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Fewer than a third think Farage will become PM within four years – politicalbetting.com
Fewer than a third think Farage will become PM within four years – politicalbetting.com
31% of Britons say it is likely Nigel Farage will become prime minister within the next four years, up from 18% who said so in JanuaryAll Britons: 31% say it is likely (+13 from 21 Jan)By party voted for in 2024Reform UK: 71% (+17)Conservative: 35% (+13)Lib Dem: 20% (+11)Labour: 20% (+8)
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Labour isn't calling an early election on current polling.
If the question was for 5 years then it would be a different answer.
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
To achieve that we need to restrict far more than low skilled migration, and in any case those restrictions are already now in place.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/05/10/recent-history-suggests-badenoch-will-not-make-it-to-the-general-election/
(OK, not quite impossible, but you get the idea.)
The Captain Renault principle applies.
https://www.moreincommon.org.uk/media/apqji45m/post_local_elections.xlsx
69% "don’t think this Labour government will be re-elected at the next General Election".
59% think "Keir Starmer will not still be Prime Minister at the time of the next General Election"
Percentages who think the PM after the next election will be:
Keir Starmer: 12%
Labour politician other than Keir Starmer: 7%
Total Labour: 18%
Kemi Badenoch : 4%
Conservative politician other than Kemi Badenoch: 7%
Total Conservative: 11%
Nigel Farage: 19%
Reform UK politician other than Nigel Farage: 5%
Total Reform: 25%
Ed Davey: 2%
Lib Dem politician other than Ed Davey: 1%
Total LibDem: 3%
Other: 2%
Don't Know: 42%
I think he got demob happy and decided to call it quits.
Unlikely Starmer does the same, but recent history shows it is possible.
Assuming those jobs still need to be done, the consequence of that will be British workers being pushed down the value chain. That is not how most countries do it, and I'm pretty sure they have got the logic right. The rationale is to free up native staff to do the nicer, more profitable jobs. First-order and second-order effects strike again.
And whilst there is a moral question about importing people from poor countries to do the jobs we don't want to do, the free market answer to that is that migrant workers are (largely) freely entering into the job and are free to go when they want.
And the issue isn't the NHS and skilled jobs - even though that is a genuine issue. I think people get that it takes time to train even if they don't understand how long or why.
The real issue is unskilled where despite that word the migrants fill a genuine gap in the labour market. If British people wanted / could afford those jobs they would have taken them...
And it's blood and soil racist to be suggesting we should have slave indentured low wage imported labour to allow the natives to go up the value chain.
Which is anyway totally ignoring the fact that 88% of care staff for instance were born in the country!
I'm not saying I advocate that position but it seems just as plausible as its opposite, especially if we agree to treat academic researchers as a special class.
Damn! Scooped by Stuartinromford who said it better and typed faster just one post earlier.
But net negative migration is not ungenuine or gaslit. It's what happened for most of the late 20th century during which time we had productivity growth and rising wages.
Half our population still does not go to University. We have no shortage of people to fill unskilled roles. If an employer can't find someone to work for them, they can improve productivity, pay and conditions.
Why haven't they magically all got £37k jobs as a result?
Life doesn't work that way, which is why we have universal education.
Look at the reaction here, and on social media, to some quite sensible proposals from Starmer. You’d think he was the second coming of Oswald Mosley.
It’s also true that amplified voices on social media are not reflective of the wider public.
Still, we will keep getting what we are given as we keep,voting for these people.
But importing skilled people doesn't suppress skilled wages because we all gain from high skills and lump of labour is a fallacy. It's importing unskilled that devalues our knowledge base and worsens our average.
Number wrangling in finance is way more productive than before computing, for example. But maths teaching is still a teacher with 1-3 dozen pupils. Almost certainly more productive than in the days of blackboards, but not transformatively so.
(Actually, it's worse than that. The cost of highly numerate people has gone up, because of the gravitational effect of the City and tech firms. So in terms of maths education per pound spent, productivity probably ends up going down. You could argue that the true hourly cost of a maths teacher is what they can make doing private tuition- that's 2-3 times what schools pay.)
So we end up at a bit of an impasse. Jobs that we want done, but really don't like the idea of paying for. We could raise public sector pay (because it mostly is a public sector issue) but that would mean more tax, and we don't want that.
We're in a similar situation to previous discussions about construction and hospitality workers with business, political and government leaders based in London thinking that the London employment situation applies to the country as a whole.
This is a complex question, and why I am quite unhappy with salary as a marker of whether someone contributes to our country or not. Soldiers from the Commonwealth, for example - people who would fight and die for us, but start on a salary of £25k.
I suspect where immigration is an important / deciding factor in people's votes absolutely nothing any Government can do will persuade those voters that the issue is resolved.
Early release was bad news for a Labour government; it would have been even worse for the Conservatives to have to do it.
Sounds a bit denial-adjacent to me.
Have a class of people who are going to do unskilled jobs. No need for education for them. And minimum wage can be slashed for them. Think how much cheaper staffing your nursing home could be then? Trebles all round.
I find clients are seeing significant operational issues when they can no longer guarantee daily staff levels because domestic employees can't be bothered to turn in. Eastern Europeans would apparently drag themselves in pre-Brexit even if they were at death's door.
I don't believe this idea has been considered by Government.
Prisons is one
The reduced tax intake that resulted in the WFA going which was directly connected to the excessive employee NI cuts would have been far more entertaining.
The third one was the independently determined public sector pay settlements which couldn't be avoided but caused problem 2.
The days when ordinary working people could retire to the Costas are over.
100k to 500k is a huge range. I'd regard 100k net immigration as inadequate for replacement for the demographic loss of workers as the late boomer retired population burgeons with the British born, and inadequate to even prevent damaging population decline come a decade or so's time.
Yet 500k net migration is hugely problematic for services, housing and integration.
A sweet spot somewhere below around 200k (but no artificial targets please, just policy that consistently pushes in that direction) is where I'd like things to be. That's about what I said pre-Brexit 10 years ago, but the higher migration since has been balanced by a quicker decline in birth rates, so I think we're not far off being in the same place.
So just under 4 years away.
Labour aren't going to get hardly any of the people who rank immigration as their main issue and have done for many years. But the 10% who have moved to Reform in the last year? They (rightly) see immigration as too high and not controlled properly over the last five years and want to see change, it may be the current decider in how they vote. If they see progress back to where it was a decade ago for some of that 10% that will be enough. Win back 2-3% from there, another 2-3% from the rest of the electorate would be enough to be the difference between winning and losing.
And of Labour's own current vote many will have anxiety over immigration too, the government need to make progress to protect their own vote as well as try to get some back from Reform.
"And that's why they voted for Reform in massive numbers, where they're allowed to vote"
MAGA adjacent conspiracist Timothy White and Taylor.
The NIC "cuts" were as @RochdalePioneers kept pointing out a fully funded tax rise.
I guess they’ll try and bring it back sometime later, but without the push from the top is it really going to happen?
As the rise of Powell on the right demonstrated, fifty years ago.
If you're one of the smugglers putting people in small boats across the channel — we’re coming after you.
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1923272799516307683
Once they start mirroring the Trump cult it’s hard to dislodge them from their beliefs and you get to a point where facts no longer matter.
(Oh God, I've just invoked the ghost of nonsense-peddler Saint Laffer haven't I?)
Convenient excuse now to say well worried about the PR. Maybe Mauritius are asked for extra cherries on top of their extra cherries.
Take Harry Cole's front page in today's Sun. A victim becomes the perp. Is it because Lammy is black?
Any politician would kill to have a front page of them saying ‘The fucking French’.
I'm not sure that's what he means to imply, though.
I’ve sat across from people saying that, since they would keep only a pound or 2 per extra hour worked, they don’t want to work extra hours. Because, by the time you factor in travel, clothing wear and tear etc, they would lose money.
Or is Laffer only for rich people?
Welcome to the benefits trap. We give people money in a way that penalises them for working more. Then they don’t work more.
When Trump puts an 80% tariff on something, he is trying to kill import of that thing. When we put an effective tax rate of 80% on poor people working more….
Global CO2 emissions continue to be at record levels. And if by some miracle they ceased right now warming would continue to work its way through the system.
I am genuinely surprised that the Foreign Security is travelling around by such means.
When we got to the other end, tried to renegotiate the price, as expected.
Do keep up.
There's a shortage of care workers. If you arrive on a care worker visa then don't do care work, instant visa revocation followed by deportation.
However I didnt vote for him so I suspect we will avoid politics.
The Herald
@heraldscotland
"We’d just watched King Creosote possibly torch his good name by telling us that he thought Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens as well as local boy and vaccine-sceptic Neil Oliver were among his pantheon of 'good guys'."
https://heraldscotland.com/opinion/25160503.open-letter-king-creosote-please-dont-become-scotlands-morrissey/
https://x.com/heraldscotland/status/1922678206890426674
No doubt the boxes have all been ticked and the reports done stating that the children are at the standard expected for their age but the reality is that they are innumerate and illiterate. I very much doubt this will change any time soon.
I brung you a massage: The Scrumming Ogles heartily endorses Doovid Limmy's toorade against the Frunch toxi-droover!
"Prof Rogoff says that episode was an amuse bouche. He fears inflation could reach 20pc to 25pc in the next wave, which may not be far away. No bondholder waits for that. Once in motion it becomes self-fulfilling."
AEP - Telegraph
Rogoff has studied the history of crashes.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/king-charles-rich-list-wealth-2025-elizabeth-crown-b2752182.html
The real reason Rishi resigned?
Any Government that deserves to be in place needs to eliminate the cliff edges and benefits trap.
'But it's difficult' - don't seek office then.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqj7v7x1gywo
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
I'm not cynical that it is manipulated so happy to assume the odds on up, down or staying the same are all fair.