It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Trouble is, the corollary of (b) might be even worse politically, if HMG moves asylum seekers out of hotels and into Angela Rayner's newly-built homes.
There were about 40,000 in hotels at the start of the year, so it would take maybe 10,000 or less houses to replace that - so just over half a percent of all the new houses Labour have committed to build.
Of course it would only be part that might have a chance of moving into new housing stock, and even then it would be a lot less visible than a hotel being closed.
If the place are seen as a failure in those circumstances, then not sure Labour have any hope.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
The economic case for migration seems to come from one (foreign) individual:
Let’s start in 2003. That was the year the Home Office published its official report, authored by the UCL economist Christian Dustmann (of whom more later) estimating that only 5,000-13,000 additional migrants a year would come to Britain when the eastern bloc acceded to the EU in 2004. By 2007, 750,000 had arrived.
...
Since at least 2002, we’ve been told by officialdom that more immigration always brings economic benefits. Among the most influential papers supposedly proving this were: a 2005 Home Office study claiming migrants had little impact on native jobs and wages; a 2010 study published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies finding that migrants from the eastern bloc were large net contributors to the exchequer; and a 2014 update arguing the same in more detail. What all of these studies have in common is their lead author: Christian Dustmann. The very same Dustmann whose hopelessly flawed model was used to justify opening the gates in 2004.
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
His problem there will be that the voters he is trying to con with his phoney concern don't think the low hundreds of thousands is sensible
I doubt it is phoney. I hold a similar view and it is genuine, the numbers are too high recently especially without house building.
And the people who thought the low hundreds of thousands were a problem are the very same people who put someone in charge who brought in close to a million instead, just perhaps their judgment isn't all that good......
That's a nice attempt a smart arse pay off, but I think you should know better than that.
Basically voting for Boris was the only way anyone who wanted what they thought in 2016 would be the straightforward process of voting Leave being recognised. It's to the shame of people like Starmer that they tried so hard to ignore the democratic vote they promised to implement.
The only reason people like Starmer even have power right now because Boris and the ERG wing of the Tories took Leave voters for fools.
I would put it the other way round. The leave voters were fools for believing Boris and the ERG.
At the 2019 GE, Leave voters had a choice between voting Tory, & having their Leave vote implemented, or voting for anyone else and tossing a coin about the referendum result being overturned. So it wasn't a case of being made fools of; Boris did implement the Leave vote, and that's why we voted for him. He didn't do as expected on immigration, but at least we have the ability to do something about it now.
The basic failure in comprehension it takes not to distinguish between the returning the right of the UK Government to set its own immigration policy, and the implementation of a low immigration policy, and why the former is a necessary precursor for, but not a guarantee of, the latter, is quite extraordinary. If I believed that people really didn't understand it (as opposed to irritatingly debating in bad faith), I'd believe I was talking to people who couldn't tie their shoelaces.
Having a lever is utterly worthless if it's apparent the UK Government was never going to use it. And the people who actually wanted Singapore on Thames (the ERG) or just supported Brexit for their own careers (Boris, then eventually Truss and now Jenrick) were never going to use it. The reason the Tories are totally f**ked everyone eventually realised they were a bunch of bullshitting, liars.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
Reports that say immigrants are good for the economy tend to look at quite a narrow set of stats, for example neglecting to take into account infrastructure costs and knock on effects, nor do most seem to take into account gdp per capita. It is quite possible for example for gdp to rise but gdp per capita to fall.
The graduate thing seems a bit bullshitty to be honest. Perhaps having a degree is just a proxy for something else? I don't see why someone is automatically of greater value with a degree, but I haven't read the detail so perhaps I am wrong.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
GDP per capita is tricky because a working immigrant is almost always going to increase that, unless they bring in more dependents than our current working:non-working ratio.
Hmm... There's quite a gap between the median and mean wage though.
The graduate thing seems a bit bullshitty to be honest. Perhaps having a degree is just a proxy for something else? I don't see why someone is automatically of greater value with a degree, but I haven't read the detail so perhaps I am wrong.
They are more likely to be seeking skilled work and most Reform voters don't have degrees so are less bothered by graduate migrants taking British jobs than lower skilled migrants taking British jobs
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
Similarly, we hear that housing illegal immigrants is costing us £x-million a day, and accept it as being the going rate… but why is the man who runs the company housing the migrants a billionaire?
Britain’s asylum hotel ‘king’ becomes a billionaire
This is where it gets interesting. Now that we've gone for low immigration, we need to think about what that means.
Universities. They allow young Brits the ability to freeload on massive fees charged to overseas students.
Public services. These tend to me much harder to automate (teaching, social care, police etc). That means that, all else held equal, a larger proportion of our labour will end up going on them. That means attracting people into those roles with higher salaries to keep up with the private sector.
Long term demographic challenge. Our fertility rate continues to crash and we need to find a way to maintain a steady population without net migration.
Mail on Sunday not having Sir Keir’s pretend concern about the effects of the mass immigration he & Labour supported but are trying to disown
Labour have tried to face both ways on this for some time now. But in a new White Paper they plan to embrace a ‘crackdown’ ostensibly intended to deport immigrants who commit any crime, and to somehow overcome the ‘Human Rights’ provisions which make deportation so hard and which Labour themselves wrote into British law.
We are also promised less complacency about the questionable economic benefits of mass immigration, which is seriously straining our health, welfare and school systems.
These moves are designed to create helpful headlines. But should we take any of it seriously?
While they thought they were safe from voter anger, Labour energetically pursued an open borders policy.
Now they are scared of electoral oblivion, they try to ape Nigel Farage. How they used to jeer and sneer at those who warned that their policy was foolish and unrealistic, such as the fact-based campaigning body Migration Watch.
Anyone who suggested that the levels of migration were impractically high was dismissed as some sort of bigot.
Well, now Home Office experts are admitting what Migration Watch said many years ago, that net migration has reached such levels that it is the equivalent of adding a city the size of Edinburgh to the population of the UK each year. Who are the bigots now?
There is some (deliberate) conflation here between asylum seekers/small boats/illegal migration, and legal immigration. Just look at the photo that they use - that's not of people on student visas overstaying, is it?
I think it's perfectly natural for a "labour" party to be against immigration. The minimum wage was a control against it in some respects, because it prevented the flooding of our labour market with low-wage workers. Now that we are out of the EU, I guess you could make the argument that we don't need it anymore as long as there are restrictions on inwards migration/salary controls.
And the bigoted thing is tiresome. The trouble is that some of those who are most against immigration are bigots, dominate the discussion about it and don't like being called out.
Yes, it is natural that a party called Labour should want to protect British workers from the effects of mass migration, but as we all know, Labour isn't that sort of party, if it ever was, and has long since given itself over to representing global corporate interests against the people it has used as voting fodder.
Like your surprise post the other day that 'we must subsidise industrial energy because it's too expensive', this is a dog's dinner of excuses, 'twas ever thus's, and half-hearted acknowledgements, because you've realised politics is massively swinging away from the deeply damaging and anti-human policies that you and others have espoused.
It is inadequate and tissue thin, but it is an improvement at least on 'we just need someone with charisma who can put a positive spin on this' that has been the general PB-leftie vibe since the election.
Labour was once the party to protect British workers, but gave it up under Blair in return for power.
Labour in the 20th century was the party of the white working class.
Labour in the 21st century is the party of the public sector, ethnic minorities, especially Muslims and students as their core vote (albeit with some leakage now even of those groups to the Greens and Independents since Starmer became their leader).
Reform have now replaced Labour as the main party of the white working class
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
The economic case for migration seems to come from one (foreign) individual:
Let’s start in 2003. That was the year the Home Office published its official report, authored by the UCL economist Christian Dustmann (of whom more later) estimating that only 5,000-13,000 additional migrants a year would come to Britain when the eastern bloc acceded to the EU in 2004. By 2007, 750,000 had arrived.
...
Since at least 2002, we’ve been told by officialdom that more immigration always brings economic benefits. Among the most influential papers supposedly proving this were: a 2005 Home Office study claiming migrants had little impact on native jobs and wages; a 2010 study published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies finding that migrants from the eastern bloc were large net contributors to the exchequer; and a 2014 update arguing the same in more detail. What all of these studies have in common is their lead author: Christian Dustmann. The very same Dustmann whose hopelessly flawed model was used to justify opening the gates in 2004.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
His problem there will be that the voters he is trying to con with his phoney concern don't think the low hundreds of thousands is sensible
I doubt it is phoney. I hold a similar view and it is genuine, the numbers are too high recently especially without house building.
And the people who thought the low hundreds of thousands were a problem are the very same people who put someone in charge who brought in close to a million instead, just perhaps their judgment isn't all that good......
That's a nice attempt a smart arse pay off, but I think you should know better than that.
Basically voting for Boris was the only way anyone who wanted what they thought in 2016 would be the straightforward process of voting Leave being recognised. It's to the shame of people like Starmer that they tried so hard to ignore the democratic vote they promised to implement.
The only reason people like Starmer even have power right now because Boris and the ERG wing of the Tories took Leave voters for fools.
I would put it the other way round. The leave voters were fools for believing Boris and the ERG.
At the 2019 GE, Leave voters had a choice between voting Tory, & having their Leave vote implemented, or voting for anyone else and tossing a coin about the referendum result being overturned. So it wasn't a case of being made fools of; Boris did implement the Leave vote, and that's why we voted for him. He didn't do as expected on immigration, but at least we have the ability to do something about it now.
The basic failure in comprehension it takes not to distinguish between the returning the right of the UK Government to set its own immigration policy, and the implementation of a low immigration policy, and why the former is a necessary precursor for, but not a guarantee of, the latter, is quite extraordinary. If I believed that people really didn't understand it (as opposed to irritatingly debating in bad faith), I'd believe I was talking to people who couldn't tie their shoelaces.
Having a lever is utterly worthless if it's apparent the UK Government was never going to use it. And the people who actually wanted Singapore on Thames (the ERG) or just supported Brexit for their own careers (Boris, then eventually Truss and now Jenrick) were never going to use it. The reason the Tories are totally f**ked everyone eventually realised they were a bunch of bullshitting, liars.
That isn't really true, had the Tories stayed in the EEA with free movement and had Sunak not tightened visa wage requirements and ended the right of dependents to come over you might have had a point
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Trouble is, the corollary of (b) might be even worse politically, if HMG moves asylum seekers out of hotels and into Angela Rayner's newly-built homes.
There were about 40,000 in hotels at the start of the year, so it would take maybe 10,000 or less houses to replace that - so just over half a percent of all the new houses Labour have committed to build.
Of course it would only be part that might have a chance of moving into new housing stock, and even then it would be a lot less visible than a hotel being closed.
If the place are seen as a failure in those circumstances, then not sure Labour have any hope.
Direct recruitment from abroad has become a major scam.
You invent a job. Which effectively crates the visa. You sell the visa* to some poor schmuck abroad - often for 5 figures. When they arrive in the U.K. - no job. If they complain, they will get deported (probably)
One company the BBC investigated, employed about 20 people, but had recruited 1,200 people in a year…
*selling visas is supposed to be illegal but rarely prosecuted.
Mail on Sunday not having Sir Keir’s pretend concern about the effects of the mass immigration he & Labour supported but are trying to disown
Labour have tried to face both ways on this for some time now. But in a new White Paper they plan to embrace a ‘crackdown’ ostensibly intended to deport immigrants who commit any crime, and to somehow overcome the ‘Human Rights’ provisions which make deportation so hard and which Labour themselves wrote into British law.
We are also promised less complacency about the questionable economic benefits of mass immigration, which is seriously straining our health, welfare and school systems.
These moves are designed to create helpful headlines. But should we take any of it seriously?
While they thought they were safe from voter anger, Labour energetically pursued an open borders policy.
Now they are scared of electoral oblivion, they try to ape Nigel Farage. How they used to jeer and sneer at those who warned that their policy was foolish and unrealistic, such as the fact-based campaigning body Migration Watch.
Anyone who suggested that the levels of migration were impractically high was dismissed as some sort of bigot.
Well, now Home Office experts are admitting what Migration Watch said many years ago, that net migration has reached such levels that it is the equivalent of adding a city the size of Edinburgh to the population of the UK each year. Who are the bigots now?
There is some (deliberate) conflation here between asylum seekers/small boats/illegal migration, and legal immigration. Just look at the photo that they use - that's not of people on student visas overstaying, is it?
I think it's perfectly natural for a "labour" party to be against immigration. The minimum wage was a control against it in some respects, because it prevented the flooding of our labour market with low-wage workers. Now that we are out of the EU, I guess you could make the argument that we don't need it anymore as long as there are restrictions on inwards migration/salary controls.
And the bigoted thing is tiresome. The trouble is that some of those who are most against immigration are bigots, dominate the discussion about it and don't like being called out.
Yes, it is natural that a party called Labour should want to protect British workers from the effects of mass migration, but as we all know, Labour isn't that sort of party, if it ever was, and has long since given itself over to representing global corporate interests against the people it has used as voting fodder.
Like your surprise post the other day that 'we must subsidise industrial energy because it's too expensive', this is a dog's dinner of excuses, 'twas ever thus's, and half-hearted acknowledgements, because you've realised politics is massively swinging away from the deeply damaging and anti-human policies that you and others have espoused.
It is inadequate and tissue thin, but it is an improvement at least on 'we just need someone with charisma who can put a positive spin on this' that has been the general PB-leftie vibe since the election.
Labour was once the party to protect British workers, but gave it up under Blair in return for power.
Labour in the 20th century was the party of the white working class.
Labour in the 21st century is the party of the public sector, ethnic minorities, especially Muslims and students as their core vote (albeit with some leakage now even of those groups to the Greens and Independents since Starmer became their leader).
Reform have now replaced Labour as the main party of the white working class
That’s fine but what about the large amount here due to the Boriswave. With their economically inactive dependents. Soon coming up to five years for the first who will be able to apply for ILR.
This reeks of Stable door closing after horse has bolted.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Trouble is, the corollary of (b) might be even worse politically, if HMG moves asylum seekers out of hotels and into Angela Rayner's newly-built homes.
There were about 40,000 in hotels at the start of the year, so it would take maybe 10,000 or less houses to replace that - so just over half a percent of all the new houses Labour have committed to build.
Of course it would only be part that might have a chance of moving into new housing stock, and even then it would be a lot less visible than a hotel being closed.
If the place are seen as a failure in those circumstances, then not sure Labour have any hope.
One way to encourage nimbyism is to build new housing specifically for asylum seekers.
As such new housing would be predominantly built in more deprived areas it would led to even further electoral support for anti-establishment parties.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
The economic case for migration seems to come from one (foreign) individual:
Let’s start in 2003. That was the year the Home Office published its official report, authored by the UCL economist Christian Dustmann (of whom more later) estimating that only 5,000-13,000 additional migrants a year would come to Britain when the eastern bloc acceded to the EU in 2004. By 2007, 750,000 had arrived.
...
Since at least 2002, we’ve been told by officialdom that more immigration always brings economic benefits. Among the most influential papers supposedly proving this were: a 2005 Home Office study claiming migrants had little impact on native jobs and wages; a 2010 study published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies finding that migrants from the eastern bloc were large net contributors to the exchequer; and a 2014 update arguing the same in more detail. What all of these studies have in common is their lead author: Christian Dustmann. The very same Dustmann whose hopelessly flawed model was used to justify opening the gates in 2004.
Mail on Sunday not having Sir Keir’s pretend concern about the effects of the mass immigration he & Labour supported but are trying to disown
Labour have tried to face both ways on this for some time now. But in a new White Paper they plan to embrace a ‘crackdown’ ostensibly intended to deport immigrants who commit any crime, and to somehow overcome the ‘Human Rights’ provisions which make deportation so hard and which Labour themselves wrote into British law.
We are also promised less complacency about the questionable economic benefits of mass immigration, which is seriously straining our health, welfare and school systems.
These moves are designed to create helpful headlines. But should we take any of it seriously?
While they thought they were safe from voter anger, Labour energetically pursued an open borders policy.
Now they are scared of electoral oblivion, they try to ape Nigel Farage. How they used to jeer and sneer at those who warned that their policy was foolish and unrealistic, such as the fact-based campaigning body Migration Watch.
Anyone who suggested that the levels of migration were impractically high was dismissed as some sort of bigot.
Well, now Home Office experts are admitting what Migration Watch said many years ago, that net migration has reached such levels that it is the equivalent of adding a city the size of Edinburgh to the population of the UK each year. Who are the bigots now?
There is some (deliberate) conflation here between asylum seekers/small boats/illegal migration, and legal immigration. Just look at the photo that they use - that's not of people on student visas overstaying, is it?
I think it's perfectly natural for a "labour" party to be against immigration. The minimum wage was a control against it in some respects, because it prevented the flooding of our labour market with low-wage workers. Now that we are out of the EU, I guess you could make the argument that we don't need it anymore as long as there are restrictions on inwards migration/salary controls.
And the bigoted thing is tiresome. The trouble is that some of those who are most against immigration are bigots, dominate the discussion about it and don't like being called out.
Yes, it is natural that a party called Labour should want to protect British workers from the effects of mass migration, but as we all know, Labour isn't that sort of party, if it ever was, and has long since given itself over to representing global corporate interests against the people it has used as voting fodder.
Like your surprise post the other day that 'we must subsidise industrial energy because it's too expensive', this is a dog's dinner of excuses, 'twas ever thus's, and half-hearted acknowledgements, because you've realised politics is massively swinging away from the deeply damaging and anti-human policies that you and others have espoused.
It is inadequate and tissue thin, but it is an improvement at least on 'we just need someone with charisma who can put a positive spin on this' that has been the general PB-leftie vibe since the election.
Labour was once the party to protect British workers, but gave it up under Blair in return for power.
Labour in the 20th century was the party of the white working class.
Labour in the 21st century is the party of the public sector, ethnic minorities, especially Muslims and students as their core vote (albeit with some leakage now even of those groups to the Greens and Independents since Starmer became their leader).
Reform have now replaced Labour as the main party of the white working class
It's still a bit of a jump to "Reform have now replaced Labour as the main party of the white working class".
The most recent poll to come out was by Techne. You only have to go back to their last poll, just two weeks ago, and Labour were still ahead with those voters.
I'd agree that right now, Reform are more popular with those voters, but I wouldn't bet on it being anything like permanent replacement.
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
A mistake to leave this to the private sector, at least for the places paid for with public money. Far too much Incentive to cut costs/game the system.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
Mail on Sunday not having Sir Keir’s pretend concern about the effects of the mass immigration he & Labour supported but are trying to disown
Labour have tried to face both ways on this for some time now. But in a new White Paper they plan to embrace a ‘crackdown’ ostensibly intended to deport immigrants who commit any crime, and to somehow overcome the ‘Human Rights’ provisions which make deportation so hard and which Labour themselves wrote into British law.
We are also promised less complacency about the questionable economic benefits of mass immigration, which is seriously straining our health, welfare and school systems.
These moves are designed to create helpful headlines. But should we take any of it seriously?
While they thought they were safe from voter anger, Labour energetically pursued an open borders policy.
Now they are scared of electoral oblivion, they try to ape Nigel Farage. How they used to jeer and sneer at those who warned that their policy was foolish and unrealistic, such as the fact-based campaigning body Migration Watch.
Anyone who suggested that the levels of migration were impractically high was dismissed as some sort of bigot.
Well, now Home Office experts are admitting what Migration Watch said many years ago, that net migration has reached such levels that it is the equivalent of adding a city the size of Edinburgh to the population of the UK each year. Who are the bigots now?
There is some (deliberate) conflation here between asylum seekers/small boats/illegal migration, and legal immigration. Just look at the photo that they use - that's not of people on student visas overstaying, is it?
I think it's perfectly natural for a "labour" party to be against immigration. The minimum wage was a control against it in some respects, because it prevented the flooding of our labour market with low-wage workers. Now that we are out of the EU, I guess you could make the argument that we don't need it anymore as long as there are restrictions on inwards migration/salary controls.
And the bigoted thing is tiresome. The trouble is that some of those who are most against immigration are bigots, dominate the discussion about it and don't like being called out.
Yes, it is natural that a party called Labour should want to protect British workers from the effects of mass migration, but as we all know, Labour isn't that sort of party, if it ever was, and has long since given itself over to representing global corporate interests against the people it has used as voting fodder.
Like your surprise post the other day that 'we must subsidise industrial energy because it's too expensive', this is a dog's dinner of excuses, 'twas ever thus's, and half-hearted acknowledgements, because you've realised politics is massively swinging away from the deeply damaging and anti-human policies that you and others have espoused.
It is inadequate and tissue thin, but it is an improvement at least on 'we just need someone with charisma who can put a positive spin on this' that has been the general PB-leftie vibe since the election.
Labour was once the party to protect British workers, but gave it up under Blair in return for power.
Labour in the 20th century was the party of the white working class.
Labour in the 21st century is the party of the public sector, ethnic minorities, especially Muslims and students as their core vote (albeit with some leakage now even of those groups to the Greens and Independents since Starmer became their leader).
Reform have now replaced Labour as the main party of the white working class
Thanks. Useful site. Reform UK there are indeed the main party of the working class, and presumably of the white working class, as you said.
However, they’re only on 39%. What we see is the highly fractured nature of modern British politics in the working class vote as it it across the electorate.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Trouble is, the corollary of (b) might be even worse politically, if HMG moves asylum seekers out of hotels and into Angela Rayner's newly-built homes.
There were about 40,000 in hotels at the start of the year, so it would take maybe 10,000 or less houses to replace that - so just over half a percent of all the new houses Labour have committed to build.
Of course it would only be part that might have a chance of moving into new housing stock, and even then it would be a lot less visible than a hotel being closed.
If the place are seen as a failure in those circumstances, then not sure Labour have any hope.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Well it’s nice to see these voices on the left, who have been rather conspicuous by their quietness, seem to be rediscovering their long held views and principles in the face of an electoral and polling onslaught from Reform.
That’s fine but what about the large amount here due to the Boriswave. With their economically inactive dependents. Soon coming up to five years for the first who will be able to apply for ILR.
This reeks of Stable door closing after horse has bolted.
You can’t blame Starmer for not closing the door when Johnson was in charge.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
His problem there will be that the voters he is trying to con with his phoney concern don't think the low hundreds of thousands is sensible
I doubt it is phoney. I hold a similar view and it is genuine, the numbers are too high recently especially without house building.
And the people who thought the low hundreds of thousands were a problem are the very same people who put someone in charge who brought in close to a million instead, just perhaps their judgment isn't all that good......
That's a nice attempt a smart arse pay off, but I think you should know better than that.
Basically voting for Boris was the only way anyone who wanted what they thought in 2016 would be the straightforward process of voting Leave being recognised. It's to the shame of people like Starmer that they tried so hard to ignore the democratic vote they promised to implement.
The only reason people like Starmer even have power right now because Boris and the ERG wing of the Tories took Leave voters for fools.
I would put it the other way round. The leave voters were fools for believing Boris and the ERG.
At the 2019 GE, Leave voters had a choice between voting Tory, & having their Leave vote implemented, or voting for anyone else and tossing a coin about the referendum result being overturned. So it wasn't a case of being made fools of; Boris did implement the Leave vote, and that's why we voted for him. He didn't do as expected on immigration, but at least we have the ability to do something about it now.
The basic failure in comprehension it takes not to distinguish between the returning the right of the UK Government to set its own immigration policy, and the implementation of a low immigration policy, and why the former is a necessary precursor for, but not a guarantee of, the latter, is quite extraordinary. If I believed that people really didn't understand it (as opposed to irritatingly debating in bad faith), I'd believe I was talking to people who couldn't tie their shoelaces.
That’s fine but what about the large amount here due to the Boriswave. With their economically inactive dependents. Soon coming up to five years for the first who will be able to apply for ILR.
This reeks of Stable door closing after horse has bolted.
You can’t blame Starmer for not closing the door when Johnson was in charge.
But when Johnson had the door open, Labour were accusing him of being a right-wing nativist and promising to bring in more workers to help the economy.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
Some people on PB are racist and get called racist.
Some people want lower immigration and are not racist. I don’t think those people generally get called racist. Numerous people in this thread have called for lower immigration and have not been called racist.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Well it’s nice to see these voices on the left, who have been rather conspicuous by their quietness, seem to be rediscovering their long held views and principles in the face of an electoral and polling onslaught from Reform.
If the government ignores concerns about immigration, they are accused of ignoring the wishes of the people. If the government responds to concerns about immigration, they are accused of doing so hypocritically.
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
A mistake to leave this to the private sector, at least for the places paid for with public money. Far too much Incentive to cut costs/game the system.
It's left to the private sector because the state (ie, us) do not want to pay for it.
Mail on Sunday not having Sir Keir’s pretend concern about the effects of the mass immigration he & Labour supported but are trying to disown
Labour have tried to face both ways on this for some time now. But in a new White Paper they plan to embrace a ‘crackdown’ ostensibly intended to deport immigrants who commit any crime, and to somehow overcome the ‘Human Rights’ provisions which make deportation so hard and which Labour themselves wrote into British law.
We are also promised less complacency about the questionable economic benefits of mass immigration, which is seriously straining our health, welfare and school systems.
These moves are designed to create helpful headlines. But should we take any of it seriously?
While they thought they were safe from voter anger, Labour energetically pursued an open borders policy.
Now they are scared of electoral oblivion, they try to ape Nigel Farage. How they used to jeer and sneer at those who warned that their policy was foolish and unrealistic, such as the fact-based campaigning body Migration Watch.
Anyone who suggested that the levels of migration were impractically high was dismissed as some sort of bigot.
Well, now Home Office experts are admitting what Migration Watch said many years ago, that net migration has reached such levels that it is the equivalent of adding a city the size of Edinburgh to the population of the UK each year. Who are the bigots now?
There is some (deliberate) conflation here between asylum seekers/small boats/illegal migration, and legal immigration. Just look at the photo that they use - that's not of people on student visas overstaying, is it?
I think it's perfectly natural for a "labour" party to be against immigration. The minimum wage was a control against it in some respects, because it prevented the flooding of our labour market with low-wage workers. Now that we are out of the EU, I guess you could make the argument that we don't need it anymore as long as there are restrictions on inwards migration/salary controls.
And the bigoted thing is tiresome. The trouble is that some of those who are most against immigration are bigots, dominate the discussion about it and don't like being called out.
Yes, it is natural that a party called Labour should want to protect British workers from the effects of mass migration, but as we all know, Labour isn't that sort of party, if it ever was, and has long since given itself over to representing global corporate interests against the people it has used as voting fodder.
Like your surprise post the other day that 'we must subsidise industrial energy because it's too expensive', this is a dog's dinner of excuses, 'twas ever thus's, and half-hearted acknowledgements, because you've realised politics is massively swinging away from the deeply damaging and anti-human policies that you and others have espoused.
It is inadequate and tissue thin, but it is an improvement at least on 'we just need someone with charisma who can put a positive spin on this' that has been the general PB-leftie vibe since the election.
Labour was once the party to protect British workers, but gave it up under Blair in return for power.
Labour in the 20th century was the party of the white working class.
Labour in the 21st century is the party of the public sector, ethnic minorities, especially Muslims and students as their core vote (albeit with some leakage now even of those groups to the Greens and Independents since Starmer became their leader).
Reform have now replaced Labour as the main party of the white working class
Thanks. Useful site. Reform UK there are indeed the main party of the working class, and presumably of the white working class, as you said.
However, they’re only on 39%. What we see is the highly fractured nature of modern British politics in the working class vote as it it across the electorate.
True but Labour used to own the working class vote, especially the DE semi and unskilled working class vote.
From 1974 to 1997 Labour always won the DE vote and never got under 41% of that DE vote and in 1974 57% and 1997 59% of that vote.
Even when heavily defeated nationally their skilled working class C2 voteshare was also higher than their national voteshare, as in 1983 and 1987.
That’s fine but what about the large amount here due to the Boriswave. With their economically inactive dependents. Soon coming up to five years for the first who will be able to apply for ILR.
This reeks of Stable door closing after horse has bolted.
You can’t blame Starmer for not closing the door when Johnson was in charge.
No, but he can do something about those who came on the Boriswave, the first of whom will be coming up to being able to apply for ILR.
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
It's a very fair question. But the bottom line on this is that the more you pay staff and the better the conditions you give them, the higher the cost of supply will be. It is cheaper to make one man extremely wealthy than it is to give hundreds of thousands of people a good salary and a healthy working environment. Basically, if we want great social care we have to be willing to pay for it.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Well it’s nice to see these voices on the left, who have been rather conspicuous by their quietness, seem to be rediscovering their long held views and principles in the face of an electoral and polling onslaught from Reform.
If the government ignores concerns about immigration, they are accused of ignoring the wishes of the people. If the government responds to concerns about immigration, they are accused of doing so hypocritically.
With the exception of some rather toe curling moments at the start of New Labour, everything that every government has done. In my life time, has been used to attack them.
Who was it, who said that if the PM healed the sick, walked on water, changed water into wine, the headlines would be “PM destroys NHS, bridge building and drinks industries.”??
Here's something I'm sure someone knows, but I'm too lazy to look up.
What was the UKIP/BXP view of the May version of Brexit?
If the aim was to control immigration without the sort of economic hit that would require an immigration bulge to keep GDP up, that was probably optimal.
Johnson, of course, was massively against it. What did Farage say?
Here's something I'm sure someone knows, but I'm too lazy to look up.
What was the UKIP/BXP view of the May version of Brexit?
If the aim was to control immigration without the sort of economic hit that would require an immigration bulge to keep GDP up, that was probably optimal.
Johnson, of course, was massively against it. What did Farage say?
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
It's a very fair question. But the bottom line on this is that the more you pay staff and the better the conditions you give them, the higher the cost of supply will be. It is cheaper to make one man extremely wealthy than it is to give hundreds of thousands of people a good salary and a healthy working environment. Basically, if we want great social care we have to be willing to pay for it.
I’ve seen numbers suggesting that profits on care homes range from 20-35%
The special constable story is a reminder that all this was happening under the Tories. You have to be wary of one off reports in the papers but there are just too many of these cases for it not to be a thing. Why are they doing it? I can only assume it is 'pour encourager les autres.'
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
Are care home profit margins so large ? Across the sector, I seriously doubt it (though there will of course be exceptions).
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Well it’s nice to see these voices on the left, who have been rather conspicuous by their quietness, seem to be rediscovering their long held views and principles in the face of an electoral and polling onslaught from Reform.
If the government ignores concerns about immigration, they are accused of ignoring the wishes of the people. If the government responds to concerns about immigration, they are accused of doing so hypocritically.
I’m talking about voices on the left who didn’t speak up before now speaking up. Nothing to do with the govt.
Oh, and the govt is hypocritical as it is now only doing something about it due to electoral disadvantage when it has been, as has other govts, very happy clappy about it.
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
It's a very fair question. But the bottom line on this is that the more you pay staff and the better the conditions you give them, the higher the cost of supply will be. It is cheaper to make one man extremely wealthy than it is to give hundreds of thousands of people a good salary and a healthy working environment. Basically, if we want great social care we have to be willing to pay for it.
I’ve seen numbers suggesting that profits on care homes range from 20-35%
Those are healthy margins but not spectacular ones. And they are achieved on levels of pay and working conditions that are clearly very unattractive to UK citizens.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Great to have you on board.
We're only hearing about now, once SKS has aligned his policy direction with it and got a thumping from Reform - before it was all "safe and legal routes" - but better late than never.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Maybe, but let’s not pretend the general language of the left in the past decade or so has in any way majored on this - often the opposite. There is a reason why people don’t feel Labour are in tune with their concerns on this. Now they may be able to recover some good standing, but they start from a position of distrust, and the jury is still out.
More than a decade. There was a view on the Left that immigation was to "rub the Right's nose in diversity."
To the activists, rubbing the right's nose in diversity seemed like a win-win proposition: you get to wind up your opponents and you massage the demographics of the electorate in your favour, rendering their complaints impotent.
They didn't count on two things: the resentment of their own core vote and the fact that migrants can think for themselves.
Owning the Right came well before Owning the Libs.
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
It's a very fair question. But the bottom line on this is that the more you pay staff and the better the conditions you give them, the higher the cost of supply will be. It is cheaper to make one man extremely wealthy than it is to give hundreds of thousands of people a good salary and a healthy working environment. Basically, if we want great social care we have to be willing to pay for it.
I’ve seen numbers suggesting that profits on care homes range from 20-35%
That's ridiculous, unless you have a 1/4 - 1/3 chance of going bust every year. The return on an investment should be not that much more than a retail interest rate
"The Government will also negotiate a new “fair pay” agreement to boost salary levels in the sector."
Telegraph.
And how are local councils going to pay for that?
They aren't. Those paying for themselves subsidise local authorities, who (I think, though my knowledge on this is a few years old) get about a 30% discount.
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
It's a very fair question. But the bottom line on this is that the more you pay staff and the better the conditions you give them, the higher the cost of supply will be. It is cheaper to make one man extremely wealthy than it is to give hundreds of thousands of people a good salary and a healthy working environment. Basically, if we want great social care we have to be willing to pay for it.
I’ve seen numbers suggesting that profits on care homes range from 20-35%
Those are healthy margins but not spectacular ones. And they are achieved on levels of pay and working conditions that are clearly very unattractive to UK citizens.
Surely that is spectacular when interest rates are 3-4%. The reward for taking risk should may be twice that
I have no issue if the university and care home sector have to fundamentally restructure themselves due to the demise of cheap immigrant labour/funding.
We are on course for spending up to £100 billion on welfare for 9 million British adults of working age by the end of this Parliament.
I reckon they could maybe try, oh I don't know, doing some actual work.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
One of the reasons I've tended not to get involved in PB immigration spats over the years.
What gets very little discussion is the two biggest drivers of mass migration into Europe over the last two decades - Bush's 'war on terror', and the Russian sponsored devastation of Syria.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Great to have you on board.
We're only hearing about now, once SKS has aligned his policy direction with it and got a thumping from Reform - before it was all "safe and legal routes" - but better late than never.
I'm not on board. I'm still in favour of "safe and legal routes" for genuine asylum seekers. But I'm not in favour of temporary accommodation being used for asylum seekers because there is a huge backlog of applications to process. I want the backlog cleared and decisions made on whether to accept or reject applications as swiftly as possible.
But most of all, I'm opposed to the dehumanising language used by so many to scapegoat and 'other' asylum seekers. They're just humans, like you and me.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
His problem there will be that the voters he is trying to con with his phoney concern don't think the low hundreds of thousands is sensible
I doubt it is phoney. I hold a similar view and it is genuine, the numbers are too high recently especially without house building.
And the people who thought the low hundreds of thousands were a problem are the very same people who put someone in charge who brought in close to a million instead, just perhaps their judgment isn't all that good......
That's a nice attempt a smart arse pay off, but I think you should know better than that.
Basically voting for Boris was the only way anyone who wanted what they thought in 2016 would be the straightforward process of voting Leave being recognised. It's to the shame of people like Starmer that they tried so hard to ignore the democratic vote they promised to implement.
The only reason people like Starmer even have power right now because Boris and the ERG wing of the Tories took Leave voters for fools.
I would put it the other way round. The leave voters were fools for believing Boris and the ERG.
At the 2019 GE, Leave voters had a choice between voting Tory, & having their Leave vote implemented, or voting for anyone else and tossing a coin about the referendum result being overturned. So it wasn't a case of being made fools of; Boris did implement the Leave vote, and that's why we voted for him. He didn't do as expected on immigration, but at least we have the ability to do something about it now.
The basic failure in comprehension it takes not to distinguish between the returning the right of the UK Government to set its own immigration policy, and the implementation of a low immigration policy, and why the former is a necessary precursor for, but not a guarantee of, the latter, is quite extraordinary. If I believed that people really didn't understand it (as opposed to irritatingly debating in bad faith), I'd believe I was talking to people who couldn't tie their shoelaces.
Having a lever is utterly worthless if it's apparent the UK Government was never going to use it. And the people who actually wanted Singapore on Thames (the ERG) or just supported Brexit for their own careers (Boris, then eventually Truss and now Jenrick) were never going to use it. The reason the Tories are totally f**ked everyone eventually realised they were a bunch of bullshitting, liars.
"Singapore on Thames" was always a ridiculous fantasy. There's no real way of doing any such thing with the UK.
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
It's a very fair question. But the bottom line on this is that the more you pay staff and the better the conditions you give them, the higher the cost of supply will be. It is cheaper to make one man extremely wealthy than it is to give hundreds of thousands of people a good salary and a healthy working environment. Basically, if we want great social care we have to be willing to pay for it.
I’ve seen numbers suggesting that profits on care homes range from 20-35%
Those are healthy margins but not spectacular ones. And they are achieved on levels of pay and working conditions that are clearly very unattractive to UK citizens.
Some little time back, here, there was discuss ion of the cost of employing people for 24/7 care.
The conclusion, IIRC, was that 24/7 coverage for one person, paid minimum wage, would cost the employer £132k a year.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
One of the reasons I've tended not to get involved in PB immigration spats over the years.
What gets very little discussion is the two biggest drivers of mass migration into Europe over the last two decades - Bush's 'war on terror', and the Russian sponsored devastation of Syria.
The numbers don’t really support that. Indians and Nigerians weren’t driven to Europe by Bush’s ‘war on terror’.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
Some people on PB are racist and get called racist.
Some people want lower immigration and are not racist. I don’t think those people generally get called racist. Numerous people in this thread have called for lower immigration and have not been called racist.
In this thread sure, but historically ?
Genuine concerns about it was always labelled ‘genuine concerns’ in inverted commas to imply you’re racist for opposing it.
Still more room in heaven for a repenting sinner etc etc.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Great to have you on board.
We're only hearing about now, once SKS has aligned his policy direction with it and got a thumping from Reform - before it was all "safe and legal routes" - but better late than never.
Yes, so many repenting sinners now the wind has changed direction. Similar to the tedious trans debate.
This is where it gets interesting. Now that we've gone for low immigration, we need to think about what that means.
Universities. They allow young Brits the ability to freeload on massive fees charged to overseas students.
Public services. These tend to me much harder to automate (teaching, social care, police etc). That means that, all else held equal, a larger proportion of our labour will end up going on them. That means attracting people into those roles with higher salaries to keep up with the private sector.
Long term demographic challenge. Our fertility rate continues to crash and we need to find a way to maintain a steady population without net migration.
Foreign students at universities represent a huge balance of payments benefit to the UK overall. There's a decent case for looking at the bottom end of the market. Anything beyond that would be self destructive.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
One of the reasons I've tended not to get involved in PB immigration spats over the years.
What gets very little discussion is the two biggest drivers of mass migration into Europe over the last two decades - Bush's 'war on terror', and the Russian sponsored devastation of Syria.
The numbers don’t really support that. Indians and Nigerians weren’t driven to Europe by Bush’s ‘war on terror’.
The special constable story is a reminder that all this was happening under the Tories. You have to be wary of one off reports in the papers but there are just too many of these cases for it not to be a thing. Why are they doing it? I can only assume it is 'pour encourager les autres.'
That's the Conservatives' fundamental problem. Everything that Labour gets criticised for, the Conservatives were up to their necks in.
And while *a lot* of the problems can be laid at the feet of Boris and his shower of incompetents and crooks, the problems with justice, policing, and defence belong entirely to the Coalition. Limiting child benefits looks like a bad idea, too.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
One of the reasons I've tended not to get involved in PB immigration spats over the years.
What gets very little discussion is the two biggest drivers of mass migration into Europe over the last two decades - Bush's 'war on terror', and the Russian sponsored devastation of Syria.
The numbers don’t really support that. Indians and Nigerians weren’t driven to Europe by Bush’s ‘war on terror’.
Apologies: the two biggest pre-Brexit drivers.
Weren’t they drivers of asylum rather than straight migration ?
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Maybe, but let’s not pretend the general language of the left in the past decade or so has in any way majored on this - often the opposite. There is a reason why people don’t feel Labour are in tune with their concerns on this. Now they may be able to recover some good standing, but they start from a position of distrust, and the jury is still out.
More than a decade. There was a view on the Left that immigation was to "rub the Right's nose in diversity."
To the activists, rubbing the right's nose in diversity seemed like a win-win proposition: you get to wind up your opponents and you massage the demographics of the electorate in your favour, rendering their complaints impotent.
They didn't count on two things: the resentment of their own core vote and the fact that migrants can think for themselves.
Owning the Right came well before Owning the Libs.
The party you voted for has been in power for the last decade and a half, during which immigration has reached levels never seen before - and that after the Brexit you voted for.
This is where it gets interesting. Now that we've gone for low immigration, we need to think about what that means.
Universities. They allow young Brits the ability to freeload on massive fees charged to overseas students.
Public services. These tend to me much harder to automate (teaching, social care, police etc). That means that, all else held equal, a larger proportion of our labour will end up going on them. That means attracting people into those roles with higher salaries to keep up with the private sector.
Long term demographic challenge. Our fertility rate continues to crash and we need to find a way to maintain a steady population without net migration.
Foreign students at universities represent a huge balance of payments benefit to the UK overall. There's a decent case for looking at the bottom end of the market. Anything beyond that would be self destructive.
Are they, even when they bring numerous dependents with them ?
Do they pay as they go or do they get to defer and pay later ?
Also, are there any stats for how many who come to study don’t bother taking the course up but just merge into society ?
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Maybe, but let’s not pretend the general language of the left in the past decade or so has in any way majored on this - often the opposite. There is a reason why people don’t feel Labour are in tune with their concerns on this. Now they may be able to recover some good standing, but they start from a position of distrust, and the jury is still out.
More than a decade. There was a view on the Left that immigation was to "rub the Right's nose in diversity." Andrew Neather in 2000:
"I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls... That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit", continued Neather. "The PIU's reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy... Eventually published in January 2001, [it] focused heavily on the labour market case."
"But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural", he went on to write. "I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far. Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing."
Totally counterproductive, because migrants in general have more conservative views on many topics than the white population.
Bluesky appears to be full of people getting their knickers in a twist over the Government finally looking to do something about unsustainable net migration.
If there truly is a housing crisis, then it is difficult to understand how increasing the population by a million every couple of years helps to deal with it.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
His problem there will be that the voters he is trying to con with his phoney concern don't think the low hundreds of thousands is sensible
I doubt it is phoney. I hold a similar view and it is genuine, the numbers are too high recently especially without house building.
And the people who thought the low hundreds of thousands were a problem are the very same people who put someone in charge who brought in close to a million instead, just perhaps their judgment isn't all that good......
That's a nice attempt a smart arse pay off, but I think you should know better than that.
Basically voting for Boris was the only way anyone who wanted what they thought in 2016 would be the straightforward process of voting Leave being recognised. It's to the shame of people like Starmer that they tried so hard to ignore the democratic vote they promised to implement.
The only reason people like Starmer even have power right now because Boris and the ERG wing of the Tories took Leave voters for fools.
I would put it the other way round. The leave voters were fools for believing Boris and the ERG.
At the 2019 GE, Leave voters had a choice between voting Tory, & having their Leave vote implemented, or voting for anyone else and tossing a coin about the referendum result being overturned. So it wasn't a case of being made fools of; Boris did implement the Leave vote, and that's why we voted for him. He didn't do as expected on immigration, but at least we have the ability to do something about it now.
The basic failure in comprehension it takes not to distinguish between the returning the right of the UK Government to set its own immigration policy, and the implementation of a low immigration policy, and why the former is a necessary precursor for, but not a guarantee of, the latter, is quite extraordinary. If I believed that people really didn't understand it (as opposed to irritatingly debating in bad faith), I'd believe I was talking to people who couldn't tie their shoelaces.
Having a lever is utterly worthless if it's apparent the UK Government was never going to use it. And the people who actually wanted Singapore on Thames (the ERG) or just supported Brexit for their own careers (Boris, then eventually Truss and now Jenrick) were never going to use it. The reason the Tories are totally f**ked everyone eventually realised they were a bunch of bullshitting, liars.
"Singapore on Thames" was always a ridiculous fantasy. There's no real way of doing any such thing with the UK.
Those advocating it never explained who would benefit from it either.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
One of the reasons I've tended not to get involved in PB immigration spats over the years.
What gets very little discussion is the two biggest drivers of mass migration into Europe over the last two decades - Bush's 'war on terror', and the Russian sponsored devastation of Syria.
The numbers don’t really support that. Indians and Nigerians weren’t driven to Europe by Bush’s ‘war on terror’.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Maybe, but let’s not pretend the general language of the left in the past decade or so has in any way majored on this - often the opposite. There is a reason why people don’t feel Labour are in tune with their concerns on this. Now they may be able to recover some good standing, but they start from a position of distrust, and the jury is still out.
More than a decade. There was a view on the Left that immigation was to "rub the Right's nose in diversity." Andrew Neather in 2000:
"I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls... That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit", continued Neather. "The PIU's reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy... Eventually published in January 2001, [it] focused heavily on the labour market case."
"But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural", he went on to write. "I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far. Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing."
Often quoted but what is the actual underlying source? One bloke who develops a "clear sense" based on "some discussions" despite it not being "its main purpose" but then concedes ministers were "very nervous about the whole thing".
NEW: Care sector is already raising the alarm about tomorrow’s immigration white paper.
@homecareassn says “Without access to international talent, there is a real risk of extreme workforce shortages” and people going without care.
There is already a massive shortage of carers.
By 'international talent' they actually mean minimum wage workers.
Some companies are charging *the workers* £10,000+ for a job with a visa. Selling visas is illegal, but hey…
That sounds a lot until you realise that the cross channel boat hire specialists charge thousands for a seat. A seat on a plane, with a real, valid visa, compared to that?
So they literally sell the jobs to would be migrants. So locals are useless for that.
Hang on, you say, £10k to work minimum wage? Well, the migrant will be hoping to get a better job, somehow.
For those who have an exuberant disposition, you can sell *non-existent* jobs to the would be migrants.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Maybe, but let’s not pretend the general language of the left in the past decade or so has in any way majored on this - often the opposite. There is a reason why people don’t feel Labour are in tune with their concerns on this. Now they may be able to recover some good standing, but they start from a position of distrust, and the jury is still out.
More than a decade. There was a view on the Left that immigation was to "rub the Right's nose in diversity." Andrew Neather in 2000:
"I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls... That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit", continued Neather. "The PIU's reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy... Eventually published in January 2001, [it] focused heavily on the labour market case."
"But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural", he went on to write. "I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far. Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing."
Often quoted but what is the actual underlying source? One bloke who develops a "clear sense" based on "some discussions" despite it not being "its main purpose" but then concedes ministers were "very nervous about the whole thing".
This is where it gets interesting. Now that we've gone for low immigration, we need to think about what that means.
Universities. They allow young Brits the ability to freeload on massive fees charged to overseas students.
Public services. These tend to me much harder to automate (teaching, social care, police etc). That means that, all else held equal, a larger proportion of our labour will end up going on them. That means attracting people into those roles with higher salaries to keep up with the private sector.
Long term demographic challenge. Our fertility rate continues to crash and we need to find a way to maintain a steady population without net migration.
Foreign students at universities represent a huge balance of payments benefit to the UK overall. There's a decent case for looking at the bottom end of the market. Anything beyond that would be self destructive.
Are they, even when they bring numerous dependents with them ?
Do they pay as they go or do they get to defer and pay later ?
Also, are there any stats for how many who come to study don’t bother taking the course up but just merge into society ?
They pay as they go now. EU students used to be entitled to student loans, due to an incomprehensibly silly ECJ ruling. But no longer.
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
It's a very fair question. But the bottom line on this is that the more you pay staff and the better the conditions you give them, the higher the cost of supply will be. It is cheaper to make one man extremely wealthy than it is to give hundreds of thousands of people a good salary and a healthy working environment. Basically, if we want great social care we have to be willing to pay for it.
I am sure I say this every time this is debated, but when I was a young child, the hospital next to where we lived was basically a retirement home for gentlefolk. Old people went there to be looked after before they died. This is St Georges Hospital in Hornchurch. We used to take them baskets of food from school. Now it has been knocked down and developed as housing with a Health hub on site. Everything is being knocked down and turned into housing and people say there's not enough of it!
A friend's Dad has just been put in a home as he has dementia - Two grand a week! They can charge that because they basically nick the equity from old people's houses. Something is wrong. Why are diseases that affect the old treated as private healthcare problems? Disgraceful really
Surely the state could do it cheaper than someone who is not much more than a venture capitalist? Don't fund foreign wars, don't buy nuclear missiles. As you said in the past, how can it be that there are people with elaborate tax avoidance schemes, to avoid paying tax on money that they will never spend, and people dying in poverty unable to clean themselves?
The special constable story is a reminder that all this was happening under the Tories. You have to be wary of one off reports in the papers but there are just too many of these cases for it not to be a thing. Why are they doing it? I can only assume it is 'pour encourager les autres.'
That's the Conservatives' fundamental problem. Everything that Labour gets criticised for, the Conservatives were up to their necks in.
And while *a lot* of the problems can be laid at the feet of Boris and his shower of incompetents and crooks, the problems with justice, policing, and defence belong entirely to the Coalition. Limiting child benefits looks like a bad idea, too.
Here’s a version of the story from Kentonline which is not behind a paywall.
Interesting that in the story the inept Police were contrite and apologetic for their stupidity yet when I was first reported here a couple of the regular centrist Dads commenting on it chose to attack the Telegraph and its readers who were blameless.
I have no issue if the university and care home sector have to fundamentally restructure themselves due to the demise of cheap immigrant labour/funding.
We are on course for spending up to £100 billion on welfare for 9 million British adults of working age by the end of this Parliament.
I reckon they could maybe try, oh I don't know, doing some actual work.
I read on here that threatening people with homelessness would encourage them to start businesses. Double bingo, no need to build more houses in that scenario.
This is where it gets interesting. Now that we've gone for low immigration, we need to think about what that means.
Universities. They allow young Brits the ability to freeload on massive fees charged to overseas students.
Public services. These tend to me much harder to automate (teaching, social care, police etc). That means that, all else held equal, a larger proportion of our labour will end up going on them. That means attracting people into those roles with higher salaries to keep up with the private sector.
Long term demographic challenge. Our fertility rate continues to crash and we need to find a way to maintain a steady population without net migration.
Foreign students at universities represent a huge balance of payments benefit to the UK overall. There's a decent case for looking at the bottom end of the market. Anything beyond that would be self destructive.
Are they, even when they bring numerous dependents with them ?
Do they pay as they go or do they get to defer and pay later ?
Also, are there any stats for how many who come to study don’t bother taking the course up but just merge into society ?
They pay as they go now. EU students used to be entitled to student loans, due to an incomprehensibly silly ECJ ruling. But no longer.
Some students also work and pay tax whilst here.
In university cities like Newcastle hospitality would grind to a halt without students working in it.
Mail on Sunday not having Sir Keir’s pretend concern about the effects of the mass immigration he & Labour supported but are trying to disown
Labour have tried to face both ways on this for some time now. But in a new White Paper they plan to embrace a ‘crackdown’ ostensibly intended to deport immigrants who commit any crime, and to somehow overcome the ‘Human Rights’ provisions which make deportation so hard and which Labour themselves wrote into British law.
We are also promised less complacency about the questionable economic benefits of mass immigration, which is seriously straining our health, welfare and school systems.
These moves are designed to create helpful headlines. But should we take any of it seriously?
While they thought they were safe from voter anger, Labour energetically pursued an open borders policy.
Now they are scared of electoral oblivion, they try to ape Nigel Farage. How they used to jeer and sneer at those who warned that their policy was foolish and unrealistic, such as the fact-based campaigning body Migration Watch.
Anyone who suggested that the levels of migration were impractically high was dismissed as some sort of bigot.
Well, now Home Office experts are admitting what Migration Watch said many years ago, that net migration has reached such levels that it is the equivalent of adding a city the size of Edinburgh to the population of the UK each year. Who are the bigots now?
There is some (deliberate) conflation here between asylum seekers/small boats/illegal migration, and legal immigration. Just look at the photo that they use - that's not of people on student visas overstaying, is it?
I think it's perfectly natural for a "labour" party to be against immigration. The minimum wage was a control against it in some respects, because it prevented the flooding of our labour market with low-wage workers. Now that we are out of the EU, I guess you could make the argument that we don't need it anymore as long as there are restrictions on inwards migration/salary controls.
And the bigoted thing is tiresome. The trouble is that some of those who are most against immigration are bigots, dominate the discussion about it and don't like being called out.
Yes, it is natural that a party called Labour should want to protect British workers from the effects of mass migration, but as we all know, Labour isn't that sort of party, if it ever was, and has long since given itself over to representing global corporate interests against the people it has used as voting fodder.
Like your surprise post the other day that 'we must subsidise industrial energy because it's too expensive', this is a dog's dinner of excuses, 'twas ever thus's, and half-hearted acknowledgements, because you've realised politics is massively swinging away from the deeply damaging and anti-human policies that you and others have espoused.
It is inadequate and tissue thin, but it is an improvement at least on 'we just need someone with charisma who can put a positive spin on this' that has been the general PB-leftie vibe since the election.
Labour was once the party to protect British workers, but gave it up under Blair in return for power.
Labour in the 20th century was the party of the white working class.
Labour in the 21st century is the party of the public sector, ethnic minorities, especially Muslims and students as their core vote (albeit with some leakage now even of those groups to the Greens and Independents since Starmer became their leader).
Reform have now replaced Labour as the main party of the white working class
Most of those groups are now starting to vote for other parties of various types. The only one which is still fully behind Labour is public sector workers, although even with them there's probably some movement to the Greens.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
One of the reasons I've tended not to get involved in PB immigration spats over the years.
What gets very little discussion is the two biggest drivers of mass migration into Europe over the last two decades - Bush's 'war on terror', and the Russian sponsored devastation of Syria.
The numbers don’t really support that. Indians and Nigerians weren’t driven to Europe by Bush’s ‘war on terror’.
Numbers 'into Europe' is what Nigelb said.
For example, the 2 biggest sources of foreign-born residents of Germany (the European country with the most foreign-born residents) outside Europe are Syria and Afghanistan.
I have no issue if the university and care home sector have to fundamentally restructure themselves due to the demise of cheap immigrant labour/funding.
We are on course for spending up to £100 billion on welfare for 9 million British adults of working age by the end of this Parliament.
I reckon they could maybe try, oh I don't know, doing some actual work.
You might be surprised that largely I agree with you - the welfare system institutionalises a large number of people.
The big issue though as far as I can see it is: you would not employ a lot of these people, I would not employ them; they are unemployable.
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
A mistake to leave this to the private sector, at least for the places paid for with public money. Far too much Incentive to cut costs/game the system.
It's left to the private sector because the state (ie, us) do not want to pay for it.
We pay for it either way, it just costs more for less. The state pays billions and billions for social care.
This is where it gets interesting. Now that we've gone for low immigration, we need to think about what that means.
Universities. They allow young Brits the ability to freeload on massive fees charged to overseas students.
Public services. These tend to me much harder to automate (teaching, social care, police etc). That means that, all else held equal, a larger proportion of our labour will end up going on them. That means attracting people into those roles with higher salaries to keep up with the private sector.
Long term demographic challenge. Our fertility rate continues to crash and we need to find a way to maintain a steady population without net migration.
Foreign students at universities represent a huge balance of payments benefit to the UK overall. There's a decent case for looking at the bottom end of the market. Anything beyond that would be self destructive.
Are they, even when they bring numerous dependents with them ?
Do they pay as they go or do they get to defer and pay later ?
Also, are there any stats for how many who come to study don’t bother taking the course up but just merge into society ?
They pay as they go now. EU students used to be entitled to student loans, due to an incomprehensibly silly ECJ ruling. But no longer.
Some students also work and pay tax whilst here.
Or, put another way, some workers attend the occasional lecture.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Maybe, but let’s not pretend the general language of the left in the past decade or so has in any way majored on this - often the opposite. There is a reason why people don’t feel Labour are in tune with their concerns on this. Now they may be able to recover some good standing, but they start from a position of distrust, and the jury is still out.
More than a decade. There was a view on the Left that immigation was to "rub the Right's nose in diversity." Andrew Neather in 2000:
"I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls... That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit", continued Neather. "The PIU's reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy... Eventually published in January 2001, [it] focused heavily on the labour market case."
"But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural", he went on to write. "I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far. Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing."
Often quoted but what is the actual underlying source? One bloke who develops a "clear sense" based on "some discussions" despite it not being "its main purpose" but then concedes ministers were "very nervous about the whole thing".
The underlying source is a former Labour advisor and former speech-writer for Tony Blair.
Used to have something similar in the footwell of my Mk2 Escort. No plug though.
Ford have been selling the hidden 80 litre waterproof basin with plughole in the boot of the Puma as something you can bathe your dog in - MegaBox I think they call it.
I have no issue if the university and care home sector have to fundamentally restructure themselves due to the demise of cheap immigrant labour/funding.
We are on course for spending up to £100 billion on welfare for 9 million British adults of working age by the end of this Parliament.
I reckon they could maybe try, oh I don't know, doing some actual work.
You might be surprised that largely I agree with you - the welfare system institutionalises a large number of people.
The big issue though as far as I can see it is: you would not employ a lot of these people, I would not employ them; they are unemployable.
We have to find away to solve this though.
Send them to prison then let James Timpson employ them when they come out!
I remember having all day ding-dong on here about a decade ago about why we felt retirement/care homes were only viable if they paid minimum wages to (exploited) foreign staff. It goes back to something verging on communism really - why should the owners of such businesses be so much wealthier than their staff? The excuses put forward were that £x multiplied by x hours meant the business couldn't run if they had to pay staff more, but really we should be asking why the profit margin has to be so big
A mistake to leave this to the private sector, at least for the places paid for with public money. Far too much Incentive to cut costs/game the system.
It's left to the private sector because the state (ie, us) do not want to pay for it.
We pay for it either way, it just costs more for less. The state pays billions and billions for social care.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
One of the reasons I've tended not to get involved in PB immigration spats over the years.
What gets very little discussion is the two biggest drivers of mass migration into Europe over the last two decades - Bush's 'war on terror', and the Russian sponsored devastation of Syria.
The numbers don’t really support that. Indians and Nigerians weren’t driven to Europe by Bush’s ‘war on terror’.
Numbers 'into Europe' is what Nigelb said.
For example, the 2 biggest sources of foreign-born residents of Germany (the European country with the most foreign-born residents) outside Europe are Syria and Afghanistan.
If you look at stats before Merkel opened the floodgates, they tell a different story. Afghanistan barely figures in 2013, with more asylum applications from Serbia.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Maybe, but let’s not pretend the general language of the left in the past decade or so has in any way majored on this - often the opposite. There is a reason why people don’t feel Labour are in tune with their concerns on this. Now they may be able to recover some good standing, but they start from a position of distrust, and the jury is still out.
More than a decade. There was a view on the Left that immigation was to "rub the Right's nose in diversity."
To the activists, rubbing the right's nose in diversity seemed like a win-win proposition: you get to wind up your opponents and you massage the demographics of the electorate in your favour, rendering their complaints impotent.
They didn't count on two things: the resentment of their own core vote and the fact that migrants can think for themselves.
Owning the Right came well before Owning the Libs.
The party you voted for has been in power for the last decade and a half, during which immigration has reached levels never seen before - and that after the Brexit you voted for.
Your account is nonsensical.
This "party you voted for" criticism would carry more weight if I wasn't heavily critical of them myself.
I have no issue if the university and care home sector have to fundamentally restructure themselves due to the demise of cheap immigrant labour/funding.
We are on course for spending up to £100 billion on welfare for 9 million British adults of working age by the end of this Parliament.
I reckon they could maybe try, oh I don't know, doing some actual work.
You might be surprised that largely I agree with you - the welfare system institutionalises a large number of people.
The big issue though as far as I can see it is: you would not employ a lot of these people, I would not employ them; they are unemployable.
We have to find away to solve this though.
I'm not prepared to simply write off 9 million people and accept they are unemployable, and that we owe them a living.
I am trying to imagine the howls of apoplexy that would have come from the left if a Tory PM or Farage had tweeted something like that.
I find Tough Sir Keir’s Twitter persona exceptionally cringe, but it does show how much they have realised this issue is hurting them. They might however be better served at quietly getting on with it rather than trying to get into a measuring contest as to who can sound tougher on immigration (because Farage will always, always win that one).
Oh yes, the beauty of the centrist's silence almost calms the anxiety brought on by Sir Keir's bad acting
I would have thought Reform voters would be more put off by the blatant hypocrisy from the nations leading Human Rights lawyer, who signed letters preventing criminals who went on to commit murder being deported recently, as well as campaigning for a second referendum and promising to fight for FOM
Continued FOM would have led, and did lead, to less immigration than Brexit and the Boris wave.....as most of the people who came here did so to work for a few years and returned to their home countries, whereas the immigration we have outside Europe is more permanent.....just saying.....
There is no way of knowing that to be true. FOM meant we had no control whatsoever over who could come from EU countries. If a million had turned up in a year, then a million would be here. Obviously the Boris wave was a disaster, but a government that is actually tough on immigration can lower it to zero if it wanted, and that wasn't possible while we were in the EU - if it had been, we wouldn't have had a referendum, let alone voted to leave
You're a betting man, we had a long sample of what FOM would bring in each year and trends we could extrapolate from. None of that pointed to the kind of migration we have seen post Brexit.
Yes, I agree it is highly improbable, but the fact that Boris messed up immigration post Brexit doesn't mean voting for Leave in order to limit immigration should be a regret. Starmer's phoney rhetoric on immigration grates as he has never said a word against it before, and fought tooth and nail to continue FOM. I don't think he was doing that because he feared higher immigration without it!
It will be interesting to see what the post Boris-wave migration figures are. There's no reason why they should only come down gradually, they should drop like a stone really, to way lower than EU FOM levels
Starmer is probably for sensible migration. He wasn't bothered by the low hundreds of thousands but can see the problem with high hundreds of thousands. There is nothing hypocritical about that.
I think most (if not all) people would prefer sensible migration.
One thing that strikes me is that it seems to be an accepted fact that migrants are good for the economy. I've been reading some of the articles which say this, and I'm not entirely convinced. Plus we have our actual economic history, which doesn't seem to have seen much of a boost - indeed GDP per capita isn't rosy at all. I wonder if the arguments require a closer look? (For example I can imagine that a medium skilled immigrant might displace a medium skilled local, who then goes on to be rather forced into a lower level job, which thus displaces someone else into the unemployed - and they are the really expensive ones for the state.) I'm far from being confident of my arguments here, but I do rather suspect the strong accepted conclusions.
It seems that the government have discovered that the economic basis for mass immigration was flawed all along. The millions of people negatively affected by it for the last 25 years, that were ignored, belittled, called racist and xenophobic by the likes of Gordon Brown, Jonathan Portes, David Cameron etc were right.
Who would have thought it? It was only their lives that were being ruined, how would they know?
That's a narrative which makes no differentiation between net migration of (for example) 160k p/a and 750k p/a. Which is clearly bullshit.
There's a good case to be made for limiting migration to manageable levels - and a serious debate about what that number might be.
Your account isn't that - it's just "immigration is unacceptable".
Skilled inward migration is not only acceptable but desirable. Unskilled mass inward migration of cheap labour with a large amount of economically inactive dependents living off the state isn’t. However criticise that, and as Isam says, these people (as well as the PB happy clappy mass inward migration is cool brigade) label you as ‘racist’ to really shut down debate.
One of the reasons I've tended not to get involved in PB immigration spats over the years.
What gets very little discussion is the two biggest drivers of mass migration into Europe over the last two decades - Bush's 'war on terror', and the Russian sponsored devastation of Syria.
The numbers don’t really support that. Indians and Nigerians weren’t driven to Europe by Bush’s ‘war on terror’.
Numbers 'into Europe' is what Nigelb said.
For example, the 2 biggest sources of foreign-born residents of Germany (the European country with the most foreign-born residents) outside Europe are Syria and Afghanistan.
There's also the point that immigration from India in 2023 was six times what it was a decade earlier.
Bluesky appears to be full of people getting their knickers in a twist over the Government finally looking to do something about unsustainable net migration.
If there truly is a housing crisis, then it is difficult to understand how increasing the population by a million every couple of years helps to deal with it.
That tells you everything you need to know about Bluesky.
It's an absolute disgrace, Labour trying to win back voters that they have lost to Reform. How dare they!
For the record, there's lots of us on the left who think:
a) legal migration has been far too high over the last 5 years, and b) the asylum system is a shambles, and it's ludicrous that asylum seekers have to be housed in hotels and other unsuitable accommodation - it needs sorting.
Maybe, but let’s not pretend the general language of the left in the past decade or so has in any way majored on this - often the opposite. There is a reason why people don’t feel Labour are in tune with their concerns on this. Now they may be able to recover some good standing, but they start from a position of distrust, and the jury is still out.
More than a decade. There was a view on the Left that immigation was to "rub the Right's nose in diversity."
To the activists, rubbing the right's nose in diversity seemed like a win-win proposition: you get to wind up your opponents and you massage the demographics of the electorate in your favour, rendering their complaints impotent.
They didn't count on two things: the resentment of their own core vote and the fact that migrants can think for themselves.
Owning the Right came well before Owning the Libs.
The party you voted for has been in power for the last decade and a half, during which immigration has reached levels never seen before - and that after the Brexit you voted for.
Your account is nonsensical.
This "party you voted for" criticism would carry more weight if I wasn't heavily critical of them myself.
Comments
Britain’s asylum hotel ‘king’ becomes a billionaire
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/graham-king-asylum-seekers-hostel-billionaire-l09ldxngh
Or pre selecting the data required to produce the desired conclusion (whatever that might be) ?
You invent a job. Which effectively crates the visa. You sell the visa* to some poor schmuck abroad - often for 5 figures. When they arrive in the U.K. - no job. If they complain, they will get deported (probably)
One company the BBC investigated, employed about 20 people, but had recruited 1,200 people in a year…
*selling visas is supposed to be illegal but rarely prosecuted.
Reform now lead with working class C2DEs with a massive 39% to just 20% for Labour and 14% for the Conservatives.
Labour still lead with middle class ABC1s with 24%, near tied with Reform, to 19% for the Conservatives and LDs
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/voting-intention?crossBreak=c2de
This reeks of Stable door closing after horse has bolted.
As such new housing would be predominantly built in more deprived areas it would led to even further electoral support for anti-establishment parties.
You can go and read the papers that are published if you really want to know the answers to those questions.
The most recent poll to come out was by Techne. You only have to go back to their last poll, just two weeks ago, and Labour were still ahead with those voters.
I'd agree that right now, Reform are more popular with those voters, but I wouldn't bet on it being anything like permanent replacement.
Far too much Incentive to cut costs/game the system.
However, they’re only on 39%. What we see is the highly fractured nature of modern British politics in the working class vote as it it across the electorate.
Some people want lower immigration and are not racist. I don’t think those people generally get called racist. Numerous people in this thread have called for lower immigration and have not been called racist.
From 1974 to 1997 Labour always won the DE vote and never got under 41% of that DE vote and in 1974 57% and 1997 59% of that vote.
Even when heavily defeated nationally their skilled working class C2 voteshare was also higher than their national voteshare, as in 1983 and 1987.
Now Labour not only have lost the working class vote, their working class voteshare is below their national voteshare due to the wwc vote switch to Reform
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-october-1974
Telegraph.
And how are local councils going to pay for that?
Who was it, who said that if the PM healed the sick, walked on water, changed water into wine, the headlines would be “PM destroys NHS, bridge building and drinks industries.”??
What was the UKIP/BXP view of the May version of Brexit?
If the aim was to control immigration without the sort of economic hit that would require an immigration bulge to keep GDP up, that was probably optimal.
Johnson, of course, was massively against it. What did Farage say?
Across the sector, I seriously doubt it (though there will of course be exceptions).
I could of course be wrong on that.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/24/uk-private-care-providers-profit-rise-covid-report
Data seems to suggest margins are declining now.
Oh, and the govt is hypocritical as it is now only doing something about it due to electoral disadvantage when it has been, as has other govts, very happy clappy about it.
We're only hearing about now, once SKS has aligned his policy direction with it and got a thumping from Reform - before it was all "safe and legal routes" - but better late than never.
Those paying for themselves subsidise local authorities, who (I think, though my knowledge on this is a few years old) get about a 30% discount.
We are on course for spending up to £100 billion on welfare for 9 million British adults of working age by the end of this Parliament.
I reckon they could maybe try, oh I don't know, doing some actual work.
What gets very little discussion is the two biggest drivers of mass migration into Europe over the last two decades - Bush's 'war on terror', and the Russian sponsored devastation of Syria.
But most of all, I'm opposed to the dehumanising language used by so many to scapegoat and 'other' asylum seekers. They're just humans, like you and me.
The conclusion, IIRC, was that 24/7 coverage for one person, paid minimum wage, would cost the employer £132k a year.
Genuine concerns about it was always labelled ‘genuine concerns’ in inverted commas to imply you’re racist for opposing it.
Still more room in heaven for a repenting sinner etc etc.
There's a decent case for looking at the bottom end of the market. Anything beyond that would be self destructive.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NocdWBitQXY
https://x.com/paulbranditv/status/1921484136079851919?s=61
And while *a lot* of the problems can be laid at the feet of Boris and his shower of incompetents and crooks, the problems with justice, policing, and defence belong entirely to the Coalition. Limiting child benefits looks like a bad idea, too.
Your account is nonsensical.
Do they pay as they go or do they get to defer and pay later ?
Also, are there any stats for how many who come to study don’t bother taking the course up but just merge into society ?
@homecareassn
says “Without access to international talent, there is a real risk of extreme workforce shortages” and people going without care.
There is already a massive shortage of carers.
By 'international talent' they actually mean minimum wage workers.
If there truly is a housing crisis, then it is difficult to understand how increasing the population by a million every couple of years helps to deal with it.
That sounds a lot until you realise that the cross channel boat hire specialists charge thousands for a seat. A seat on a plane, with a real, valid visa, compared to that?
So they literally sell the jobs to would be migrants. So locals are useless for that.
Hang on, you say, £10k to work minimum wage? Well, the migrant will be hoping to get a better job, somehow.
For those who have an exuberant disposition, you can sell *non-existent* jobs to the would be migrants.
Some students also work and pay tax whilst here.
A friend's Dad has just been put in a home as he has dementia - Two grand a week! They can charge that because they basically nick the equity from old people's houses. Something is wrong. Why are diseases that affect the old treated as private healthcare problems? Disgraceful really
Surely the state could do it cheaper than someone who is not much more than a venture capitalist? Don't fund foreign wars, don't buy nuclear missiles. As you said in the past, how can it be that there are people with elaborate tax avoidance schemes, to avoid paying tax on money that they will never spend, and people dying in poverty unable to clean themselves?
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/medway/news/retired-special-constable-arrested-for-posting-thought-crim-324147/
Interesting that in the story the inept Police were contrite and apologetic for their stupidity yet when I was first reported here a couple of the regular centrist Dads commenting on it chose to attack the Telegraph and its readers who were blameless.
@FrancisUrquhart has posted some interesting stuff on Chinese cars and linked an interesting YouTube channel too.
They absolutely can, and will if allowed, eat our European car makers lunch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rx1ieryuBc
For example, the 2 biggest sources of foreign-born residents of Germany (the European country with the most foreign-born residents) outside Europe are Syria and Afghanistan.
The big issue though as far as I can see it is: you would not employ a lot of these people, I would not employ them; they are unemployable.
We have to find away to solve this though.
The state pays billions and billions for social care.
So just some random...
Photo of the day
https://www.bamf.de/SharedDocs/Anlagen/DE/Forschung/Migrationsberichte/migrationsbericht-2013-zentrale-ergebnisse.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=16
Since I am, you can shut up.
Actually, I'm off for a walk, so I shall.