of 14 hour production daily.
Collect, trap, release, twice a day. For maybe 180 years. Requires no fuel, creates no waste.
Isn't the issue the massive scale of the lagoons required to balance output? You don't have the height difference from pumped hydro, and the ratio of storage to output required is very high?
I'm not against tidal at all, it's just the panacea status is a bit unwarranted. I do think it's a bit mad that we haven't built a small test lagoon somewhere to test the idea - a pilot project shouldn't be required to be economically feasible.
One interesting part of Trump so far is how little legislative reform he's passed or attempted.
Best estimate is he's got 21 months left to pass anything.
Why not use this time to make changes that are hard to reverse rather than rely on executive orders that won't outlast his Presidency by more than a few months?
One interesting part of Trump so far is how little legislative reform he's passed or attempted.
Best estimate is he's got 21 months left to pass anything.
Why not use this time to make changes that are hard to reverse rather than rely on executive orders that won't outlast his Presidency by more than a few months?
You are assuming he wont still be in place in 2028
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
How does the quote go?
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
The US is a democracy. (For the time being anyway)
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
One interesting part of Trump so far is how little legislative reform he's passed or attempted.
Best estimate is he's got 21 months left to pass anything.
Why not use this time to make changes that are hard to reverse rather than rely on executive orders that won't outlast his Presidency by more than a few months?
You are assuming he wont still be in place in 2028
You are also assuming that the changes he is implementing now via executive order will be simple to reverse - many of them are going to make fundamental changes that make reversing them impossible (after all how do you rehire workers who left 2+ years ago and now have other jobs)
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
Actually Tony Blair shows how lots of money from Saudi Arabia to his institute leads to a conclusion we need more fossil fuels.
Nah, I think that's a conspiracy theory. A fair few people are quizzing if this is possible, now, or if we're just fruitlessly beggaring ourselves.
The catch with that question is that solar/wind/battery are cheaper than fossil fuels + CCS right now and have the massive advantage of already existing at scale. The price factor has changed a lot in recent years, as OGH Jr points out; and lots of people haven't noticed yet.
The main downside is the balance of initial and ongoing costs. Gas is like an inkjet printer; cheap upfront but expensive to run (which is why it's OK to keep them as backup for a few days a year). Renewable + storage is a laser printer- more expensive upfront, but cheaper over the lifetime.
Getting that sort of decision right is something humans find hard and British humans almost impossible. Hence the scrambling by some for other reasons not to do this.
Sorry but that is simply not true. The strike price of gas is artificially elevated by being on constant stop start due to the intermittency of shite renewables of the type you describe. You don't do your side any favours when you speciously omit key facts because the don't support 'the transition'.
Are you saying if we used more gas the gas would be cheaper?
I am saying that if we used gas consistently it would be cheaper. The cost of constantly restarting gas plants is high, and that cost is placed artificially on the strike price of gas.
If we got rid of "shite renewables" we'd have to produce that electricity in another way. Suggestions?
Also - do you have a citation for how much restarting gas plants adds to the cost of gas?
Dependable renewables like tidal. SMR nuclear. UK produced oil, gas, and potentially coal. And ensure that unreliable intermittent sources (which are a feature now whether I would like it or not) are incentivised to store energy to even out their supply.
No, I don't have prices figures on what percent of the gas price is due to renewable intermittency, but I will try to get some later.
Nuclear is unreliably intermittent...
"The outages of four reactors - two at Heysham and two in Hartlepool - were unplanned, prompted by a part failure in the boiler pipework at Heysham 1 in Lancashire."
I'm in favour of nuclear. I'm in favour of O&G. I'm in favour of renewables. We need a mix, not one thing, all working together to get us security of supply.
And O&G does *not* give us security of supply, and AIUI will automagically not even if we maximise North Sea output. And the thought of going back to coal is laughable.
Large nuclear plants going offline is going to cause an issue (though it's nothing like as intermittent as wind or solar). Many more smaller SMR stations would provide a far more even supply not affected catastrophically by outages (would be my surmise). We need to pivot toward SMRs and away from costly too-big-to-fail nuclear projects with France and China.
I agree we need a mix.
I disagree. There are huge reserves in the North Sea - we need to properly incentivise getting it out. We also need to progress with fracking.
Coal is not 'laughable' when the world's biggest industrial economy is opening coal stations at a rate of knots to supply our windmills. And when even Germany has added more coal to its mix. Neither have particularly laughable approaches to their needs. The only laughable energy policy is our energy policy.
Coal is laughable for a number of reasons: We have zero mines, and they are massively costly to open (and controversial...) we have zero coal-fire power stations left. We have zero coal-handling infrastructure left (even the old MGR trains...)
I'd strongly argue that money spent correcting these would be much better spent elsewhere; even nuclear.
But my main reason is environmental, but not the gasses. I was born and raised a couple of miles from a large coal-fired power station, and it was impossible to hang washing out if the wind was blowing from that direction, as it would get covered in particles from the coal burning. IMV one of the best pieces of post-war legislation were the various clean air acts, and burning coal - even in power stations - is bad for air quality. (*)
You appear to hate renewables; but going back to coal would be the worst of all worlds.
(*) Orders of magnitude more radiation is released into the environment from burning coal than from nuclear power stations, for the same power generated...
Things not existing doesn't make them laughable - otherwise anything new would be laughable. There was a big plan for a large clean coal power station 15 years or so ago. Alec Salmond was interested for Scotland.
Clearly I don't hate renewables, because tidal is included in my list. I hate undependable, intermittent, and unsuitable renewables whose primary purpose is to farm subsidies.
Tidal is predictable. It's still super intermittent; you have slack tides that change time during the week, and the difference in generation between a spring and neap tide is over 50%. There is very little scope for storage even with lagoons, and utilising the Severn estuary to its full extent would only generate about 10 GW.
To put that into perspective, Scotland alone currently has nearly 50 GW of renewables operating, under construction or in planning. Only 5% of UK households have solar, yet we're generating 12 GW right now.
Perhaps my understanding of this is flawed, and @MarqueeMark may wish to weigh in, but don't the lagoons create electricity both when the water is flooding into it, and when it's flooding out of it? To me that doesn't leave a huge gap in service, and it is, as you say, utterly predictable. There really is no case against it, except that there's little subsidy cash to be spaffed around, due to the inherent workability of the concept. It is certainly nothing like the intermittency, unreliability and unsuitability (solar power at its highest when it's least needed/wind dropping down when it's cold) of wind and solar.
As for that 50GW, how much is actually providing power, not being constrained, or becalmed because the weather isn't right? We have abundant oil and gas, we have coal, we have tides for days. So we're using solar and wind.
The lagoons spread the generation a fair bit. Depends on capacity, but most design don’t actually merge high and low generation - there is a gap.
But the offset between locations is pretty much fixed. So you can site your lagoons around the coast to “fill in” each others generating gaps.
Tidal lagoon power stations are a seawall with gaps, the gaps filled with turbines. As the sea comes in, turbines turn until high tide. You then hold the water until the tide has dropped sufficiently on the other side, then open the sluices and the turbines turn as the water exits. They operate to generate electricity for about 14 hours a day, catching the power of the moon via the tides. It delivers power to our door, twice a day, regardless.
The power of the tides vary on a daily, monthly and 18 year cycle. But they are utterly predictable. You could have a series of lagoons around the west coast of England and Wales. Plus if you really wanted an eco war to end all eco wars, The Wash too. But because of the varying time of high tide around the coast, you can have a significant distribution of 14 hour production daily.
Collect, trap, release, twice a day. For maybe 180 years. Requires no fuel, creates no waste.
Isn't the issue the massive scale of the lagoons required to balance output? You don't have the height difference from pumped hydro, and the ratio of storage to output required is very high?
I'm not against tidal at all, it's just the panacea status is a bit unwarranted. I do think it's a bit mad that we haven't built a small test lagoon somewhere to test the idea - a pilot project shouldn't be required to be economically feasible.
Do you need a pilot if the French have been running one for half a century?
There were also some test rigs of sea bed turbines if I recall. There was certainly one in the channel between the mainland and Ramsey Island in Pembrokeshire but it failed quite quickly:
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
As of November 2023, around 145 countries had announced or are considering net zero targets, covering close to 90% of global emissions.[9] [...] Country-level net zero targets now cover 92% of global GDP, 88% of emissions and 89% of the world population.[8]
And:
The International Monetary Fund estimates that compared to current government policies, shifting policies to bring emissions to net zero by 2050 would result in global gross domestic product (GDP) being 7 percent higher. In its estimates, the cost of emissions reductions in 2050 is less than 2% of world GDP, and the cost savings from reducing the effects of climate change are approximately 9% of world GDP.[63]
I appreciate their effort though i bet its one step above tea leaves given very local factorslike strong Indies or paper candidates. Seems plausible on its face overall though.
OK having been horribly mean about London for the last six weeks (years?) I have to confess, nothing makes you appreciate the beauty of Georgian/early Victorian townhouse architecture, as six weeks spent in the largely Soviet and post Soviet buildings of Central Asia (the odd bit of Samarkand and Astana excepted)
My God, London can be lovely. Especially in warm late April sun. Especially around Primrose Hill, it is sublime
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
Your vote your (non) choice, although don't expect the parties to learn anything from people sitting it out.
They don't learn anything by holding your nose and voting for one of them either so its no worse
How does the quote go...if voting could change anything they wouldn't allow it
How does the quote go?
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
The US is a democracy. (For the time being anyway)
The devil is in the details and oh holy fuck, these demons are legion.
And this last sentence is I think referring to the $1bn corrupt protection racket (ie free legal work as Trump demands from law firms Trump does not exclude from Government contracts) that Trump has been running.
The Attorney General shall take all appropriate action to create a mechanism to provide legal resources and indemnification to law enforcement officers who unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law. This mechanism shall include the use of private-sector pro bono assistance for such law enforcement officers
"Trump’s revolution is the only way to save America, says the architect of Project 2025 Paul Dans argues that the system needed smashing and rebuilding"
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
France signed up to follow eu rules but ignore them when it suits Russia promised not to invade ukraine in 94 America promised security support for ukraine in 94 if they gave up nukes
Three examples, you may call me a cynic all you like....reality tells me that what a country says and what it does for its own self interest are two entirely different things largely. I counter your cynic accusation with you are a starry eyed optimist.
The main difference there between us is sometimes I get a pleasant surprise when I turn out to be too cynicial whereas you are doomed to perpetual disappointment
Actually Tony Blair shows how lots of money from Saudi Arabia to his institute leads to a conclusion we need more fossil fuels.
Nah, I think that's a conspiracy theory. A fair few people are quizzing if this is possible, now, or if we're just fruitlessly beggaring ourselves.
The catch with that question is that solar/wind/battery are cheaper than fossil fuels + CCS right now and have the massive advantage of already existing at scale. The price factor has changed a lot in recent years, as OGH Jr points out; and lots of people haven't noticed yet.
The main downside is the balance of initial and ongoing costs. Gas is like an inkjet printer; cheap upfront but expensive to run (which is why it's OK to keep them as backup for a few days a year). Renewable + storage is a laser printer- more expensive upfront, but cheaper over the lifetime.
Getting that sort of decision right is something humans find hard and British humans almost impossible. Hence the scrambling by some for other reasons not to do this.
Sorry but that is simply not true. The strike price of gas is artificially elevated by being on constant stop start due to the intermittency of shite renewables of the type you describe. You don't do your side any favours when you speciously omit key facts because the don't support 'the transition'.
Are you saying if we used more gas the gas would be cheaper?
I am saying that if we used gas consistently it would be cheaper. The cost of constantly restarting gas plants is high, and that cost is placed artificially on the strike price of gas.
If we got rid of "shite renewables" we'd have to produce that electricity in another way. Suggestions?
Also - do you have a citation for how much restarting gas plants adds to the cost of gas?
Dependable renewables like tidal. SMR nuclear. UK produced oil, gas, and potentially coal. And ensure that unreliable intermittent sources (which are a feature now whether I would like it or not) are incentivised to store energy to even out their supply.
No, I don't have prices figures on what percent of the gas price is due to renewable intermittency, but I will try to get some later.
Nuclear is unreliably intermittent...
"The outages of four reactors - two at Heysham and two in Hartlepool - were unplanned, prompted by a part failure in the boiler pipework at Heysham 1 in Lancashire."
I'm in favour of nuclear. I'm in favour of O&G. I'm in favour of renewables. We need a mix, not one thing, all working together to get us security of supply.
And O&G does *not* give us security of supply, and AIUI will automagically not even if we maximise North Sea output. And the thought of going back to coal is laughable.
Large nuclear plants going offline is going to cause an issue (though it's nothing like as intermittent as wind or solar). Many more smaller SMR stations would provide a far more even supply not affected catastrophically by outages (would be my surmise). We need to pivot toward SMRs and away from costly too-big-to-fail nuclear projects with France and China.
I agree we need a mix.
I disagree. There are huge reserves in the North Sea - we need to properly incentivise getting it out. We also need to progress with fracking.
Coal is not 'laughable' when the world's biggest industrial economy is opening coal stations at a rate of knots to supply our windmills. And when even Germany has added more coal to its mix. Neither have particularly laughable approaches to their needs. The only laughable energy policy is our energy policy.
Coal is laughable for a number of reasons: We have zero mines, and they are massively costly to open (and controversial...) we have zero coal-fire power stations left. We have zero coal-handling infrastructure left (even the old MGR trains...)
I'd strongly argue that money spent correcting these would be much better spent elsewhere; even nuclear.
But my main reason is environmental, but not the gasses. I was born and raised a couple of miles from a large coal-fired power station, and it was impossible to hang washing out if the wind was blowing from that direction, as it would get covered in particles from the coal burning. IMV one of the best pieces of post-war legislation were the various clean air acts, and burning coal - even in power stations - is bad for air quality. (*)
You appear to hate renewables; but going back to coal would be the worst of all worlds.
(*) Orders of magnitude more radiation is released into the environment from burning coal than from nuclear power stations, for the same power generated...
Things not existing doesn't make them laughable - otherwise anything new would be laughable. There was a big plan for a large clean coal power station 15 years or so ago. Alec Salmond was interested for Scotland.
Clearly I don't hate renewables, because tidal is included in my list. I hate undependable, intermittent, and unsuitable renewables whose primary purpose is to farm subsidies.
Tidal is predictable. It's still super intermittent; you have slack tides that change time during the week, and the difference in generation between a spring and neap tide is over 50%. There is very little scope for storage even with lagoons, and utilising the Severn estuary to its full extent would only generate about 10 GW.
To put that into perspective, Scotland alone currently has nearly 50 GW of renewables operating, under construction or in planning. Only 5% of UK households have solar, yet we're generating 12 GW right now.
Perhaps my understanding of this is flawed, and @MarqueeMark may wish to weigh in, but don't the lagoons create electricity both when the water is flooding into it, and when it's flooding out of it? To me that doesn't leave a huge gap in service, and it is, as you say, utterly predictable. There really is no case against it, except that there's little subsidy cash to be spaffed around, due to the inherent workability of the concept. It is certainly nothing like the intermittency, unreliability and unsuitability (solar power at its highest when it's least needed/wind dropping down when it's cold) of wind and solar.
As for that 50GW, how much is actually providing power, not being constrained, or becalmed because the weather isn't right? We have abundant oil and gas, we have coal, we have tides for days. So we're using solar and wind.
The lagoons spread the generation a fair bit. Depends on capacity, but most design don’t actually merge high and low generation - there is a gap.
But the offset between locations is pretty much fixed. So you can site your lagoons around the coast to “fill in” each others generating gaps.
Tidal lagoon power stations are a seawall with gaps, the gaps filled with turbines. As the sea comes in, turbines turn until high tide. You then hold the water until the tide has dropped sufficiently on the other side, then open the sluices and the turbines turn as the water exits. They operate to generate electricity for about 14 hours a day, catching the power of the moon via the tides. It delivers power to our door, twice a day, regardless.
The power of the tides vary on a daily, monthly and 18 year cycle. But they are utterly predictable. You could have a series of lagoons around the west coast of England and Wales. Plus if you really wanted an eco war to end all eco wars, The Wash too. But because of the varying time of high tide around the coast, you can have a significant distribution of 14 hour production daily.
Collect, trap, release, twice a day. For maybe 180 years. Requires no fuel, creates no waste.
Isn't the issue the massive scale of the lagoons required to balance output? You don't have the height difference from pumped hydro, and the ratio of storage to output required is very high?
I'm not against tidal at all, it's just the panacea status is a bit unwarranted. I do think it's a bit mad that we haven't built a small test lagoon somewhere to test the idea - a pilot project shouldn't be required to be economically feasible.
Do you need a pilot if the French have been running one for half a century?
There were also some test rigs of sea bed turbines if I recall. There was certainly one in the channel between the mainland and Ramsey Island in Pembrokeshire but it failed quite quickly:
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
The first COP meeting was in 1995, 30 years ago, and CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, (and Trump is the POTUS). It is not unrealistic to have a degree of scepticism about the 2050 target, regardless of personal views about what would be good for the planet.
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.
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 won't vote for a party that knocks on my door as its a major irritation and interruption making me answer the door to be lied blatantly too.
I thought you never voted anyway.
Not since 2010 before that I voted in every election. I merely gave up in disgust at the absolute clueless mediocrities all parties tried foisting on us
That’s simply you getting older.
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
It doesn't really matter they are all equally crap, only the lib dems are the worst which is why I will vote anyone to keep one out
That's quite unusual, voting tactically against the Lib Dems.
I may vote next time, either greens, or reform whoever is best placed to win here. Not because I think either party would be good if they won a majority or that I would like either to have a majority nor because I endorse their policies....purely because it is the only way open to me to send a message to the supposedly serious parties to stop and rethink what they are meant to be getting elected for which is to try and improve life for the whole of the country not just their donors
Don't vote Reform, Pagan, if you value our relationship. Greens ok.
OK having been horribly mean about London for the last six weeks (years?) I have to confess, nothing makes you appreciate the beauty of Georgian/early Victorian townhouse architecture, as six weeks spent in the largely Soviet and post Soviet buildings of Central Asia (the odd bit of Samarkand and Astana excepted)
My God, London can be lovely. Especially in warm late April sun. Especially around Primrose Hill, it is sublime
But why the F can't we build like that, any more?
We can, and Welborne in southern Hampshire looks like showing that you don't even need royal involvement.
But doing it and making space for three cars per household is blooming difficult.
Actually Tony Blair shows how lots of money from Saudi Arabia to his institute leads to a conclusion we need more fossil fuels.
Nah, I think that's a conspiracy theory. A fair few people are quizzing if this is possible, now, or if we're just fruitlessly beggaring ourselves.
The catch with that question is that solar/wind/battery are cheaper than fossil fuels + CCS right now and have the massive advantage of already existing at scale. The price factor has changed a lot in recent years, as OGH Jr points out; and lots of people haven't noticed yet.
The main downside is the balance of initial and ongoing costs. Gas is like an inkjet printer; cheap upfront but expensive to run (which is why it's OK to keep them as backup for a few days a year). Renewable + storage is a laser printer- more expensive upfront, but cheaper over the lifetime.
Getting that sort of decision right is something humans find hard and British humans almost impossible. Hence the scrambling by some for other reasons not to do this.
Sorry but that is simply not true. The strike price of gas is artificially elevated by being on constant stop start due to the intermittency of shite renewables of the type you describe. You don't do your side any favours when you speciously omit key facts because the don't support 'the transition'.
Are you saying if we used more gas the gas would be cheaper?
I am saying that if we used gas consistently it would be cheaper. The cost of constantly restarting gas plants is high, and that cost is placed artificially on the strike price of gas.
If we got rid of "shite renewables" we'd have to produce that electricity in another way. Suggestions?
Also - do you have a citation for how much restarting gas plants adds to the cost of gas?
Dependable renewables like tidal. SMR nuclear. UK produced oil, gas, and potentially coal. And ensure that unreliable intermittent sources (which are a feature now whether I would like it or not) are incentivised to store energy to even out their supply.
No, I don't have prices figures on what percent of the gas price is due to renewable intermittency, but I will try to get some later.
Nuclear is unreliably intermittent...
"The outages of four reactors - two at Heysham and two in Hartlepool - were unplanned, prompted by a part failure in the boiler pipework at Heysham 1 in Lancashire."
I'm in favour of nuclear. I'm in favour of O&G. I'm in favour of renewables. We need a mix, not one thing, all working together to get us security of supply.
And O&G does *not* give us security of supply, and AIUI will automagically not even if we maximise North Sea output. And the thought of going back to coal is laughable.
Large nuclear plants going offline is going to cause an issue (though it's nothing like as intermittent as wind or solar). Many more smaller SMR stations would provide a far more even supply not affected catastrophically by outages (would be my surmise). We need to pivot toward SMRs and away from costly too-big-to-fail nuclear projects with France and China.
I agree we need a mix.
I disagree. There are huge reserves in the North Sea - we need to properly incentivise getting it out. We also need to progress with fracking.
Coal is not 'laughable' when the world's biggest industrial economy is opening coal stations at a rate of knots to supply our windmills. And when even Germany has added more coal to its mix. Neither have particularly laughable approaches to their needs. The only laughable energy policy is our energy policy.
Coal is laughable for a number of reasons: We have zero mines, and they are massively costly to open (and controversial...) we have zero coal-fire power stations left. We have zero coal-handling infrastructure left (even the old MGR trains...)
I'd strongly argue that money spent correcting these would be much better spent elsewhere; even nuclear.
But my main reason is environmental, but not the gasses. I was born and raised a couple of miles from a large coal-fired power station, and it was impossible to hang washing out if the wind was blowing from that direction, as it would get covered in particles from the coal burning. IMV one of the best pieces of post-war legislation were the various clean air acts, and burning coal - even in power stations - is bad for air quality. (*)
You appear to hate renewables; but going back to coal would be the worst of all worlds.
(*) Orders of magnitude more radiation is released into the environment from burning coal than from nuclear power stations, for the same power generated...
Things not existing doesn't make them laughable - otherwise anything new would be laughable. There was a big plan for a large clean coal power station 15 years or so ago. Alec Salmond was interested for Scotland.
Clearly I don't hate renewables, because tidal is included in my list. I hate undependable, intermittent, and unsuitable renewables whose primary purpose is to farm subsidies.
Tidal is predictable. It's still super intermittent; you have slack tides that change time during the week, and the difference in generation between a spring and neap tide is over 50%. There is very little scope for storage even with lagoons, and utilising the Severn estuary to its full extent would only generate about 10 GW.
To put that into perspective, Scotland alone currently has nearly 50 GW of renewables operating, under construction or in planning. Only 5% of UK households have solar, yet we're generating 12 GW right now.
Perhaps my understanding of this is flawed, and @MarqueeMark may wish to weigh in, but don't the lagoons create electricity both when the water is flooding into it, and when it's flooding out of it? To me that doesn't leave a huge gap in service, and it is, as you say, utterly predictable. There really is no case against it, except that there's little subsidy cash to be spaffed around, due to the inherent workability of the concept. It is certainly nothing like the intermittency, unreliability and unsuitability (solar power at its highest when it's least needed/wind dropping down when it's cold) of wind and solar.
As for that 50GW, how much is actually providing power, not being constrained, or becalmed because the weather isn't right? We have abundant oil and gas, we have coal, we have tides for days. So we're using solar and wind.
The lagoons spread the generation a fair bit. Depends on capacity, but most design don’t actually merge high and low generation - there is a gap.
But the offset between locations is pretty much fixed. So you can site your lagoons around the coast to “fill in” each others generating gaps.
Tidal lagoon power stations are a seawall with gaps, the gaps filled with turbines. As the sea comes in, turbines turn until high tide. You then hold the water until the tide has dropped sufficiently on the other side, then open the sluices and the turbines turn as the water exits. They operate to generate electricity for about 14 hours a day, catching the power of the moon via the tides. It delivers power to our door, twice a day, regardless.
The power of the tides vary on a daily, monthly and 18 year cycle. But they are utterly predictable. You could have a series of lagoons around the west coast of England and Wales. Plus if you really wanted an eco war to end all eco wars, The Wash too. But because of the varying time of high tide around the coast, you can have a significant distribution of 14 hour production daily.
Collect, trap, release, twice a day. For maybe 180 years. Requires no fuel, creates no waste.
Ah but probably won't result in tasty directorships, freebies etc for politicians and senior civil service
Oh I dont know.
- What are you doing? - I’m head of the tide timing division at the Little Fuckwington-upon-sea tidal lagoon. - What does that entail? - my division (3k people) note down the time when the tide comes in. - Hard work? - Extremely. I’m worth every penny of £1.2m a year.
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
The first COP meeting was in 1995, 30 years ago, and CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, (and Trump is the POTUS). It is not unrealistic to have a degree of scepticism about the 2050 target, regardless of personal views about what would be good for the planet.
Don't forget since then germany have closed all the nuclear plants and still has 58 coal power plants burning lignite
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
The first COP meeting was in 1995, 30 years ago, and CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, (and Trump is the POTUS). It is not unrealistic to have a degree of scepticism about the 2050 target, regardless of personal views about what would be good for the planet.
A degree of scepticism is entirely appropriate. Pagan2's cynicism is, I humbly suggest, overdone.
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
The first COP meeting was in 1995, 30 years ago, and CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, (and Trump is the POTUS). It is not unrealistic to have a degree of scepticism about the 2050 target, regardless of personal views about what would be good for the planet.
Trump, by crashing the US economy and radically reducing international trade, is doing a great job at reducing US carbon emissions. I mean, I prefer the UK approach of reducing carbon emissions and having a growing economy, but Trump has his own way of doing things...
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
The first COP meeting was in 1995, 30 years ago, and CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, (and Trump is the POTUS). It is not unrealistic to have a degree of scepticism about the 2050 target, regardless of personal views about what would be good for the planet.
Trump, by crashing the US economy and radically reducing international trade, is doing a great job at reducing US carbon emissions. I mean, I prefer the UK approach of reducing carbon emissions and having a growing economy, but Trump has his own way of doing things...
Have we done this?
Trump on China: "They made a trillion dollars with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don't need. Somebody said, 'oh, the shelves are gonna be open.' Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more."
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
The first COP meeting was in 1995, 30 years ago, and CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, (and Trump is the POTUS). It is not unrealistic to have a degree of scepticism about the 2050 target, regardless of personal views about what would be good for the planet.
Trump, by crashing the US economy and radically reducing international trade, is doing a great job at reducing US carbon emissions. I mean, I prefer the UK approach of reducing carbon emissions and having a growing economy, but Trump has his own way of doing things...
Have we done this?
Trump on China: "They made a trillion dollars with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don't need. Somebody said, 'oh, the shelves are gonna be open.' Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more."
Maybe he's right, but it's a brave statement, Mr President.
I think the major mistake he has made is reducing VA benefits, soldiers want to know they will be looked after if he wants the military properly onside for taking over the state properly.
*Mistake from the point of view of establishing his rule that is not saying I want that to happen as too many american friends
"Trump’s revolution is the only way to save America, says the architect of Project 2025 Paul Dans argues that the system needed smashing and rebuilding"
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
The first COP meeting was in 1995, 30 years ago, and CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, (and Trump is the POTUS). It is not unrealistic to have a degree of scepticism about the 2050 target, regardless of personal views about what would be good for the planet.
Our investments in wind, solar and battery technology will already make an enormous difference to the total volume of carbon the world emits over the next 50-100 years, dramatically reducing the damage caused by climate change. I also think there is a good chance they will stimulate economic growth far more than a counterfactual where we had stuck with fossil fuels, given just how efficient electricity and associated technologies are.
The question is whether we stick with it. I think we should, because the difference between 2 degrees and 3 (and 4 and 5) degrees looks very ugly. But I also think we should start to think about adaptation - at some point, perhaps soon, the optimal path will change to investing more in sea walls and air conditioning.
One interesting part of Trump so far is how little legislative reform he's passed or attempted.
Best estimate is he's got 21 months left to pass anything.
Why not use this time to make changes that are hard to reverse rather than rely on executive orders that won't outlast his Presidency by more than a few months?
Because the plan of those behind Trump does not rely on current legislation, nor a fully legislated framework. The plan is to first subvert, intimidate and control the state processes so that either elections won't happen, or they will be rigged/propagandised in favour of the 2025 plan and Trumpism. This cannot be overtly legislated for as too many people would notice and it might lose in congress.
Once you are past the 'Reichstag Fire' moment either by a single event or a process of attrition you can legislate at your leisure.
IMO the plan will probably fail, though not without huge damage. If it succeeds, a new dark age awaits. While views about 'succeed' or 'fail' will be subjective and therefore a bit vague, I would put it at: Trumpism succeed: 30%, fail 70%. Huge damage approx 100%.
The courts are doing their bit. When congress does as well the tide may turn.
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
The first COP meeting was in 1995, 30 years ago, and CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, (and Trump is the POTUS). It is not unrealistic to have a degree of scepticism about the 2050 target, regardless of personal views about what would be good for the planet.
Trump, by crashing the US economy and radically reducing international trade, is doing a great job at reducing US carbon emissions. I mean, I prefer the UK approach of reducing carbon emissions and having a growing economy, but Trump has his own way of doing things...
When it rebounds a little he and his supporters will ignore it ever dipped at all.
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
The first COP meeting was in 1995, 30 years ago, and CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, (and Trump is the POTUS). It is not unrealistic to have a degree of scepticism about the 2050 target, regardless of personal views about what would be good for the planet.
Trump, by crashing the US economy and radically reducing international trade, is doing a great job at reducing US carbon emissions. I mean, I prefer the UK approach of reducing carbon emissions and having a growing economy, but Trump has his own way of doing things...
Have we done this?
Trump on China: "They made a trillion dollars with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don't need. Somebody said, 'oh, the shelves are gonna be open.' Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more."
Maybe he's right, but it's a brave statement, Mr President.
People are not used to a political leader taking a moral stance against excessive consumption, and perhaps only someone like Trump can get away with it.
One interesting part of Trump so far is how little legislative reform he's passed or attempted.
Best estimate is he's got 21 months left to pass anything.
Why not use this time to make changes that are hard to reverse rather than rely on executive orders that won't outlast his Presidency by more than a few months?
Because the plan of those behind Trump does not rely on current legislation, nor a fully legislated framework. The plan is to first subvert, intimidate and control the state processes so that either elections won't happen, or they will be rigged/propagandised in favour of the 2025 plan and Trumpism. This cannot be overtly legislated for as too many people would notice and it might lose in congress.
Once you are past the 'Reichstag Fire' moment either by a single event or a process of attrition you can legislate at your leisure.
IMO the plan will probably fail, though not without huge damage. If it succeeds, a new dark age awaits. While views about 'succeed' or 'fail' will be subjective and therefore a bit vague, I would put it at: Trumpism succeed: 30%, fail 70%. Huge damage approx 100%.
The courts are doing their bit. When congress does as well the tide may turn.
He is turning on media outlets that don't support him and law firms that bring suits against his administration so I wouldn't count on the plan not working. Courts cant work if no law firm will oppose the administration and media won't report
I don't think we'll achieve it either, but I still think we should.
There is currently Zero evidence that the world will achieve net zero by 2050, and at the moment CO2 emissions are both continuing and at a rate faster than previously (USA, Russia, China, India etc). The world is saying it is trying to decrease something while increasing it.
So the real question, being political and pragmatic, is: When everyone stops fooling themselves and realises this, will there be any political will in the UK (or any other country) to 'go it alone' when it makes no substantial difference?
The three groups with a will for going it alone are:
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition' b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition' c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
The last time we really did a 'go it alone' was under Elizabeth I maybe? That worked out rather well.
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
We are not talking about an independent foreign policy (if only), we are talking about unilateral economic self-mutilation when nobody else can be arsed. No other countries are opposing our Net Zero plans, they are simply looking on with pitying bemusement.
That’s a complete myth. Nearly every country in the world has a net zero goal, generally in a similar time frame.
There is a difference between
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
You are a cynic and wouldn't believe it, whatever those countries actually did.
The first COP meeting was in 1995, 30 years ago, and CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, (and Trump is the POTUS). It is not unrealistic to have a degree of scepticism about the 2050 target, regardless of personal views about what would be good for the planet.
Trump, by crashing the US economy and radically reducing international trade, is doing a great job at reducing US carbon emissions. I mean, I prefer the UK approach of reducing carbon emissions and having a growing economy, but Trump has his own way of doing things...
Have we done this?
Trump on China: "They made a trillion dollars with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don't need. Somebody said, 'oh, the shelves are gonna be open.' Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more."
Maybe he's right, but it's a brave statement, Mr President.
People are not used to a political leader taking a moral stance against excessive consumption, and perhaps only someone like Trump can get away with it.
Trump's entire life has been one big moral stand against excessive consumption.
OK having been horribly mean about London for the last six weeks (years?) I have to confess, nothing makes you appreciate the beauty of Georgian/early Victorian townhouse architecture, as six weeks spent in the largely Soviet and post Soviet buildings of Central Asia (the odd bit of Samarkand and Astana excepted)
My God, London can be lovely. Especially in warm late April sun. Especially around Primrose Hill, it is sublime
But why the F can't we build like that, any more?
We can, and Welborne in southern Hampshire looks like showing that you don't even need royal involvement.
But doing it and making space for three cars per household is blooming difficult.
Tell these twats that if they want THREE cars they can fuck off. Then build these beautiful Georgian terraces and squares with enough parking for one car at most. And then: let the market decide
I suspect the people moaning about their stupid cars will suddenly forget their gripes and go for the beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood
OK having been horribly mean about London for the last six weeks (years?) I have to confess, nothing makes you appreciate the beauty of Georgian/early Victorian townhouse architecture, as six weeks spent in the largely Soviet and post Soviet buildings of Central Asia (the odd bit of Samarkand and Astana excepted)
My God, London can be lovely. Especially in warm late April sun. Especially around Primrose Hill, it is sublime
But why the F can't we build like that, any more?
I got a cab through Holland Park on Monday evening and the houses made me feel like I was in an episode of Columbo
Later on I was waiting for an Uber in Shepherds Bush, and it felt more like The Wire
OK having been horribly mean about London for the last six weeks (years?) I have to confess, nothing makes you appreciate the beauty of Georgian/early Victorian townhouse architecture, as six weeks spent in the largely Soviet and post Soviet buildings of Central Asia (the odd bit of Samarkand and Astana excepted)
My God, London can be lovely. Especially in warm late April sun. Especially around Primrose Hill, it is sublime
But why the F can't we build like that, any more?
We can, and Welborne in southern Hampshire looks like showing that you don't even need royal involvement.
But doing it and making space for three cars per household is blooming difficult.
Tell these twats that if they want THREE cars they can fuck off. Then build these beautiful Georgian terraces and squares with enough parking for one car at most. And then: let the market decide
I suspect the people moaning about their stupid cars will suddenly forget their gripes and go for the beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood
You live alone 1 car is plenty....a family including a grown up child still living at home may well need 3 cars because all their jobs are in different directions. You forget london is uniquely blessed with public transport in a lot of places it is rare than unicorn farts
Comments
It's an election, he got more votes than his brother from those eligible who voted. Given the voters were Labour members, that DM is currently a highly remunerated CEO of an NGO in the US and EM is Labour minister, attempting to enact Labour manifesto commitments for a Green Industrial Revolution (hampered by the cowardly leadership), then their choice was understandable.
Brexit is Cameron's fault, put it to a binary referendum with no thresholds when arguably best-placed to know how much money from his party donors would put behind Brexit.
He could well be transformative, if his party (Starmer, Reeves etc) let him, and he's displaying more convictions and backbone than the others who are so keen to ape Reform.
That's not a criticism - it's good tactics. But which of those two speed settings do you think they are on in Runcorn? I think we all know.
I have this at work, I have to declare all hospitality I receive and give out, I also I have to register it to the ethics team (of which I am on) also to the payroll and accounts team who have update my P11D.
It took them six years to have a single reporting system.
But I haven’t been a member for eight years now, and I’ve received a few invitations to go help in Runcorn. So someone there is doing something, at least. And having experienced the calculated chaos of a supposed Green top target campaign here in the IOW, I’d wager that the LDs effort in first gear is better than the Greens’ at top speed.
Looking at the bigger picture, a couple of elections back, the LDs were prepared to do a (limited) seat sharing deal with the Greens. Now, I sense they’re waking up to the risk of ceding the position of “progressive opposition to Labour in their own seats” to the Greens, and risk finding themselves left as merely the opposition to the Tories in the shires. If they have any sense, this is something they need to start thinking about sooner rather than later, since giving up on the long tradition of English urban non conformist liberalism would be a sad thing indeed.
SFAICS all senior politicians have been trained in all this, and it's second nature in how they always speak in public.
But the offset between locations is pretty much fixed. So you can site your lagoons around the coast to “fill in” each others generating gaps.
Florida nurse caught by husband having sex with her 15-year-old stepson loses medical license: report
https://nypost.com/2025/04/30/us-news/florida-nurse-caught-by-husband-having-sex-with-her-15-year-old-stepson-loses-medical-license-report/
You’re supposed to simply vote for the least clueless, and hope for the best.
a) People who are making obscene amounts of money from 'the transition'
b) People who are taking obscene amounts of money from the people making onscene amounts of money from 'the transition'
c) Real hardcore nutters who would like us to re-enter the stone age
https://factoryinternational.org/whats-on/hamlet-hail-to-the-thief/
(And if you argue it was under Cromwell, then that also finished up as not so bad)
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
- Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
There is a vast amount of work to be done to get anywhere near net-zero, and a lot of that work is frontloaded. As an example, you cannot really start implementing battery storage solutions at the scale required until the battery tech is mature enough and suitable factories are built. These are all frontloaded, but when they are done, you can ramp up very quickly.
Ditto many other areas, e.g. EV cars (though there are other infrastructure issues that need solving with those; it is not just building the cars).
If you look at the way wind power in the UK has increased over the years (1), then you can see how quickly things can be ramped up, given the will. (If you like renewables, it is also a great credit to the coalition and Conservative governments...). But you cannot start that ramp-up until the tech is there and scalable.
But there are still very large technological problems that need solving, let alone being in a position to scale up.
(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File:Wind_power_installed_capacity_in_UK_MW.svg
There is a difference between being anti democracy and being anti this democracy.
The power of the tides vary on a daily, monthly and 18 year cycle. But they are utterly predictable. You could have a series of lagoons around the west coast of England and Wales. Plus if you really wanted an eco war to end all eco wars, The Wash too. But because of the varying time of high tide around the coast, you can have a significant distribution of 14 hour production daily.
Collect, trap, release, twice a day. For maybe 180 years. Requires no fuel, creates no waste.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/30/trump-executive-order-says-its-time-to-unleash-cops-turn-america-into-a-police-state/
Not because I think either party would be good if they won a majority or that I would like either to have a majority nor because I endorse their policies....purely because it is the only way open to me to send a message to the supposedly serious parties to stop and rethink what they are meant to be getting elected for which is to try and improve life for the whole of the country not just their donors
https://bsky.app/profile/acjsissons.bsky.social/post/3lo2fjy6gkk25
Admittedly, the early steps are easier than the later ones. But there's still a decent amount of lowish-hanging fruit. And globally, if we aim for Net Zero by 2050 we will get an awful lot closer than if we don't try.
I'm not against tidal at all, it's just the panacea status is a bit unwarranted. I do think it's a bit mad that we haven't built a small test lagoon somewhere to test the idea - a pilot project shouldn't be required to be economically feasible.
Best estimate is he's got 21 months left to pass anything.
Why not use this time to make changes that are hard to reverse rather than rely on executive orders that won't outlast his Presidency by more than a few months?
Oh, not that Sharpe !
having a net zero policy you are actually trying to implement
and
having a net zero policy you agreed to in order to get a photo op signing up for a climate accord that you have no intention of seriously trying for.
I would suggest most countries fall into the latter category
Politics UK has predicted the local election result for every council ward
🔵 CON: 452 cllrs
🟡 LIB: 414 cllrs
🔴LAB: 101 cllrs
➡️ REF: 522 cllrs
🟢 GREEN: 79 cllrs
There were also some test rigs of sea bed turbines if I recall. There was certainly one in the channel between the mainland and Ramsey Island in Pembrokeshire but it failed quite quickly:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-38236014
Probably not the best idea for several reasons, although you can't help but look at the Minch and wonder.
As of November 2023, around 145 countries had announced or are considering net zero targets, covering close to 90% of global emissions.[9] [...] Country-level net zero targets now cover 92% of global GDP, 88% of emissions and 89% of the world population.[8]
And:
The International Monetary Fund estimates that compared to current government policies, shifting policies to bring emissions to net zero by 2050 would result in global gross domestic product (GDP) being 7 percent higher. In its estimates, the cost of emissions reductions in 2050 is less than 2% of world GDP, and the cost savings from reducing the effects of climate change are approximately 9% of world GDP.[63]
My God, London can be lovely. Especially in warm late April sun. Especially around Primrose Hill, it is sublime
But why the F can't we build like that, any more?
That's certainly possible from what I hear but I can't see it being a completely even swing.
Interesting times, I guess...
How many Brits would understand this:
The devil is in the details and oh holy fuck, these demons are legion.
And this last sentence is I think referring to the $1bn corrupt protection racket (ie free legal work as Trump demands from law firms Trump does not exclude from Government contracts) that Trump has been running.
The Attorney General shall take all appropriate action to create a mechanism to provide legal resources and indemnification to law enforcement officers who unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law. This mechanism shall include the use of private-sector pro bono assistance for such law enforcement officers
Paul Dans argues that the system needed smashing and rebuilding"
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2025/04/29/trumps-revolution-is-the-only-way-to-save-america-says-the-architect-of-project-2025
Russia promised not to invade ukraine in 94
America promised security support for ukraine in 94 if they gave up nukes
Three examples, you may call me a cynic all you like....reality tells me that what a country says and what it does for its own self interest are two entirely different things largely. I counter your cynic accusation with you are a starry eyed optimist.
The main difference there between us is sometimes I get a pleasant surprise when I turn out to be too cynicial whereas you are doomed to perpetual disappointment
ROS playing poorly, Si Jiahui on fire. 11-9 at the interval.
But doing it and making space for three cars per household is blooming difficult.
- What are you doing?
- I’m head of the tide timing division at the Little Fuckwington-upon-sea tidal lagoon.
- What does that entail?
- my division (3k people) note down the time when the tide comes in.
- Hard work?
- Extremely. I’m worth every penny of £1.2m a year.
Trump on China: "They made a trillion dollars with Biden selling us stuff. Much of it we don't need. Somebody said, 'oh, the shelves are gonna be open.' Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more."
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lo2dloetgk2l
Maybe he's right, but it's a brave statement, Mr President.
Judd, that is.
*Mistake from the point of view of establishing his rule that is not saying I want that to happen as too many american friends
The question is whether we stick with it. I think we should, because the difference between 2 degrees and 3 (and 4 and 5) degrees looks very ugly. But I also think we should start to think about adaptation - at some point, perhaps soon, the optimal path will change to investing more in sea walls and air conditioning.
Once you are past the 'Reichstag Fire' moment either by a single event or a process of attrition you can legislate at your leisure.
IMO the plan will probably fail, though not without huge damage. If it succeeds, a new dark age awaits. While views about 'succeed' or 'fail' will be subjective and therefore a bit vague, I would put it at: Trumpism succeed: 30%, fail 70%. Huge damage approx 100%.
The courts are doing their bit. When congress does as well the tide may turn.
I suspect the people moaning about their stupid cars will suddenly forget their gripes and go for the beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood
Later on I was waiting for an Uber in Shepherds Bush, and it felt more like The Wire