Reform voters confident that something they want will happen, even when it's impossible?
(OK, not quite impossible, but you get the idea.)
The Captain Renault principle applies.
Not impossible, by any means, for Farage to be PM within four years. When the revolution comes, naysayers like you (and me!) will be first against the wall!
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Here's the problem - because the narrative has been as uncontrolled as the numbers for the last few years, a great deal of voters think the target migration number must be negative. You can't satisfy people who have a genuine concern but have been gaslit into demanding an ungenuine outcome.
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...
I don't think the number should be net negative, I think it can be in the hundreds of thousands so long as we build even more hundreds of thousands of housing and associated infrastructure.
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.
The catch is that productivity improvements are lumpy- some jobs can become ten or a hundred times more productive, others will struggle to eke out a few percent.
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.
To take to extremes the fallacy that some are making that it's good to have a class of people in the country doing unskilled jobs, we could save money on maths teachers altogether by eliminating our provision of them to some people.
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.
One third of the adult working age population haven't even got a C grade in English and Maths or their current grade equivalent so not everyone can do skilled work certainly at a higher level
I don't often agree with you, so to give you credit that's a very good point, well made!
A third of school leavers fail to get a grade 4 (a pass today) in Maths and English.
Yet we need to import unskilled people? I don't think so!
The other parties need to try and claw back some of the Reform switchers before they become hardened cult members drinking the Kool Aid .
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.
Surely we have passed that point of no return.
Take Harry Cole's front page in today's Sun. A victim becomes the perp. Is it because Lammy is black?
No, The Sun are trying to make Lammy the most popular person in the UK.
Any politician would kill to have a front page of them saying ‘The fucking French’.
400 miles in the back of a Ford Kuga, I think I would be f##king furious.
I am genuinely surprised that the Foreign Security is travelling around by such means.
Indeed what was he thinking arranging and paying for his own private travel? His predecessor, Liz Truss, would have taken a private jet (probably provided by a donor).
31% though is all Farage and Reform need for a majority under FPTP unless heavy tactical voting against them
With four years to run, the chance of tactical voting becoming a major sport is fairly high. Most people want to vote for winners or at least a horse that will give them a run. Things can change, but at the moment the real GE contest in 2029 would be Reform v Lab/LD/One Nation/SNP alliance.
I see you omit Conservative voters - don't forget currently 17 to 20% of the electorate- from the upcoming sports day.
Tactical voting will cut all sorts of ways on the day (with all sorts of unintended consequences) but in Reform vs Labour battles I now expect the majority of Conservatives will vote to defeat a heniously unpopular Labour government.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
If you're in North Wales and vaguely sentient surely you'd be looking in the direction of Merseyside / Wirral rather than trying to cross a mountain range?
On migration, one thing that really needs to be cracked down on is people, who are coming in on visas for jobs lower than the threshold salary binning the job off after 5 minutes (Or not getting it at all) and doing something else. 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.
This is the kind of detail one would hope Starmer's lot will pay attention to, whereas Boris didn't and Farage probably won't either.
31% though is all Farage and Reform need for a majority under FPTP unless heavy tactical voting against them
With four years to run, the chance of tactical voting becoming a major sport is fairly high. Most people want to vote for winners or at least a horse that will give them a run. Things can change, but at the moment the real GE contest in 2029 would be Reform v Lab/LD/One Nation/SNP alliance.
I see you omit Conservative voters - don't forget currently 17 to 20% of the electorate- from the upcoming sports day.
Tactical voting will cut all sorts of ways on the day (with all sorts of unintended consequences) but in Reform vs Labour battles I now expect the majority of Conservatives will vote to defeat a heniously unpopular Labour government.
Apologies I see you say One Nation which must be an allusion to some part of the Conservative vote
Just looking at the date, as the election could be held as late as August 2029, then clearly that is more than four years away.
The obvious answer to when the next election is held is May 2029; traditional month and aligns with local elections. In that instance, it would be less than four years now.
So we're assuming that Starmer is going to hang on as late as possible and go for a June or July 2029 election? I assume August 2029 won't happen due to school holidays.
The other parties need to try and claw back some of the Reform switchers before they become hardened cult members drinking the Kool Aid .
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.
Surely we have passed that point of no return.
Take Harry Cole's front page in today's Sun. A victim becomes the perp. Is it because Lammy is black?
No, The Sun are trying to make Lammy the most popular person in the UK.
Any politician would kill to have a front page of them saying ‘The fucking French’.
400 miles in the back of a Ford Kuga, I think I would be f##king furious.
I am genuinely surprised that the Foreign Security is travelling around by such means.
Indeed what was he thinking arranging and paying for his own private travel? His predecessor, Liz Truss, would have taken a private jet (probably provided by a donor).
I actually presumed the state would provide his transport and he would have security with him as he is one of the most senior government officials. I am not one to ever criticize senior government officials taking private jets etc, because in reality for a lot of things it is the only realistic way of making it work (as Starmer has now found out as he makes regular use of such means, when he used to spent ages criticizing Sunak).
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
If you're in North Wales and vaguely sentient surely you'd be looking in the direction of Merseyside / Wirral rather than trying to cross a mountain range?
It was merely an example, if you get offered a job somewhere you cant get to then you can apply to help to relocate....its the thing that blocks people from a lot of jobs that they just cant afford the move
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
If you're in North Wales and vaguely sentient surely you'd be looking in the direction of Merseyside / Wirral rather than trying to cross a mountain range?
It was merely an example, if you get offered a job somewhere you cant get to then you can apply to help to relocate....its the thing that blocks people from a lot of jobs that they just cant afford the move
As an example when I was looking for work in Cornwall I got offered a job in slough....no way I could have afforded to move but luckily the company offered help with relocation by putting you in accomodation for the first two months. It would payback in taxes fairly quickly even for a min wage job
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
Once again, too many are trying to read too much into what is happening now and projecting forward to 2028 or 2029 and imagining the same will happen.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that nothing is certain.
We can see what is happening now - another strong night for Reform in local council by elections and a hint of what might happen next year in London from the result in Whetstone.
Back in 2022, the vote split in the London locals was Labour 42%, Conservative 26%, LDs 14.5%, Greens 11%. Those numbers seem from an alternate reality.
London is a series of complex, interconnected political battlegrounds and what happens in Inner London is different from Outer London and what happens in North, South, East and West London will all be different. Each party has its areas of stengths and weaknesses and Reform's impact may be akin to tossing a boulder into a duckpond.
Add in groups of pro-Palestine local Independents in East london and other Independents and you get a complete melange of possibilties.
It'll be fun...can Reform win control of a London Borough? How many Boroughs will Labour lose? How many Boroughs will the Conservatives lose? In how many Boroughs could the Greens become the official opposition? Can the LDs progress beyond their south west London heartland? Is there any point to this endless stream of questions? Is a life on the ocean wave better than going to sea? Why do I bother? Why are you still reading this?
If you're one of the smugglers putting people in small boats across the channel — we’re coming after you.
Thanks for reposting.
Great to see you are on message.
I'm awaiting the follow up:
"If you're one of the taxi drivers smuggling my ministers acrsoss the French border — we’re coming after you."
I hadn't thought of a conflation of the two trans*-frontier stories in the way you suggest. Have you tipped off the Telegraph about your scoop? I hear they pay handsomely.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
Want to move to London you probably need £1000 minimum to rent a room and then money to live for a month.
That isn’t affordable without help - and many people don’t have anyone who can help
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
If you're in North Wales and vaguely sentient surely you'd be looking in the direction of Merseyside / Wirral rather than trying to cross a mountain range?
It was merely an example, if you get offered a job somewhere you cant get to then you can apply to help to relocate....its the thing that blocks people from a lot of jobs that they just cant afford the move
Not a bad idea, one of our problems is people trapped in areas far away from prosperity.
The catch is that prosperous areas don't want any incomers, whether asylum seekers, economic migrants, or people moving from the other end of the county. (Actually, depressed areas aren't too keen on it either- see the "local shop for local people" trope. And whilst improving housing, schools, hospitals etc would help, many people don't want them built either.
(It's one of the reasons why Reform's crusade against remote working is so maddeningly dumb. It's such an obvious way of giving people in left-behind towns access to a better, wider job market.)
Good news: British people are, on the whole, not racist. Bad news: British people are, on the whole, misanthropic- just not in a racist way.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
Want to move to London you probably need £1000 minimum to rent a room and then money to live for a month.
That isn’t affordable without help - and many people don’t have anyone who can help
Which is why I suggest a scheme to help people move to where jobs are rather than as currently being trapped in a place with no hope. Neither was I suggesting it be mandatory...merely if offered a job we can help you relocate
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
Want to move to London you probably need £1000 minimum to rent a room and then money to live for a month.
That isn’t affordable without help - and many people don’t have anyone who can help
Which is why I suggest a scheme to help people move to where jobs are rather than as currently being trapped in a place with no hope. Neither was I suggesting it be mandatory...merely if offered a job we can help you relocate
How about we fix the benefits system first so that if people get a job they can keep more of what they earn instead of 80%+ of it being reclaimed by HMRC?
Then people might be able to afford their own bike or car.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
A bit of both I suppose. We definitely need to build more houses where the jobs are and are easier to create to make them more accessible places to live. But if someone wants to live in North Wales, and of course plenty will, we also need to make sure there are jobs and opportunities there too.
The first is easier than the second so I don't particularly disagree with your concept but many will it jarring to be told to move whether there is assistance or not, as they did when Tebbit said it. So I would prefer to make it easier for them to move by lower housing costs, rather than telling them to move, or even that they should move.
Once again, too many are trying to read too much into what is happening now and projecting forward to 2028 or 2029 and imagining the same will happen.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that nothing is certain.
We can see what is happening now - another strong night for Reform in local council by elections and a hint of what might happen next year in London from the result in Whetstone.
Back in 2022, the vote split in the London locals was Labour 42%, Conservative 26%, LDs 14.5%, Greens 11%. Those numbers seem from an alternate reality.
London is a series of complex, interconnected political battlegrounds and what happens in Inner London is different from Outer London and what happens in North, South, East and West London will all be different. Each party has its areas of stengths and weaknesses and Reform's impact may be akin to tossing a boulder into a duckpond.
Add in groups of pro-Palestine local Independents in East london and other Independents and you get a complete melange of possibilties.
It'll be fun...can Reform win control of a London Borough? How many Boroughs will Labour lose? How many Boroughs will the Conservatives lose? In how many Boroughs could the Greens become the official opposition? Can the LDs progress beyond their south west London heartland? Is there any point to this endless stream of questions? Is a life on the ocean wave better than going to sea? Why do I bother? Why are you still reading this?
Reform could certainly gain Bexley from the Conservatives and Barking and Dagenham from Labour and Havering from NOC though beyond those outer suburban areas neighbouring Essex and Kent Reform are much weaker in London than the rest of the UK.
As a result the Conservatives could still gain Westminster from Labour as the Tories will still be the main oppositio to Labour in West London.
The Tories may lose Bromley to NOC and Labour Redbridge to NOC due to Independents and Reform in the latter
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
Enabling people to keep 80%+ of what they earn, instead of HMRC reclaiming 80%+ of it, might see more than a few decide that its worthwhile to commute.
People won't commute for £1 an hour net income. Why should they?
Once again, too many are trying to read too much into what is happening now and projecting forward to 2028 or 2029 and imagining the same will happen.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that nothing is certain.
We can see what is happening now - another strong night for Reform in local council by elections and a hint of what might happen next year in London from the result in Whetstone.
Back in 2022, the vote split in the London locals was Labour 42%, Conservative 26%, LDs 14.5%, Greens 11%. Those numbers seem from an alternate reality.
London is a series of complex, interconnected political battlegrounds and what happens in Inner London is different from Outer London and what happens in North, South, East and West London will all be different. Each party has its areas of stengths and weaknesses and Reform's impact may be akin to tossing a boulder into a duckpond.
Add in groups of pro-Palestine local Independents in East london and other Independents and you get a complete melange of possibilties.
It'll be fun...can Reform win control of a London Borough? How many Boroughs will Labour lose? How many Boroughs will the Conservatives lose? In how many Boroughs could the Greens become the official opposition? Can the LDs progress beyond their south west London heartland? Is there any point to this endless stream of questions? Is a life on the ocean wave better than going to sea? Why do I bother? Why are you still reading this?
Reform could win somewhere like Havering or Bexley, maybe Bromley, I would imagine. Non-posh white bits of outer London should be fertile territory for them.
Once again, too many are trying to read too much into what is happening now and projecting forward to 2028 or 2029 and imagining the same will happen.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that nothing is certain.
We can see what is happening now - another strong night for Reform in local council by elections and a hint of what might happen next year in London from the result in Whetstone.
Back in 2022, the vote split in the London locals was Labour 42%, Conservative 26%, LDs 14.5%, Greens 11%. Those numbers seem from an alternate reality.
London is a series of complex, interconnected political battlegrounds and what happens in Inner London is different from Outer London and what happens in North, South, East and West London will all be different. Each party has its areas of stengths and weaknesses and Reform's impact may be akin to tossing a boulder into a duckpond.
Add in groups of pro-Palestine local Independents in East london and other Independents and you get a complete melange of possibilties.
It'll be fun...can Reform win control of a London Borough? How many Boroughs will Labour lose? How many Boroughs will the Conservatives lose? In how many Boroughs could the Greens become the official opposition? Can the LDs progress beyond their south west London heartland? Is there any point to this endless stream of questions? Is a life on the ocean wave better than going to sea? Why do I bother? Why are you still reading this?
Reform could certainly gain Bexley from the Conservatives and Barking and Dagenham from Labour and Havering from NOC though beyond those outer suburban areas neighbouring Essex and Kent Reform are much weaker in London than the rest of the UK.
As a result the Conservatives could still gain Westminster from Labour as the Tories will still be the main oppositio to Labour in West London.
The Tories may lose Bromley to NOC and Labour Redbridge to NOC due to Independents and Reform in the latter
Good to know that when the Tories talk about regaining Westminster their ambitions are now limited to the particular seat rather than becoming the government.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
also the cost of the ticket, between that and the taper on benefits they could quite easily find themselves worse off than for example the train fare from landudno to cardiff is £36.40 yes you might get it cheaper for a season ticket but they probably don't have the money to purchase one. In addition to commute time is 4 hours each way and the fare is off peak. Be more expensive if you need to be at work for 9
Keir Starmer's net favourability rating has dropped 12pts in a month to -46, his lowest level ever, including a 34pt drop among Labour voters, leaving him more unpopular than popular with them for the first time
All Britons: -46 net rating (down 12 from 13-14 Apr)
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Yes but the polling wasn't about that, it was about wanting zero or negative migration.
To achieve that we need to restrict far more than low skilled migration, and in any case those restrictions are already now in place.
People aren't really interested in the net migration figures. As the rise of Powell on the right demonstrated, fifty years ago.
We can't let one speech, made 57 years ago, prevent us having the debate we need to have today about immigration.
I wouldn't argue that we should. In the same way we shouldn't have been quite so triggered by Starmer's recent speech.
But let's not pretend what it is that people are actually asking for when they say "zero net migration".
Keir Starmer's net favourability rating has dropped 12pts in a month to -46, his lowest level ever, including a 34pt drop among Labour voters, leaving him more unpopular than popular with them for the first time
All Britons: -46 net rating (down 12 from 13-14 Apr)
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
also the cost of the ticket, between that and the taper on benefits they could quite easily find themselves worse off than for example the train fare from landudno to cardiff is £36.40 yes you might get it cheaper for a season ticket but they probably don't have the money to purchase one. In addition to commute time is 4 hours each way and the fare is off peak. Be more expensive if you need to be at work for 9
No, I'm not talking about North Wales - I'm saying that the South Wales problem could be addressed by persuading people in the (South Welsh) Valleys where there is significant unemployment that they could work in Cardiff. Because many don't: they see a short, relatively cheap train ride - 40 minutes or so - as too much of a barrier. This isn't just a persuade-people-to-change-their-attitude post; there are all sorts of practical things that can be done (like loans to cost of train fares until salary).
North Wales is a different and slightly tougher issue - less unemployment in North Wales but far fewer practical opportunities.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
Enabling people to keep 80%+ of what they earn, instead of HMRC reclaiming 80%+ of it, might see more than a few decide that its worthwhile to commute.
People won't commute for £1 an hour net income. Why should they?
Yes, you're right - when I say 'persuading', I perhaps chose he wrong word - I don't mean simply exhorting them to do so, I mean create an environment where it is an attractive option to do so. My point is that South Wales is in the relatively favourable position that there is a place with lots of vacancies connected by good quality infrastructure to a place with lots of unemployment nearby. It's a problem we should be able to solve.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
Once again, too many are trying to read too much into what is happening now and projecting forward to 2028 or 2029 and imagining the same will happen.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that nothing is certain.
We can see what is happening now - another strong night for Reform in local council by elections and a hint of what might happen next year in London from the result in Whetstone.
Back in 2022, the vote split in the London locals was Labour 42%, Conservative 26%, LDs 14.5%, Greens 11%. Those numbers seem from an alternate reality.
London is a series of complex, interconnected political battlegrounds and what happens in Inner London is different from Outer London and what happens in North, South, East and West London will all be different. Each party has its areas of stengths and weaknesses and Reform's impact may be akin to tossing a boulder into a duckpond.
Add in groups of pro-Palestine local Independents in East london and other Independents and you get a complete melange of possibilties.
It'll be fun...can Reform win control of a London Borough? How many Boroughs will Labour lose? How many Boroughs will the Conservatives lose? In how many Boroughs could the Greens become the official opposition? Can the LDs progress beyond their south west London heartland? Is there any point to this endless stream of questions? Is a life on the ocean wave better than going to sea? Why do I bother? Why are you still reading this?
It's certainly true that a lot can happen over the next 4-5 years. As you note, a lot has happened over the last six. Or ten. Or fifteen.
But isn't that the point? The assumption by some that Reform is a flash-in-the-pan because these mould-breaking parties tend not to perform when it matters was probably never true in the first place - we ascribe too much to inevitability in these cases and too little to chance - but even if it was true then, there's no reason to assume it still is now.
The basic inertial strength of Labour and the Tories has gone. Their rooting in communities no longer exists. The electorate is far more volatile in its choices. The nature of campaigning has changed. The nature of media and society has changed. The world around us has changed.
Reform is a party that undoubtedly is sitting on any number of problems, any or several of which could blow up at any time and sink their chances of making a major breakthrough. On the other hand, Farage has shown a cockroach-like ability to overcome such issues in the past. It's not as if UKIP or the Brexit Party were without local difficulties from time to time, and yet here Reform is, sitting on a ~30% share and a 5-10% lead.
So while Reform could implode in a series of scandals, resignations and recriminations, we probably underestimate the extend of the existential challenge to both the Tories (more obviously) and to Labour. Both face pincer-assaults on their traditional voter base. There is no guarantee that either will see them off with leaderships (and potential leaderships) who either don't get the extent of the problem, or do but are incapable of forming and delivering on an effective strategy to counter it.
I think a PM Farage is an entirely plausible scenario and his current odds as Next PM are about right.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
At heart I am a simple soul, and I find simple pleasures in simple things. On this morning's jog I came across this view across a field of thistles. It immensely cheered me.
(If I had turned ninety degrees to take the photo, it would show a line of tankers waiting to go down to a little sewage compound and at the end of the track. Somewhat less scenic. And if I had turned 45 degrees the other way, you would see old World War Two accommodation huts.)
No, we aren't. There will be no such thing as "and F35 with two engines".
Trump: F-35, we're doing an upgrade, a simple upgrade, but we're also doing an F-55. I'm going to call it an F-55, and that's going to be a substantial upgrade, but it's going to be also with two engines because the F 35 has a single engine. I don't like single engines. https://x.com/Acyn/status/1922919999406223595
Or is it just that's he's already forgotten he had the F47 named after him, and thinks that's an F35 upgrade (it isn't) ?
Funny thing is Clarkson used to like Jags, or at least review them favourably, until he dreamt up this Terry-Thomas cad or bounder saying Jaaaaaaaag.
I thought JLR missed an opportunity here by not leaning into it and starting a sub-brand just called "Jag" for smaller cars that weren't aimed at ancient fleg shaggers.
They weren't BMW or Mercedes so the brand wasn't strong enough to prosper when diluted across a wide range of not very good products built the cheapest way possible at the behest of their Indian paymasters.
Some MBA wanker might understand how the same management team simultaneously did so well with the Range Rover brand and so badly with the Jaguar brand because I don't.
The obvious reason being that there probably won't be a General Election in the next 4 years!
Labour isn't calling an early election on current polling.
I say that in the header!
No one except me reads the headers.
I do.
Comment first, read headers later, of course
You should never take my comments literally.
Isn't that a paradox?
If I don't take that post literally, then I sometimes should take your posts literally. But if I sometimes take your post literally, then its not never ...
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
Start at 6.09am, running half hourly; last train home is at 22.36.
There are - as Bart points out - issues to address to make it attractive to take the jobs which are available. But infrastructure isn't one of them. The Welsh Valleys are amazingly well connected to Cardiff.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Yes but the polling wasn't about that, it was about wanting zero or negative migration.
To achieve that we need to restrict far more than low skilled migration, and in any case those restrictions are already now in place.
People aren't really interested in the net migration figures. As the rise of Powell on the right demonstrated, fifty years ago.
We can't let one speech, made 57 years ago, prevent us having the debate we need to have today about immigration.
We're hardly prevented having a debate on immigration. It's pretty much the main thing that politicians bang on about for most of the last quarter century.
Maybe if they'd actually got a grip on it then we wouldn't be banging on about it.
One reason they haven't is because of silly Mets throwing Powell at them every time they try to do so.
No, we aren't. There will be no such thing as "and F35 with two engines".
Trump: F-35, we're doing an upgrade, a simple upgrade, but we're also doing an F-55. I'm going to call it an F-55, and that's going to be a substantial upgrade, but it's going to be also with two engines because the F 35 has a single engine. I don't like single engines. https://x.com/Acyn/status/1922919999406223595
Or is it just that's he's already forgotten he had the F47 named after him, and thinks that's an F35 upgrade (it isn't) ?
It's incoherent babble.
If Biden had said this, the usual suspects would have been all over it...
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Yes but the polling wasn't about that, it was about wanting zero or negative migration.
To achieve that we need to restrict far more than low skilled migration, and in any case those restrictions are already now in place.
People aren't really interested in the net migration figures. As the rise of Powell on the right demonstrated, fifty years ago.
We can't let one speech, made 57 years ago, prevent us having the debate we need to have today about immigration.
Who the f*** is not having the debate? Debating immigration is 63% of PB discussion.
Your idea of debating immigration is to try and show that no debate need be had.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Yes but the polling wasn't about that, it was about wanting zero or negative migration.
To achieve that we need to restrict far more than low skilled migration, and in any case those restrictions are already now in place.
People aren't really interested in the net migration figures. As the rise of Powell on the right demonstrated, fifty years ago.
We can't let one speech, made 57 years ago, prevent us having the debate we need to have today about immigration.
We're hardly prevented having a debate on immigration. It's pretty much the main thing that politicians bang on about for most of the last quarter century.
Maybe if they'd actually got a grip on it then we wouldn't be banging on about it.
One reason they haven't is because of silly Mets throwing Powell at them every time they try to do so.
Your party has been in charge for the last 14 years bar the last, not the "silly mets".
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
Enabling people to keep 80%+ of what they earn, instead of HMRC reclaiming 80%+ of it, might see more than a few decide that its worthwhile to commute.
People won't commute for £1 an hour net income. Why should they?
Yes, you're right - when I say 'persuading', I perhaps chose he wrong word - I don't mean simply exhorting them to do so, I mean create an environment where it is an attractive option to do so. My point is that South Wales is in the relatively favourable position that there is a place with lots of vacancies connected by good quality infrastructure to a place with lots of unemployment nearby. It's a problem we should be able to solve.
I wonder if you subsidised the train fares it would pay for itself
Funny thing is Clarkson used to like Jags, or at least review them favourably, until he dreamt up this Terry-Thomas cad or bounder saying Jaaaaaaaag.
I thought JLR missed an opportunity here by not leaning into it and starting a sub-brand just called "Jag" for smaller cars that weren't aimed at ancient fleg shaggers.
They weren't BMW or Mercedes so the brand wasn't strong enough to prosper when diluted across a wide range of not very good products built the cheapest way possible at the behest of their Indian paymasters.
Some MBA wanker might understand how the same management team simultaneously did so well with the Range Rover brand and so badly with the Jaguar brand because I don't.
Unusually, I agree with you. Your strategy makes sense.
And I don't understand it either. The best guess I can muster is they thought the controversy helped grab attention and will ultimately, therefore, drive more interest and sales.
I'd say there's more than a little bit of wishful thinking there.
Once again, too many are trying to read too much into what is happening now and projecting forward to 2028 or 2029 and imagining the same will happen.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that nothing is certain.
We can see what is happening now - another strong night for Reform in local council by elections and a hint of what might happen next year in London from the result in Whetstone.
Back in 2022, the vote split in the London locals was Labour 42%, Conservative 26%, LDs 14.5%, Greens 11%. Those numbers seem from an alternate reality.
London is a series of complex, interconnected political battlegrounds and what happens in Inner London is different from Outer London and what happens in North, South, East and West London will all be different. Each party has its areas of stengths and weaknesses and Reform's impact may be akin to tossing a boulder into a duckpond.
Add in groups of pro-Palestine local Independents in East london and other Independents and you get a complete melange of possibilties.
It'll be fun...can Reform win control of a London Borough? How many Boroughs will Labour lose? How many Boroughs will the Conservatives lose? In how many Boroughs could the Greens become the official opposition? Can the LDs progress beyond their south west London heartland? Is there any point to this endless stream of questions? Is a life on the ocean wave better than going to sea? Why do I bother? Why are you still reading this?
It's certainly true that a lot can happen over the next 4-5 years. As you note, a lot has happened over the last six. Or ten. Or fifteen.
But isn't that the point? The assumption by some that Reform is a flash-in-the-pan because these mould-breaking parties tend not to perform when it matters was probably never true in the first place - we ascribe too much to inevitability in these cases and too little to chance - but even if it was true then, there's no reason to assume it still is now.
The basic inertial strength of Labour and the Tories has gone. Their rooting in communities no longer exists. The electorate is far more volatile in its choices. The nature of campaigning has changed. The nature of media and society has changed. The world around us has changed.
Reform is a party that undoubtedly is sitting on any number of problems, any or several of which could blow up at any time and sink their chances of making a major breakthrough. On the other hand, Farage has shown a cockroach-like ability to overcome such issues in the past. It's not as if UKIP or the Brexit Party were without local difficulties from time to time, and yet here Reform is, sitting on a ~30% share and a 5-10% lead.
So while Reform could implode in a series of scandals, resignations and recriminations, we probably underestimate the extend of the existential challenge to both the Tories (more obviously) and to Labour. Both face pincer-assaults on their traditional voter base. There is no guarantee that either will see them off with leaderships (and potential leaderships) who either don't get the extent of the problem, or do but are incapable of forming and delivering on an effective strategy to counter it.
I think a PM Farage is an entirely plausible scenario and his current odds as Next PM are about right.
Douglas Carswell wrote an article in The Telegraph, I think, in 2014 about the old two parties losing their domination of UK politics. I can't find it now, but it was similar in the thrust of it's point to your post.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
Enabling people to keep 80%+ of what they earn, instead of HMRC reclaiming 80%+ of it, might see more than a few decide that its worthwhile to commute.
People won't commute for £1 an hour net income. Why should they?
Yes, you're right - when I say 'persuading', I perhaps chose he wrong word - I don't mean simply exhorting them to do so, I mean create an environment where it is an attractive option to do so. My point is that South Wales is in the relatively favourable position that there is a place with lots of vacancies connected by good quality infrastructure to a place with lots of unemployment nearby. It's a problem we should be able to solve.
I wonder if you subsidised the train fares it would pay for itself
I would have thought so - at least if you took a holistic view of the benefits to the public purse. For all I know, the Welsh may already do this. GM has a similar scheme for back-to-workers, though I don't know the details.
Tice says we can’t stop climate change and it’s gone on for millions of years.
Sounds a bit denial-adjacent to me.
Its an absolute truth that the climate has changed over millions of years. Forget about quibbling over medieval warm periods, the little ice age, the Roman warm period. At times the Earth came close to being fully covered in ice, and has also had much warmer conditions.
The question is are we affecting the climate - clearly yes, but just how much is still unresolved (claims of certainty should be treated with scepticism).
And then - can we stop climate change? We can certainly change our behaviour to try to stop or mitigate OUR effects on the climate, and in principle, if we try hard enough we can do other things to change the climate. A vast fleet of ships spraying aerosols for instance.
But I think there is a real question at the heart of Reform's (and others scepticism). Its really about net zero, and whether we should go all guns blazing in the UK at a considerable cost, while others reap the economic benefits of burning fossil fuels. I personally believe we should be leading the way on renewables as part of the industrial strategy - Britain led the way in the first industrial revolution, why not do the same again?
31% though is all Farage and Reform need for a majority under FPTP unless heavy tactical voting against them
With four years to run, the chance of tactical voting becoming a major sport is fairly high. Most people want to vote for winners or at least a horse that will give them a run. Things can change, but at the moment the real GE contest in 2029 would be Reform v Lab/LD/One Nation/SNP alliance.
I see you omit Conservative voters - don't forget currently 17 to 20% of the electorate- from the upcoming sports day.
Tactical voting will cut all sorts of ways on the day (with all sorts of unintended consequences) but in Reform vs Labour battles I now expect the majority of Conservatives will vote to defeat a heniously unpopular Labour government.
Thanks. Yes, I agtree that the residual currently Tory voters have to be accounted for if, as I think possible, the election becomes a sort of Reform v The Rest of the World (like the Test Match series in 1970).
If tactical voting becomes a really major thing, attracting interest from a huge number of Never Reform voters, the Tory voters might split into three: voting Tory in the seats Tories can win (if there are any left); voting LD in LD held seats, ditto Labour where Labour is the only possible rival to Reform. A fourth large group of Tory voters will of course vote Reform. The Tory split has already occurred (as between those who prefer Reform and those who prefer anyone else) but the outcomes are still working themselves out and for now the remaining MPs have to pretend otherwise. Of course.
No, we aren't. There will be no such thing as "and F35 with two engines".
Trump: F-35, we're doing an upgrade, a simple upgrade, but we're also doing an F-55. I'm going to call it an F-55, and that's going to be a substantial upgrade, but it's going to be also with two engines because the F 35 has a single engine. I don't like single engines. https://x.com/Acyn/status/1922919999406223595
Or is it just that's he's already forgotten he had the F47 named after him, and thinks that's an F35 upgrade (it isn't) ?
It's incoherent babble.
If Biden had said this, the usual suspects would have been all over it...
It's coherent babble. It's Trump designing aeroplanes in his mind like an 8 year-old boy, adding more engines because that 'makes it better'.
If you want the root of this thinking, I'd guess that Trump is reverting to type as a property developer. He just wants things to look nice without bothering too much whether it works underneath. Partly that's for his own reflection; partly so it's that he can palm it off onto gullible customers (or voters).
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Here's the problem - because the narrative has been as uncontrolled as the numbers for the last few years, a great deal of voters think the target migration number must be negative. You can't satisfy people who have a genuine concern but have been gaslit into demanding an ungenuine outcome.
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...
I don't think the number should be net negative, I think it can be in the hundreds of thousands so long as we build even more hundreds of thousands of housing and associated infrastructure.
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.
The catch is that productivity improvements are lumpy- some jobs can become ten or a hundred times more productive, others will struggle to eke out a few percent.
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.
To take to extremes the fallacy that some are making that it's good to have a class of people in the country doing unskilled jobs, we could save money on maths teachers altogether by eliminating our provision of them to some people.
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.
One third of the adult working age population haven't even got a C grade in English and Maths or their current grade equivalent so not everyone can do skilled work certainly at a higher level
I don't often agree with you, so to give you credit that's a very good point, well made!
A third of school leavers fail to get a grade 4 (a pass today) in Maths and English.
Yet we need to import unskilled people? I don't think so!
We have two major issues. The first is we don’t have enough people able or willing to carry out unskilled jobs, or those requiring non-academic skills. We have put too much emphasis on people getting a degree or needing a degree, any degree, to get a worthwhile job, to be a benefit to society. The second is the need to import people to carry out the unskilled jobs, without the infrastructure to support them. If we were to make non-academic jobs valued and fashionable again, which would also require rebalancing salary structures away from white collar jobs in favour of blue collar jobs we would help solve both issues.
I guess they’ll try and bring it back sometime later, but without the push from the top is it really going to happen?
It wouldn't surprise me if DJT said, "Fuck you, we're having it." and told SKS to get Naval Party 1002 off the island before they got detained and/or shot.
Reform voters confident that something they want will happen, even when it's impossible?
(OK, not quite impossible, but you get the idea.)
The Captain Renault principle applies.
Not impossible, by any means, for Farage to be PM within four years. When the revolution comes, naysayers like you (and me!) will be first against the wall!
Events, dear boy, events etc. Who would have foreseen the death of the Tory party on New Years Day 2020? Labours huge majority is built on sand. Starmer is (widely perceived as) useless. If the opinion polls don't turn or get worse who knows? Or Starmer may end up fighting the unions and calling a "Who governs Britain" election. Or Putin may invade western Europe and install a Quisling as PM.
Funny thing is Clarkson used to like Jags, or at least review them favourably, until he dreamt up this Terry-Thomas cad or bounder saying Jaaaaaaaag.
I thought JLR missed an opportunity here by not leaning into it and starting a sub-brand just called "Jag" for smaller cars that weren't aimed at ancient fleg shaggers.
They weren't BMW or Mercedes so the brand wasn't strong enough to prosper when diluted across a wide range of not very good products built the cheapest way possible at the behest of their Indian paymasters.
Some MBA wanker might understand how the same management team simultaneously did so well with the Range Rover brand and so badly with the Jaguar brand because I don't.
I'm no @Roger on these matters, but I would have thought there's only so much you can do to influence public perception - once the public get a certain view of a product it can be hard to shift. I'd be interested to get our resident advertising bloke's view of it.
Incidentally, I saw one of the new Jaguars the other day (at Didsbury cricket club, so the normal habitat of the Jaaaag hasn't changed even if the shape of the car has). I instantly hated it. I wonder if I would have hated it so much had I not been conditioned to do so by that advert. In reality, it's only crimes were being a slightly odd shape and having an inane logo. It wasn't even pink.
Reform voters confident that something they want will happen, even when it's impossible?
(OK, not quite impossible, but you get the idea.)
The Captain Renault principle applies.
Not impossible, by any means, for Farage to be PM within four years. When the revolution comes, naysayers like you (and me!) will be first against the wall!
Events, dear boy, events etc. Who would have foreseen the death of the Tory party on New Years Day 2020? Labours huge majority is built on sand. Starmer is (widely perceived as) useless. If the opinion polls don't turn or get worse who knows? Or Starmer may end up fighting the unions and calling a "Who governs Britain" election. Or Putin may invade western Europe and install a Quisling as PM.
On New Year's Day 2020, the Tories were less than eight months distant from an election in which they polled 9%.
Keir Starmer's net favourability rating has dropped 12pts in a month to -46, his lowest level ever, including a 34pt drop among Labour voters, leaving him more unpopular than popular with them for the first time
All Britons: -46 net rating (down 12 from 13-14 Apr)
Looks like what I predicted. With his recent Reform-lite policies Starmer has pissed off his own supporters while gaining no credit with the Faragists.
Funny thing is Clarkson used to like Jags, or at least review them favourably, until he dreamt up this Terry-Thomas cad or bounder saying Jaaaaaaaag.
I thought JLR missed an opportunity here by not leaning into it and starting a sub-brand just called "Jag" for smaller cars that weren't aimed at ancient fleg shaggers.
They weren't BMW or Mercedes so the brand wasn't strong enough to prosper when diluted across a wide range of not very good products built the cheapest way possible at the behest of their Indian paymasters.
Some MBA wanker might understand how the same management team simultaneously did so well with the Range Rover brand and so badly with the Jaguar brand because I don't.
I'm no @Roger on these matters, but I would have thought there's only so much you can do to influence public perception - once the public get a certain view of a product it can be hard to shift. I'd be interested to get our resident advertising bloke's view of it.
Incidentally, I saw one of the new Jaguars the other day (at Didsbury cricket club, so the normal habitat of the Jaaaag hasn't changed even if the shape of the car has). I instantly hated it. I wonder if I would have hated it so much had I not been conditioned to do so by that advert. In reality, it's only crimes were being a slightly odd shape and having an inane logo. It wasn't even pink.
The new Jaaaaaaggggg that all the advertising was about won't be released until next year and then another year until it will actually be delivered to customers. They have stopped production now on any new cars.
Reform voters confident that something they want will happen, even when it's impossible?
(OK, not quite impossible, but you get the idea.)
The Captain Renault principle applies.
Not impossible, by any means, for Farage to be PM within four years. When the revolution comes, naysayers like you (and me!) will be first against the wall!
Events, dear boy, events etc. Who would have foreseen the death of the Tory party on New Years Day 2020? Labours huge majority is built on sand. Starmer is (widely perceived as) useless. If the opinion polls don't turn or get worse who knows? Or Starmer may end up fighting the unions and calling a "Who governs Britain" election. Or Putin may invade western Europe and install a Quisling as PM.
On New Year's Day 2020, the Tories were less than eight months distant from an election in which they polled 9%.
Funny thing is Clarkson used to like Jags, or at least review them favourably, until he dreamt up this Terry-Thomas cad or bounder saying Jaaaaaaaag.
I thought JLR missed an opportunity here by not leaning into it and starting a sub-brand just called "Jag" for smaller cars that weren't aimed at ancient fleg shaggers.
They weren't BMW or Mercedes so the brand wasn't strong enough to prosper when diluted across a wide range of not very good products built the cheapest way possible at the behest of their Indian paymasters.
Some MBA wanker might understand how the same management team simultaneously did so well with the Range Rover brand and so badly with the Jaguar brand because I don't.
The RR Dennis Wise and John Terry models have great appeal to people who drive aggressively at you down a double-parked street and are a glimpse of conti GP5000 or schwalbe rubber away from berserker road rage (Noye-ites) while wannabe Jag owners are more refined, is I think the explanation.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Here's the problem - because the narrative has been as uncontrolled as the numbers for the last few years, a great deal of voters think the target migration number must be negative. You can't satisfy people who have a genuine concern but have been gaslit into demanding an ungenuine outcome.
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...
I don't think the number should be net negative, I think it can be in the hundreds of thousands so long as we build even more hundreds of thousands of housing and associated infrastructure.
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.
The catch is that productivity improvements are lumpy- some jobs can become ten or a hundred times more productive, others will struggle to eke out a few percent.
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.
To take to extremes the fallacy that some are making that it's good to have a class of people in the country doing unskilled jobs, we could save money on maths teachers altogether by eliminating our provision of them to some people.
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.
One third of the adult working age population haven't even got a C grade in English and Maths or their current grade equivalent so not everyone can do skilled work certainly at a higher level
I don't often agree with you, so to give you credit that's a very good point, well made!
A third of school leavers fail to get a grade 4 (a pass today) in Maths and English.
Yet we need to import unskilled people? I don't think so!
We have two major issues. The first is we don’t have enough people able or willing to carry out unskilled jobs, or those requiring non-academic skills. We have put too much emphasis on people getting a degree or needing a degree, any degree, to get a worthwhile job, to be a benefit to society. The second is the need to import people to carry out the unskilled jobs, without the infrastructure to support them. If we were to make non-academic jobs valued and fashionable again, which would also require rebalancing salary structures away from white collar jobs in favour of blue collar jobs we would help solve both issues.
We absolutely do have enough people able or willing to carry out unskilled jobs. We have tens of millions of people able or willing to do that today already.
What we don't have is an infinite supply of people willing to do so for minimum wage. So compete for the people who are available by offering better pay or conditions.
We could increase our supply of people willing to work for minimum wage, or especially the amount of hours they're willing to work, by enabling people to keep what they earn rather than having an effective 80%+ tax rate.
And I don't understand it either. The best guess I can muster is they thought the controversy helped grab attention and will ultimately, therefore, drive more interest and sales.
I'm not talking about le monstre rose because that's yet to be proven mismanagement. It might work and it'll all depend on the product.
I was referring to the 2008 - 2024 doom spiral that followed the Ford sale.
Rats and ships - a bunch of tory councillors in Sevenoaks District Council have resigned from party leaving it without an administration - more info available via search engine of choice
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Yes but the polling wasn't about that, it was about wanting zero or negative migration.
To achieve that we need to restrict far more than low skilled migration, and in any case those restrictions are already now in place.
People aren't really interested in the net migration figures. As the rise of Powell on the right demonstrated, fifty years ago.
We can't let one speech, made 57 years ago, prevent us having the debate we need to have today about immigration.
Who the f*** is not having the debate? Debating immigration is 63% of PB discussion.
Your idea of debating immigration is to try and show that no debate need be had.
No it simply means that a debate has two sides, and one side is willing to discuss the downsides of slashing immigration and the knock on effects while the other is not.
Race relations weren't noticeably better in the decades up to 1992, the last year of net emigration.
Once again, too many are trying to read too much into what is happening now and projecting forward to 2028 or 2029 and imagining the same will happen.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that nothing is certain.
We can see what is happening now - another strong night for Reform in local council by elections and a hint of what might happen next year in London from the result in Whetstone.
Back in 2022, the vote split in the London locals was Labour 42%, Conservative 26%, LDs 14.5%, Greens 11%. Those numbers seem from an alternate reality.
London is a series of complex, interconnected political battlegrounds and what happens in Inner London is different from Outer London and what happens in North, South, East and West London will all be different. Each party has its areas of stengths and weaknesses and Reform's impact may be akin to tossing a boulder into a duckpond.
Add in groups of pro-Palestine local Independents in East london and other Independents and you get a complete melange of possibilties.
It'll be fun...can Reform win control of a London Borough? How many Boroughs will Labour lose? How many Boroughs will the Conservatives lose? In how many Boroughs could the Greens become the official opposition? Can the LDs progress beyond their south west London heartland? Is there any point to this endless stream of questions? Is a life on the ocean wave better than going to sea? Why do I bother? Why are you still reading this?
It's certainly true that a lot can happen over the next 4-5 years. As you note, a lot has happened over the last six. Or ten. Or fifteen.
But isn't that the point? The assumption by some that Reform is a flash-in-the-pan because these mould-breaking parties tend not to perform when it matters was probably never true in the first place - we ascribe too much to inevitability in these cases and too little to chance - but even if it was true then, there's no reason to assume it still is now.
The basic inertial strength of Labour and the Tories has gone. Their rooting in communities no longer exists. The electorate is far more volatile in its choices. The nature of campaigning has changed. The nature of media and society has changed. The world around us has changed.
Reform is a party that undoubtedly is sitting on any number of problems, any or several of which could blow up at any time and sink their chances of making a major breakthrough. On the other hand, Farage has shown a cockroach-like ability to overcome such issues in the past. It's not as if UKIP or the Brexit Party were without local difficulties from time to time, and yet here Reform is, sitting on a ~30% share and a 5-10% lead.
So while Reform could implode in a series of scandals, resignations and recriminations, we probably underestimate the extend of the existential challenge to both the Tories (more obviously) and to Labour. Both face pincer-assaults on their traditional voter base. There is no guarantee that either will see them off with leaderships (and potential leaderships) who either don't get the extent of the problem, or do but are incapable of forming and delivering on an effective strategy to counter it.
I think a PM Farage is an entirely plausible scenario and his current odds as Next PM are about right.
A thoughtful response as always, David. for which many thanks.
I begin to suspect electoral volatility has been building for a while - it may have been accelerated and accentuated by more recent events but if you look at, for example, the emergence of what we once called "the Red Wall", Conservative vote shares in dozen of northern and midlands began rising in 2001 and rose inexorably until the dam broke in 2019 and the seats went Conservative.
That electoral switch was, I believe, the consequence of the right to buy initiative of the Thatcher Government which created a generation of home owners, the sons and daughters of those who had originally purchased their council houses. The new home owners of the 2000s were Conservative (now Reform I imagine).
As you also say, traditional methods of political campaigning have changed - I was an old fashioned pavement pounding Liberal and then LD activist - I produced leaflets first with a lithograph and then with a friendly printer. It was all typeset - I knocked on doors, it was old school politics.
Now, it's very different.
Reform has become the conduit for and you can call it anger, frustration or whatever over both single issues and a general malaise and discontent about how "it's all going". Whether you consider it leaderless, directionless or hopeless is up to you but the real discontent is we are not progressing (we are) and the world we are leaving our children is worse than the world we ourselves inherited (it isn't on a number of measures).
Reform are a tabula rasa - they are whatever you want them to be. They will disappoint - political parties always do when they try to be all things to all people. At the moment, they attract those who don't like or understand what has happened to their communities and to their country and yes, let's not call a spade a garden implement, those who are worried (or appalled) by people with different cultures, languages and ways of dressing moving into their areas and changing them quickly.
We alreasdy know from listening to the Farage interview about Wales, he loves banging on about "woke" but he's as much up the Magic Money Tree as everyone else and his brand of populist tax and spend will run out of road just as everyone else's has (possibly quicker).
Funny thing is Clarkson used to like Jags, or at least review them favourably, until he dreamt up this Terry-Thomas cad or bounder saying Jaaaaaaaag.
I thought JLR missed an opportunity here by not leaning into it and starting a sub-brand just called "Jag" for smaller cars that weren't aimed at ancient fleg shaggers.
They weren't BMW or Mercedes so the brand wasn't strong enough to prosper when diluted across a wide range of not very good products built the cheapest way possible at the behest of their Indian paymasters.
Some MBA wanker might understand how the same management team simultaneously did so well with the Range Rover brand and so badly with the Jaguar brand because I don't.
I'm no @Roger on these matters, but I would have thought there's only so much you can do to influence public perception - once the public get a certain view of a product it can be hard to shift. I'd be interested to get our resident advertising bloke's view of it.
Incidentally, I saw one of the new Jaguars the other day (at Didsbury cricket club, so the normal habitat of the Jaaaag hasn't changed even if the shape of the car has). I instantly hated it. I wonder if I would have hated it so much had I not been conditioned to do so by that advert. In reality, it's only crimes were being a slightly odd shape and having an inane logo. It wasn't even pink.
The new Jaaaaaaggggg that all the advertising was about won't be released until next year and then another year until it will actually be delivered to customers.
Huh. I've just done a Google image search. The one I saw was much bulkier and blockier than I expect a Jag to be, but it wasn't the new one. Jeez, yes, that's hideous. And surely it will be impossible to turn out of any street without a massive visibility splay. But evidently that advert has made me hate all Jags, even the ones which aren't featured in it.
Keir Starmer's net favourability rating has dropped 12pts in a month to -46, his lowest level ever, including a 34pt drop among Labour voters, leaving him more unpopular than popular with them for the first time
All Britons: -46 net rating (down 12 from 13-14 Apr)
Looks like what I predicted. With his recent Reform-lite policies Starmer has pissed off his own supporters while gaining no credit with the Faragists.
He really isn't very good at retail politics.
Which would be fine, if he had the right people behind the scenes advising him. Even if Starmer drafted the speech, someone ought to have scrawled "are you out of your (insert Tuckerism here) mind?" over it.
That doesn't excuse Starmer, whose ears are undoubtedly 95 percent tin. But it does point to how this problem could be fixed.
(As with Johnson and Cummings, it looks like the PM is being direccted by someone who may be great at campaigning mechanics, and good at identifying problems, but has terrible ideas about solving them. Is this inherent in the way we do politics now, or just an unfortunate conincidence?)
The obvious reason being that there probably won't be a General Election in the next 4 years!
Labour isn't calling an early election on current polling.
I say that in the header!
No one except me reads the headers.
I do.
Comment first, read headers later, of course
You should never take my comments literally.
Isn't that a paradox?
If I don't take that post literally, then I sometimes should take your posts literally. But if I sometimes take your post literally, then its not never ...
steam starts coming out of ears
The paradox recurs in life in all manner of ways, and is sometimes called the Ishmael effect. Logical positivism suffered, and suffers, from the problem that to state its fundamental principle (the verifiability criterion) is to break its own fundamental principle about what can be meaningful or true. Hume and Nietzsche suffer from the same affliction of self referential incoherence.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Yes but the polling wasn't about that, it was about wanting zero or negative migration.
To achieve that we need to restrict far more than low skilled migration, and in any case those restrictions are already now in place.
People aren't really interested in the net migration figures. As the rise of Powell on the right demonstrated, fifty years ago.
We can't let one speech, made 57 years ago, prevent us having the debate we need to have today about immigration.
Who the f*** is not having the debate? Debating immigration is 63% of PB discussion.
Your idea of debating immigration is to try and show that no debate need be had.
No it simply means that a debate has two sides, and one side is willing to discuss the downsides of slashing immigration and the knock on effects while the other is not.
Race relations weren't noticeably better in the decades up to 1992, the last year of net emigration.
House price to income ratios were considerably better though.
No problem with immigration so long as we invest in housing and infrastructure, the biggest problem is having one but not the other.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Here's the problem - because the narrative has been as uncontrolled as the numbers for the last few years, a great deal of voters think the target migration number must be negative. You can't satisfy people who have a genuine concern but have been gaslit into demanding an ungenuine outcome.
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...
I don't think the number should be net negative, I think it can be in the hundreds of thousands so long as we build even more hundreds of thousands of housing and associated infrastructure.
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.
The catch is that productivity improvements are lumpy- some jobs can become ten or a hundred times more productive, others will struggle to eke out a few percent.
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.
To take to extremes the fallacy that some are making that it's good to have a class of people in the country doing unskilled jobs, we could save money on maths teachers altogether by eliminating our provision of them to some people.
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.
One third of the adult working age population haven't even got a C grade in English and Maths or their current grade equivalent so not everyone can do skilled work certainly at a higher level
I don't often agree with you, so to give you credit that's a very good point, well made!
A third of school leavers fail to get a grade 4 (a pass today) in Maths and English.
Yet we need to import unskilled people? I don't think so!
We have two major issues. The first is we don’t have enough people able or willing to carry out unskilled jobs, or those requiring non-academic skills. We have put too much emphasis on people getting a degree or needing a degree, any degree, to get a worthwhile job, to be a benefit to society. The second is the need to import people to carry out the unskilled jobs, without the infrastructure to support them. If we were to make non-academic jobs valued and fashionable again, which would also require rebalancing salary structures away from white collar jobs in favour of blue collar jobs we would help solve both issues.
We absolutely do have enough people able or willing to carry out unskilled jobs. We have tens of millions of people able or willing to do that today already.
What we don't have is an infinite supply of people willing to do so for minimum wage. So compete for the people who are available by offering better pay or conditions.
We could increase our supply of people willing to work for minimum wage, or especially the amount of hours they're willing to work, by enabling people to keep what they earn rather than having an effective 80%+ tax rate.
Alternatively, we could combine the maximum wage acts of Henry VIII with the traditional structure of the Scottish mining industry.
Cross channel migrants as serfs (and their children) working in care home etc. Paid a fixed sub-minimum wage. Never allowed to leave the jobs.
Keir Starmer's net favourability rating has dropped 12pts in a month to -46, his lowest level ever, including a 34pt drop among Labour voters, leaving him more unpopular than popular with them for the first time
All Britons: -46 net rating (down 12 from 13-14 Apr)
Looks like what I predicted. With his recent Reform-lite policies Starmer has pissed off his own supporters while gaining no credit with the Faragists.
He really isn't very good at retail politics.
Most PMs aren't, because to be elected party leader you need to impress either party supporters or MPs, not the population as a whole. And then winning power from opposition is mostly about how unpopular the other lot are.
Of the PMs we've had since 1990, only a minority have been any good at impressing the voters. Blair was an off-the-scale political genius, John Major, Cameron and Boris were mixed. But Brown, TMay, Truss and Sunak all bombed, and Starmer is also shit.
Whatever the faults of a Presidential system, to win you need at least to impress the voters (and then you can let them down with impunity).
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
also the cost of the ticket, between that and the taper on benefits they could quite easily find themselves worse off than for example the train fare from landudno to cardiff is £36.40 yes you might get it cheaper for a season ticket but they probably don't have the money to purchase one. In addition to commute time is 4 hours each way and the fare is off peak. Be more expensive if you need to be at work for 9
No, I'm not talking about North Wales - I'm saying that the South Wales problem could be addressed by persuading people in the (South Welsh) Valleys where there is significant unemployment that they could work in Cardiff. Because many don't: they see a short, relatively cheap train ride - 40 minutes or so - as too much of a barrier. This isn't just a persuade-people-to-change-their-attitude post; there are all sorts of practical things that can be done (like loans to cost of train fares until salary).
North Wales is a different and slightly tougher issue - less unemployment in North Wales but far fewer practical opportunities.
I did exactly this (granted 10ish years ago). The trains were awful, hourly for the Ebbw Vale line, ended up having to drive which is another nightmare around Cardiff.
Too many people live at the tops of the valleys where there used to be large employers that just don't exist anymore and probably never will again. If I had dictatorial powers I'd start to depopulate the tops of the valleys and move people to where the jobs are. The housing stock is awful and any attempt at regeneration largely falls to McDonald's and shopping outlets.
31% though is all Farage and Reform need for a majority under FPTP unless heavy tactical voting against them
With four years to run, the chance of tactical voting becoming a major sport is fairly high. Most people want to vote for winners or at least a horse that will give them a run. Things can change, but at the moment the real GE contest in 2029 would be Reform v Lab/LD/One Nation/SNP alliance.
As I have told HY often, the vacancy is for a pro-European party on the right. Like the Tories were, once upon a time, when they were sitting comfortably. Until they realise this, which will likely take a long time, they are destined for life in the wilderness.
Funny thing is Clarkson used to like Jags, or at least review them favourably, until he dreamt up this Terry-Thomas cad or bounder saying Jaaaaaaaag.
I thought JLR missed an opportunity here by not leaning into it and starting a sub-brand just called "Jag" for smaller cars that weren't aimed at ancient fleg shaggers.
They weren't BMW or Mercedes so the brand wasn't strong enough to prosper when diluted across a wide range of not very good products built the cheapest way possible at the behest of their Indian paymasters.
Some MBA wanker might understand how the same management team simultaneously did so well with the Range Rover brand and so badly with the Jaguar brand because I don't.
I'm no @Roger on these matters, but I would have thought there's only so much you can do to influence public perception - once the public get a certain view of a product it can be hard to shift. I'd be interested to get our resident advertising bloke's view of it.
Incidentally, I saw one of the new Jaguars the other day (at Didsbury cricket club, so the normal habitat of the Jaaaag hasn't changed even if the shape of the car has). I instantly hated it. I wonder if I would have hated it so much had I not been conditioned to do so by that advert. In reality, it's only crimes were being a slightly odd shape and having an inane logo. It wasn't even pink.
You aren't the target market now though, they're aiming at people who don't want cars. It's a truly brilliant business strategy.
In a year or two I suspect the economy and immigration will be on significantly different positions.
If the Ukraine war 'resolves' than many Ukranians may head back. Or not. The economy I am less convinced will be that different. We've been in a low growth world since 2007, and the fundamentals haven't changed.
Once again, too many are trying to read too much into what is happening now and projecting forward to 2028 or 2029 and imagining the same will happen.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that nothing is certain.
We can see what is happening now - another strong night for Reform in local council by elections and a hint of what might happen next year in London from the result in Whetstone.
Back in 2022, the vote split in the London locals was Labour 42%, Conservative 26%, LDs 14.5%, Greens 11%. Those numbers seem from an alternate reality.
London is a series of complex, interconnected political battlegrounds and what happens in Inner London is different from Outer London and what happens in North, South, East and West London will all be different. Each party has its areas of stengths and weaknesses and Reform's impact may be akin to tossing a boulder into a duckpond.
Add in groups of pro-Palestine local Independents in East london and other Independents and you get a complete melange of possibilties.
It'll be fun...can Reform win control of a London Borough? How many Boroughs will Labour lose? How many Boroughs will the Conservatives lose? In how many Boroughs could the Greens become the official opposition? Can the LDs progress beyond their south west London heartland? Is there any point to this endless stream of questions? Is a life on the ocean wave better than going to sea? Why do I bother? Why are you still reading this?
It's certainly true that a lot can happen over the next 4-5 years. As you note, a lot has happened over the last six. Or ten. Or fifteen.
But isn't that the point? The assumption by some that Reform is a flash-in-the-pan because these mould-breaking parties tend not to perform when it matters was probably never true in the first place - we ascribe too much to inevitability in these cases and too little to chance - but even if it was true then, there's no reason to assume it still is now.
The basic inertial strength of Labour and the Tories has gone. Their rooting in communities no longer exists. The electorate is far more volatile in its choices. The nature of campaigning has changed. The nature of media and society has changed. The world around us has changed.
Reform is a party that undoubtedly is sitting on any number of problems, any or several of which could blow up at any time and sink their chances of making a major breakthrough. On the other hand, Farage has shown a cockroach-like ability to overcome such issues in the past. It's not as if UKIP or the Brexit Party were without local difficulties from time to time, and yet here Reform is, sitting on a ~30% share and a 5-10% lead.
So while Reform could implode in a series of scandals, resignations and recriminations, we probably underestimate the extend of the existential challenge to both the Tories (more obviously) and to Labour. Both face pincer-assaults on their traditional voter base. There is no guarantee that either will see them off with leaderships (and potential leaderships) who either don't get the extent of the problem, or do but are incapable of forming and delivering on an effective strategy to counter it.
I think a PM Farage is an entirely plausible scenario and his current odds as Next PM are about right.
Douglas Carswell wrote an article in The Telegraph, I think, in 2014 about the old two parties losing their domination of UK politics. I can't find it now, but it was similar in the thrust of it's point to your post.
Well, he was right. Things have teetered since and the Big Two have just about mostly kept hold of the controls but simply the nature of what was allowed into mainstream debate shows the extent to which others have muscled in.
If Labour and the Tories (and Lib Dems) had retained their dominance, there would never have been referendums on Scottish independence or Brexit in the first place, never mind losing one of them. The election of Corbyn, the splits within Labour, the return of Reform, the near-4m UKIP votes in 2015, the devastating Tory result in 2024 (and Labour in 2019, and LD in 2015, and SLab that year too): all are signs of the breakdown.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Why? Surely that can easily be turned round. We should train our own doctors and nurses rather than act like colonial powers asset-stripping developing countries of their healthcare workers. We should bring in low-skilled, low-paid workers to free up our own people for better jobs.
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.
We have a lump of unskilled labour as well that currently doesn't work (not talking here about carers or the disabled). Part of the issue for a lot of them is that there are not the jobs in their area that they can get to. An example is there are vacancies in Cardiff but the unemployed in north wales can't get there.
Maybe what we should be looking at is a "Help to relocate" scheme
"Get on your bike"
You prefer stay where there are no jobs and spend a life on benefits to be the message?
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
The Cardiff problem is easier to solve. There is massive unemployment in the valleys. There are also surprisingly plentiful trains from the valleys to Cardiff. But horizons in small depressed valleys towns are so narrow that Cardiff seems a world away. It's 'just' a case of persuading people in the valleys that a 40 minute commute to Cardiff is a reasonable thing to do.
also the cost of the ticket, between that and the taper on benefits they could quite easily find themselves worse off than for example the train fare from landudno to cardiff is £36.40 yes you might get it cheaper for a season ticket but they probably don't have the money to purchase one. In addition to commute time is 4 hours each way and the fare is off peak. Be more expensive if you need to be at work for 9
No, I'm not talking about North Wales - I'm saying that the South Wales problem could be addressed by persuading people in the (South Welsh) Valleys where there is significant unemployment that they could work in Cardiff. Because many don't: they see a short, relatively cheap train ride - 40 minutes or so - as too much of a barrier. This isn't just a persuade-people-to-change-their-attitude post; there are all sorts of practical things that can be done (like loans to cost of train fares until salary).
North Wales is a different and slightly tougher issue - less unemployment in North Wales but far fewer practical opportunities.
I did exactly this (granted 10ish years ago). The trains were awful, hourly for the Ebbw Vale line, ended up having to drive which is another nightmare around Cardiff.
Too many people live at the tops of the valleys where there used to be large employers that just don't exist anymore and probably never will again. If I had dictatorial powers I'd start to depopulate the tops of the valleys and move people to where the jobs are. The housing stock is awful and any attempt at regeneration largely falls to McDonald's and shopping outlets.
Ebbw Vale line is half-hourly now.
I'm not saying the Valleys are a great place to live (though they have their upsides). But for ex-mining villages they're unusual in the extent to which they're well-connected to a big city with plentiful jobs.
I wonder whether people in other countries are so rooted to a place as we are in this country? Once a (private) house exists in this country, in most cases it pretty much gets lived in forever, even if it's somewhere terrible (the obvious, though possibly apocryphal (is it actually lived in?) example being that house in the middle of the M62 between Rochdale and Huddersfield).
Funny thing is Clarkson used to like Jags, or at least review them favourably, until he dreamt up this Terry-Thomas cad or bounder saying Jaaaaaaaag.
I thought JLR missed an opportunity here by not leaning into it and starting a sub-brand just called "Jag" for smaller cars that weren't aimed at ancient fleg shaggers.
They weren't BMW or Mercedes so the brand wasn't strong enough to prosper when diluted across a wide range of not very good products built the cheapest way possible at the behest of their Indian paymasters.
Some MBA wanker might understand how the same management team simultaneously did so well with the Range Rover brand and so badly with the Jaguar brand because I don't.
I'm no @Roger on these matters, but I would have thought there's only so much you can do to influence public perception - once the public get a certain view of a product it can be hard to shift. I'd be interested to get our resident advertising bloke's view of it.
Incidentally, I saw one of the new Jaguars the other day (at Didsbury cricket club, so the normal habitat of the Jaaaag hasn't changed even if the shape of the car has). I instantly hated it. I wonder if I would have hated it so much had I not been conditioned to do so by that advert. In reality, it's only crimes were being a slightly odd shape and having an inane logo. It wasn't even pink.
You aren't the target market now though, they're aiming at people who don't want cars. It's a truly brilliant business strategy.
And are young and have £100k just burning a hole in their pocket....
Reform voters confident that something they want will happen, even when it's impossible?
(OK, not quite impossible, but you get the idea.)
The Captain Renault principle applies.
Not impossible, by any means, for Farage to be PM within four years. When the revolution comes, naysayers like you (and me!) will be first against the wall!
Events, dear boy, events etc. Who would have foreseen the death of the Tory party on New Years Day 2020? Labours huge majority is built on sand. Starmer is (widely perceived as) useless. If the opinion polls don't turn or get worse who knows? Or Starmer may end up fighting the unions and calling a "Who governs Britain" election. Or Putin may invade western Europe and install a Quisling as PM.
On New Year's Day 2020, the Tories were less than eight months distant from an election in which they polled 9%.
European elections were different.
Only in degree. GE opinion polls had the Tories in a four-way battle, polling in the high-teens / low-20s. The Peterborough by-election showed these had substance.
63% want virtually none or only entirety tokenistic net migration, and yet we get what the 5% want.
Yes but wasn't there also a recent survey showing the public greatly underestimates the rate of immigration? If so, is the desired rate actually telling us the desired rate, or just whether they want more of less than the status quo?
The polling also doesn't cover the downsides of that sort of restriction, such as staffing shortages and rising costs. Which is why government after government of all stripes has permitted these sorts of numbers.
By rising costs do you mean wages?
Not sure everyone calls that a downside.
Yet when British doctors want more pay they don't get a very positive response.
Isn't the whole point of restricting immigration to give sturdy British Yeomen more leverage?
Is that the same doctors who were just granted a 22% pay rise?
Yet we need to keep care staff on minimum wage, because reasons.
Restricting medical and nursing immigration would certainly help my unions bargaining position.
It wouldn't do much for either waiting lists or the viability of some services though.
Still, for the greater good...
Indeed, so long as your salary is below the £37k or whatever it is that the skilled visa migration threshold is set at.
No problems with skilled migration, it's the flow of unskilled, minimum wage migration we need to be stemming.
Yes but the polling wasn't about that, it was about wanting zero or negative migration.
To achieve that we need to restrict far more than low skilled migration, and in any case those restrictions are already now in place.
People aren't really interested in the net migration figures. As the rise of Powell on the right demonstrated, fifty years ago.
We can't let one speech, made 57 years ago, prevent us having the debate we need to have today about immigration.
Who the f*** is not having the debate? Debating immigration is 63% of PB discussion.
Your idea of debating immigration is to try and show that no debate need be had.
No it simply means that a debate has two sides, and one side is willing to discuss the downsides of slashing immigration and the knock on effects while the other is not.
Race relations weren't noticeably better in the decades up to 1992, the last year of net emigration.
Comments
A third of school leavers fail to get a grade 4 (a pass today) in Maths and English.
Yet we need to import unskilled people? I don't think so!
If you're one of the smugglers putting people in small boats across the channel — we’re coming after you.
Tactical voting will cut all sorts of ways on the day (with all sorts of unintended consequences) but in Reform vs Labour battles I now expect the majority of Conservatives will vote to defeat a heniously unpopular Labour government.
Comment first, read headers later, of course
Wonder how many of the smugglers have read it
The obvious answer to when the next election is held is May 2029; traditional month and aligns with local elections. In that instance, it would be less than four years now.
So we're assuming that Starmer is going to hang on as late as possible and go for a June or July 2029 election? I assume August 2029 won't happen due to school holidays.
Great to see you are on message.
"If you're one of the taxi drivers smuggling my ministers acrsoss the French border — we’re coming after you."
The "Get on your bike" that Tebbit said also didn't offer assistance to make the relocation.
Once again, too many are trying to read too much into what is happening now and projecting forward to 2028 or 2029 and imagining the same will happen.
If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that nothing is certain.
We can see what is happening now - another strong night for Reform in local council by elections and a hint of what might happen next year in London from the result in Whetstone.
Back in 2022, the vote split in the London locals was Labour 42%, Conservative 26%, LDs 14.5%, Greens 11%. Those numbers seem from an alternate reality.
London is a series of complex, interconnected political battlegrounds and what happens in Inner London is different from Outer London and what happens in North, South, East and West London will all be different. Each party has its areas of stengths and weaknesses and Reform's impact may be akin to tossing a boulder into a duckpond.
Add in groups of pro-Palestine local Independents in East london and other Independents and you get a complete melange of possibilties.
It'll be fun...can Reform win control of a London Borough? How many Boroughs will Labour lose? How many Boroughs will the Conservatives lose? In how many Boroughs could the Greens become the official opposition? Can the LDs progress beyond their south west London heartland? Is there any point to this endless stream of questions? Is a life on the ocean wave better than going to sea? Why do I bother? Why are you still reading this?
* Careful!
That isn’t affordable without help - and many people don’t have anyone who can help
The catch is that prosperous areas don't want any incomers, whether asylum seekers, economic migrants, or people moving from the other end of the county. (Actually, depressed areas aren't too keen on it either- see the "local shop for local people" trope. And whilst improving housing, schools, hospitals etc would help, many people don't want them built either.
(It's one of the reasons why Reform's crusade against remote working is so maddeningly dumb. It's such an obvious way of giving people in left-behind towns access to a better, wider job market.)
Good news: British people are, on the whole, not racist.
Bad news: British people are, on the whole, misanthropic- just not in a racist way.
Then people might be able to afford their own bike or car.
The first is easier than the second so I don't particularly disagree with your concept but many will it jarring to be told to move whether there is assistance or not, as they did when Tebbit said it. So I would prefer to make it easier for them to move by lower housing costs, rather than telling them to move, or even that they should move.
As a result the Conservatives could still gain Westminster from Labour as the Tories will still be the main oppositio to Labour in West London.
The Tories may lose Bromley to NOC and Labour Redbridge to NOC due to Independents and Reform in the latter
People won't commute for £1 an hour net income. Why should they?
Keir Starmer's net favourability rating has dropped 12pts in a month to -46, his lowest level ever, including a 34pt drop among Labour voters, leaving him more unpopular than popular with them for the first time
All Britons: -46 net rating (down 12 from 13-14 Apr)
By 2024 vote
Labour: -5 (down 34)
Lib Dem: -13 (down 12)
Conservative: -76 (up 1)
Reform UK: -94 (down 5)
https://x.com/yougov/status/1923284836455743525?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
In the same way we shouldn't have been quite so triggered by Starmer's recent speech.
But let's not pretend what it is that people are actually asking for when they say "zero net migration".
North Wales is a different and slightly tougher issue - less unemployment in North Wales but far fewer practical opportunities.
Farage 32/59
Davey 26/34
Starmer 26/62
Badenoch 16/55
But isn't that the point? The assumption by some that Reform is a flash-in-the-pan because these mould-breaking parties tend not to perform when it matters was probably never true in the first place - we ascribe too much to inevitability in these cases and too little to chance - but even if it was true then, there's no reason to assume it still is now.
The basic inertial strength of Labour and the Tories has gone. Their rooting in communities no longer exists. The electorate is far more volatile in its choices. The nature of campaigning has changed. The nature of media and society has changed. The world around us has changed.
Reform is a party that undoubtedly is sitting on any number of problems, any or several of which could blow up at any time and sink their chances of making a major breakthrough. On the other hand, Farage has shown a cockroach-like ability to overcome such issues in the past. It's not as if UKIP or the Brexit Party were without local difficulties from time to time, and yet here Reform is, sitting on a ~30% share and a 5-10% lead.
So while Reform could implode in a series of scandals, resignations and recriminations, we probably underestimate the extend of the existential challenge to both the Tories (more obviously) and to Labour. Both face pincer-assaults on their traditional voter base. There is no guarantee that either will see them off with leaderships (and potential leaderships) who either don't get the extent of the problem, or do but are incapable of forming and delivering on an effective strategy to counter it.
I think a PM Farage is an entirely plausible scenario and his current odds as Next PM are about right.
(If I had turned ninety degrees to take the photo, it would show a line of tankers waiting to go down to a little sewage compound and at the end of the track. Somewhat less scenic. And if I had turned 45 degrees the other way, you would see old World War Two accommodation huts.)
There will be no such thing as "and F35 with two engines".
Trump: F-35, we're doing an upgrade, a simple upgrade, but we're also doing an F-55. I'm going to call it an F-55, and that's going to be a substantial upgrade, but it's going to be also with two engines because the F 35 has a single engine. I don't like single engines.
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1922919999406223595
Or is it just that's he's already forgotten he had the F47 named after him, and thinks that's an F35 upgrade (it isn't) ?
This is exactly what we have been warning the Government of from the start, says Priti Patel
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/05/16/chagos-security-fears-as-china-cosies-up-to-mauritius/ (£££)
Well, who saw that coming? Apart from Priti Patel, obviously.
Note to Kemi – check when negotiations started before raising it at PMQs.
They weren't BMW or Mercedes so the brand wasn't strong enough to prosper when diluted across a wide range of not very good products built the cheapest way possible at the behest of their Indian paymasters.
Some MBA wanker might understand how the same management team simultaneously did so well with the Range Rover brand and so badly with the Jaguar brand because I don't.
If I don't take that post literally, then I sometimes should take your posts literally. But if I sometimes take your post literally, then its not never ...
steam starts coming out of ears
Start at 6.09am, running half hourly; last train home is at 22.36.
There are - as Bart points out - issues to address to make it attractive to take the jobs which are available. But infrastructure isn't one of them. The Welsh Valleys are amazingly well connected to Cardiff.
One reason they haven't is because of silly Mets throwing Powell at them every time they try to do so.
If Biden had said this, the usual suspects would have been all over it...
And I don't understand it either. The best guess I can muster is they thought the controversy helped grab attention and will ultimately, therefore, drive more interest and sales.
I'd say there's more than a little bit of wishful thinking there.
The question is are we affecting the climate - clearly yes, but just how much is still unresolved (claims of certainty should be treated with scepticism).
And then - can we stop climate change? We can certainly change our behaviour to try to stop or mitigate OUR effects on the climate, and in principle, if we try hard enough we can do other things to change the climate. A vast fleet of ships spraying aerosols for instance.
But I think there is a real question at the heart of Reform's (and others scepticism). Its really about net zero, and whether we should go all guns blazing in the UK at a considerable cost, while others reap the economic benefits of burning fossil fuels. I personally believe we should be leading the way on renewables as part of the industrial strategy - Britain led the way in the first industrial revolution, why not do the same again?
If tactical voting becomes a really major thing, attracting interest from a huge number of Never Reform voters, the Tory voters might split into three: voting Tory in the seats Tories can win (if there are any left); voting LD in LD held seats, ditto Labour where Labour is the only possible rival to Reform. A fourth large group of Tory voters will of course vote Reform. The Tory split has already occurred (as between those who prefer Reform and those who prefer anyone else) but the outcomes are still working themselves out and for now the remaining MPs have to pretend otherwise. Of course.
If you want the root of this thinking, I'd guess that Trump is reverting to type as a property developer. He just wants things to look nice without bothering too much whether it works underneath. Partly that's for his own reflection; partly so it's that he can palm it off onto gullible customers (or voters).
Incidentally, I saw one of the new Jaguars the other day (at Didsbury cricket club, so the normal habitat of the Jaaaag hasn't changed even if the shape of the car has). I instantly hated it. I wonder if I would have hated it so much had I not been conditioned to do so by that advert. In reality, it's only crimes were being a slightly odd shape and having an inane logo. It wasn't even pink.
He really isn't very good at retail politics.
What we don't have is an infinite supply of people willing to do so for minimum wage. So compete for the people who are available by offering better pay or conditions.
We could increase our supply of people willing to work for minimum wage, or especially the amount of hours they're willing to work, by enabling people to keep what they earn rather than having an effective 80%+ tax rate.
I was referring to the 2008 - 2024 doom spiral that followed the Ford sale.
Race relations weren't noticeably better in the decades up to 1992, the last year of net emigration.
I begin to suspect electoral volatility has been building for a while - it may have been accelerated and accentuated by more recent events but if you look at, for example, the emergence of what we once called "the Red Wall", Conservative vote shares in dozen of northern and midlands began rising in 2001 and rose inexorably until the dam broke in 2019 and the seats went Conservative.
That electoral switch was, I believe, the consequence of the right to buy initiative of the Thatcher Government which created a generation of home owners, the sons and daughters of those who had originally purchased their council houses. The new home owners of the 2000s were Conservative (now Reform I imagine).
As you also say, traditional methods of political campaigning have changed - I was an old fashioned pavement pounding Liberal and then LD activist - I produced leaflets first with a lithograph and then with a friendly printer. It was all typeset - I knocked on doors, it was old school politics.
Now, it's very different.
Reform has become the conduit for and you can call it anger, frustration or whatever over both single issues and a general malaise and discontent about how "it's all going". Whether you consider it leaderless, directionless or hopeless is up to you but the real discontent is we are not progressing (we are) and the world we are leaving our children is worse than the world we ourselves inherited (it isn't on a number of measures).
Reform are a tabula rasa - they are whatever you want them to be. They will disappoint - political parties always do when they try to be all things to all people. At the moment, they attract those who don't like or understand what has happened to their communities and to their country and yes, let's not call a spade a garden implement, those who are worried (or appalled) by people with different cultures, languages and ways of dressing moving into their areas and changing them quickly.
We alreasdy know from listening to the Farage interview about Wales, he loves banging on about "woke" but he's as much up the Magic Money Tree as everyone else and his brand of populist tax and spend will run out of road just as everyone else's has (possibly quicker).
I've just done a Google image search. The one I saw was much bulkier and blockier than I expect a Jag to be, but it wasn't the new one. Jeez, yes, that's hideous. And surely it will be impossible to turn out of any street without a massive visibility splay.
But evidently that advert has made me hate all Jags, even the ones which aren't featured in it.
That doesn't excuse Starmer, whose ears are undoubtedly 95 percent tin. But it does point to how this problem could be fixed.
(As with Johnson and Cummings, it looks like the PM is being direccted by someone who may be great at campaigning mechanics, and good at identifying problems, but has terrible ideas about solving them. Is this inherent in the way we do politics now, or just an unfortunate conincidence?)
No problem with immigration so long as we invest in housing and infrastructure, the biggest problem is having one but not the other.
Cross channel migrants as serfs (and their children) working in care home etc. Paid a fixed sub-minimum wage. Never allowed to leave the jobs.
What’s not to like in that?
Of the PMs we've had since 1990, only a minority have been any good at impressing the voters. Blair was an off-the-scale political genius, John Major, Cameron and Boris were mixed. But Brown, TMay, Truss and Sunak all bombed, and Starmer is also shit.
Whatever the faults of a Presidential system, to win you need at least to impress the voters (and then you can let them down with impunity).
Too many people live at the tops of the valleys where there used to be large employers that just don't exist anymore and probably never will again. If I had dictatorial powers I'd start to depopulate the tops of the valleys and move people to where the jobs are. The housing stock is awful and any attempt at regeneration largely falls to McDonald's and shopping outlets.
0.7% growth so far, so we might end the year still in the positive?
If Labour and the Tories (and Lib Dems) had retained their dominance, there would never have been referendums on Scottish independence or Brexit in the first place, never mind losing one of them. The election of Corbyn, the splits within Labour, the return of Reform, the near-4m UKIP votes in 2015, the devastating Tory result in 2024 (and Labour in 2019, and LD in 2015, and SLab that year too): all are signs of the breakdown.
I'm not saying the Valleys are a great place to live (though they have their upsides). But for ex-mining villages they're unusual in the extent to which they're well-connected to a big city with plentiful jobs.
I wonder whether people in other countries are so rooted to a place as we are in this country? Once a (private) house exists in this country, in most cases it pretty much gets lived in forever, even if it's somewhere terrible (the obvious, though possibly apocryphal (is it actually lived in?) example being that house in the middle of the M62 between Rochdale and Huddersfield).