You could improve the new housing estates by planting proper hedges and trees. You don't realise how much work they are doing to improve older estates until your neighbour cuts them down and turns their garden into a parking space.
I genuinely believe this should be illegal, as it impacts the beauty of an entire neighborhood and lowers the value of everyone's home
About half of the front-facing semis/ground floor flats around me have done it. There was one original garden tended to by an 80-year old - roses, a plum tree, beech hedge, beautiful decorative brick patio etc.
She died a few months ago. It now has two cars parked on it instead, no vegetation whatsoever - just tarmac. The biggest challenge is that a large proportion of the population have no sense of aesthetics at all.
I have remembered the song that was plagiarised, been somewhere in my head for 48 hours… ‘Love My Way’ by The Psychedelic Furs was outrageously ripped off by Electronic for the aptly titled ‘Getting Away With it”
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
So you're saying if we were still in the UK then there would have been far lower spending on the NHS and much reduced health services ???
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
A third man has been arrested over alleged arson attacks at properties connected to Sir Keir Starmer, the Met Police says.
The 34-year-old was arrested on Monday morning in Chelsea, south-west London on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life, the force said.
Interesting reading these comments on house design and construction as we're currently having our new house built in Hull.
Then once it's out of the factory it's going to be shipped down and erected on our self-build site in Dorset.
I'll leave you to guess whether we are going for a) identikit red0brick box, b) mock-Georgian Poundburyesque pastiche or c) something modern, efficient and beautiful.
Work starts on digging the foundations next week - very exciting and a bit nerve wracking.
This is where I am right now. Primrose Hill. 5 minutes from my flat. One of the most beautiful urban burbs of the world
Is there any reason why we can’t build like this again? No. King Charles is doing it. The French are doing it across France. Likewise the Germans and Dutch
Enough ticky tacky redbrick boxes. Build beauty
The reason is that builders always go the cheapest way, hence breeze block covered in redbrick.
And our planning policy gives permission to an oligopopy of developers whose only goal is to churn through developments.
Liberate planning and houses can be built one at a time, rather than as blocky developments, and the grand designs variety can be the norm not the exception.
See Japan where a street can have a hodgepodge of interesting and different buildings next to each other, based on each buildings owners preferences, rather than pure identikit similarity.
I love Japan and I broadly agree with you that we need to radically deconstruct our planning laws, but it's hard to look at the average Japanese urban or suburban streetscape and see it as full of "grand designs" style projects or beautiful vernacular architecture. People mostly build what they can afford, which might well be whatever the builder offers as their stock house type. Plus the "value is in the land and the house is not valued much by the next buyer" market they have doesn't encourage investing in higher quality housing...
Your proposed reforms have good arguments going for them, but I think this one's a bit shaky.
Japan has really ugly houses but for different reasons to this
1. There was a massive population boom postwar so they had to build cheap and quick
2. Of course half the country had also burned down. So they did them even cheaper and quicker
3 lack of urban space means almost no gardens and few parks. Very bleak
4. Japan is prone to earthquakes fires and tsunamis so there is no sense of “build for the future”. There isn’t one. Houses are just machines for living in
Do the Japanese themselves see their housing as 'ugly', or is it a cultural norm?
The Japanese don't see the house as something to last generations, so they don't really care that much about beautifying / maintenance if its ok for them at the moment. The value is all in the land. It is the norm for the house to be passed on to children and they flatten the house and rebuild. So lots of Japanese homes are 40-50 years old when the trend was ugly concrete blocks.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
He’ll say that he wasn’t in power so couldn’t affect that . They’re better hammering him on the NHS and trashing the Reform manifesto which would have seen huge cuts to public services .
I agree on all of those, but they very particularly need to link him to the rise in immigration, for several reasons.
-High immigration, not Brexit, is now his trump card. The two should be linked in the public mind, because that is the reality.
-It's a reality that the Tory press are also desperate to avoid,
-Many former Brexit voters still know nothing about the connection, because of the above.
-It takes on directly Farage's main appeal: apparent straight-forwardness and authenticity.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
More of this please, Keir. Maybe, in Farage, Keir has found an enemy which inspires him to do better.
Or maybe, in Farage, Starmer has found the potential nemesis of the Tories and is deliberately magnifying Reform to undermine Kemi. Or a bit of both.
Interesting reading these comments on house design and construction as we're currently having our new house built in Hull.
Then once it's out of the factory it's going to be shipped down and erected on our self-build site in Dorset.
I'll leave you to guess whether we are going for a) identikit red0brick box, b) mock-Georgian Poundburyesque pastiche or c) something modern, efficient and beautiful.
Work starts on digging the foundations next week - very exciting and a bit nerve wracking.
There was a Grand Designs of a Huf Haus (prefab house made in a factory). It was really very impressive how it all worked.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
He’ll say that he wasn’t in power so couldn’t affect that . They’re better hammering him on the NHS and trashing the Reform manifesto which would have seen huge cuts to public services .
I agree on all of those, but they very particularly need to link him to the rise in immigration, for several reasons.
-High immigration, not Brexit, is now his trump card. The two should be linked in the public mind, because that is the reality.
-It's a reality that the Tory press are also desperate to avoid,
-Many former Brexit voters still know nothing about the connection, because of the above.
-It takes on directly Farage's main appeal: apparent straight-forwardness and authenticity.
Brexit did not cause high immigration.
Boris being a fan of immigration, and Patel wanting easier migration from the subcontinent . . . both of which they made no secret of in advance even if some weren't listening . . . is why we had higher immigration.
It was a choice.
"Shortages" of labour is bullshit, since lump of labour is a fallacy. That fallacy cuts both ways. You can not say that immigration causes unemployment, as its a fallacy. You can not say for the same reason that immigration solves shortages, as its also a fallacy.
The only thing that fixes shortages is prices getting into equilibrium. Immigration is a sticking plaster that does nothing since it creates extra demand meaning more jobs are needed, which is why its a fallacy, there is no fixed lump of labour.
We're holidaying near Poitiers in the summer. Any suggestions on things to see/ do / avoid? Puy du Pou and Futoroscope are on the list. What else? We're driving, so transport generally shouldn't be an issue.
This is where I am right now. Primrose Hill. 5 minutes from my flat. One of the most beautiful urban burbs of the world
Is there any reason why we can’t build like this again? No. King Charles is doing it. The French are doing it across France. Likewise the Germans and Dutch
Enough ticky tacky redbrick boxes. Build beauty
How much do those houses go for? I mean the whole house, not individual flats within.
Insane money. £3m? £6m?
The mad thing is when much of Primrose Hill was built it was seen as nice housing for the middle classes. Or even lower middle classes. Not billionaires
And many other houses built at the same time are no more. There is a certain amount of survivor's bias going on.
But this isn’t true
You can see it across london which has very large areas of period housing dating 1800-1930 (when things began to go wrong). They are nearly all charming (and now desirable)
It’s not survivor bias. They simply built more beautiful homes back then - even for quite poor people
Now take that Nuneaton development. Houses costing £400,000!! There is zero attempt at beauty. No thought for aesthetics. No human has sat down and thought - people will live here, how can we make it stand out, make it lovelier, add beauty and charm. It screams “maximum profit and minimum effort”
Its hideous. Ticky tacky identikit hideousness
Back in 19th century London over 90% of people would have been renters.
Would you prefer to rent in a 'beautiful' property or own an 'identikit' property ?
And do you regard all those 'corrie' style terraced streets as beautiful or hideous identikit - they were perhaps the first attempt to produce housing that the urban C1C2s could afford to buy.
There are plenty of slumhouses surviving in places like Borough, Oval, Hackney and Vauxhall that are now desirable. Why? Because they still adhere to basic principles of beauty
Here's my favourite example, which I've used before on PB. Bob Cratchitt's House is about five minutes from me (the other direction from Primrose Hill). We know it is Bob Cratchitt's house (from Dickens' Christmas Carol) because Dickens' places the house in grotty, smoggy Camden Town and the description exactly matches the house Dickens himself lived in, in Camden, on Bayham Street. Cratchitt is definitely C1, C2... lower middle class and struggling
They're desirable because they're close to central London and there is great demand to live there.
Why were such places not desirable in the 70s and 80s when SeanT was squatting in them ?
Not because of the aesthetics but because there wasn't the demand to live in the area.
It’s a bit of both. Here’s an example. In the 1970s the houses on this street went for as little as £5k, because South East London was a tatty wasteland.
But these houses were always attractive, even when growing buddleia from the roof and with caved in ceilings and polystyrene false ceilings. Which is the state this house was in until 2011.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
More of this please, Keir. Maybe, in Farage, Keir has found an enemy which inspires him to do better.
Or maybe, in Farage, Starmer has found the potential nemesis of the Tories and is deliberately magnifying Reform to undermine Kemi. Or a bit of both.
Dangerous game to play if so. It’s far better for Starmer to be facing the Tories at the next GE than Farage.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
More of this please, Keir. Maybe, in Farage, Keir has found an enemy which inspires him to do better.
As an aside, timber-frame buildings got a really bad reputation in the UK after a scandal in the 1980s that was reported in a TV program. A program that might not have been fully factual...
It's interesting that they're finally coming back into mainstream use.
As a further aside, an acquaintance bought a metal-framed house on an ex-USAF base. It's really hard to insure, or get people to work on it...
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
More of this please, Keir. Maybe, in Farage, Keir has found an enemy which inspires him to do better.
Or maybe, in Farage, Starmer has found the potential nemesis of the Tories and is deliberately magnifying Reform to undermine Kemi. Or a bit of both.
Dangerous game to play if so. It’s far better for Starmer to be facing the Tories at the next GE than Farage.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
More of this please, Keir. Maybe, in Farage, Keir has found an enemy which inspires him to do better.
Or maybe, in Farage, Starmer has found the potential nemesis of the Tories and is deliberately magnifying Reform to undermine Kemi. Or a bit of both.
Or maybe, in Farage, Starmer thinks he has found an enemy which inspires Starmer's party to back Starmer more loyally.
Kemi is so weak that "back me to beat Kemi" isn't a strong argument.
Farage is so loathsome that "back me to beat Farage" is.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Of course this is a move back to the way shops used to be until the 1950s or whenever it was. Goods were probably put in front of the counter because crime was so rare at that time.
In my local Tesco Express after installing the Wire -esque cage around the checkouts, they have now installed all these plastic contraptions over valuable goods that stops you grabbing lots in one go.
As an aside, timber-frame buildings got a really bad reputation in the UK after a scandal in the 1980s that was reported in a TV program. A program that might not have been fully factual...
It's interesting that they're finally coming back into mainstream use.
As a further aside, an acquaintance bought a metal-framed house on an ex-USAF base. It's really hard to insure, or get people to work on it...
One of the friends I was with on Saturday at our reunion is the owner of a company called Border Oak, who have been making old-style, very expensive timber framed houses for decades primarily in Herefordshire and the marches. His father in law founded the business in the 80s.
The houses are inevitably on the margins of pastiche but are pretty sturdily built and often quite attractive things.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Of course this is a move back to the way shops used to be until the 1950s or whenever it was. Goods were probably put in front of the counter because crime was so rare at that time.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
More of this please, Keir. Maybe, in Farage, Keir has found an enemy which inspires him to do better.
Or maybe, in Farage, Starmer has found the potential nemesis of the Tories and is deliberately magnifying Reform to undermine Kemi. Or a bit of both.
Or maybe, in Farage, Starmer thinks he has found an enemy which inspires Starmer's party to back Starmer more loyally.
Kemi is so weak that "back me to beat Kemi" isn't a strong argument.
Farage is so loathsome that "back me to beat Farage" is.
Yes, a fair point. He can’t use Trump for those purposes, unlike Ed Davey.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Of course this is a move back to the way shops used to be until the 1950s or whenever it was. Goods were probably put in front of the counter because crime was so rare at that time.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Of course this is a move back to the way shops used to be until the 1950s or whenever it was. Goods were probably put in front of the counter because crime was so rare at that time.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
A third man has been arrested over alleged arson attacks at properties connected to Sir Keir Starmer, the Met Police says.
The 34-year-old was arrested on Monday morning in Chelsea, south-west London on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life, the force said.
One can only speculate (never good for an active investigation) how many of these "Ukrainian nationals" will turn out to be, um, from a very specific part of Ukraine.
Interesting reading these comments on house design and construction as we're currently having our new house built in Hull.
Then once it's out of the factory it's going to be shipped down and erected on our self-build site in Dorset.
I'll leave you to guess whether we are going for a) identikit red0brick box, b) mock-Georgian Poundburyesque pastiche or c) something modern, efficient and beautiful.
Work starts on digging the foundations next week - very exciting and a bit nerve wracking.
There was a Grand Designs of a Huf Haus (prefab house made in a factory). It was really very impressive how it all worked.
Tbh we're not going the whole Huf Haus route because we want to control the interior fittings and exterior finishes ourselves (plus Huf Haus is eye-wateringly expensive). So it's just the structure that is being fabricated in Hull.
Interesting reading these comments on house design and construction as we're currently having our new house built in Hull.
Then once it's out of the factory it's going to be shipped down and erected on our self-build site in Dorset.
I'll leave you to guess whether we are going for a) identikit red0brick box, b) mock-Georgian Poundburyesque pastiche or c) something modern, efficient and beautiful.
Work starts on digging the foundations next week - very exciting and a bit nerve wracking.
For a few seconds there I thought you had gone mad and were planning on living in Hull... Hope it all goes well. We 'finished' our extension about one year in (still some bits of decor left to do) and it was a hard year. Worth it though
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
We're holidaying near Poitiers in the summer. Any suggestions on things to see/ do / avoid? Puy du Pou and Futoroscope are on the list. What else? We're driving, so transport generally shouldn't be an issue.
You go and see the Battle of Poitiers, obviously.
Might be a challenge unless going via TARDIS.! Was Poitiers the high point for England in the middle ages? Must be in with a shout.
This is where I am right now. Primrose Hill. 5 minutes from my flat. One of the most beautiful urban burbs of the world
Is there any reason why we can’t build like this again? No. King Charles is doing it. The French are doing it across France. Likewise the Germans and Dutch
Enough ticky tacky redbrick boxes. Build beauty
The reason is that builders always go the cheapest way, hence breeze block covered in redbrick.
And our planning policy gives permission to an oligopopy of developers whose only goal is to churn through developments.
Liberate planning and houses can be built one at a time, rather than as blocky developments, and the grand designs variety can be the norm not the exception.
See Japan where a street can have a hodgepodge of interesting and different buildings next to each other, based on each buildings owners preferences, rather than pure identikit similarity.
I love Japan and I broadly agree with you that we need to radically deconstruct our planning laws, but it's hard to look at the average Japanese urban or suburban streetscape and see it as full of "grand designs" style projects or beautiful vernacular architecture. People mostly build what they can afford, which might well be whatever the builder offers as their stock house type. Plus the "value is in the land and the house is not valued much by the next buyer" market they have doesn't encourage investing in higher quality housing...
Your proposed reforms have good arguments going for them, but I think this one's a bit shaky.
Japan has really ugly houses but for different reasons to this
1. There was a massive population boom postwar so they had to build cheap and quick
2. Of course half the country had also burned down. So they did them even cheaper and quicker
3 lack of urban space means almost no gardens and few parks. Very bleak
4. Japan is prone to earthquakes fires and tsunamis so there is no sense of “build for the future”. There isn’t one. Houses are just machines for living in
Do the Japanese themselves see their housing as 'ugly', or is it a cultural norm?
Yes, they do. They know urban Japan is ugly, and lament it. Yet never do that much about it
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
Was Trudeau also dealing with Brexit? The same policy mistake of massively opening the floodgates was made simultaneously by several Anglosphere countries, which suggests something deeper than Brexit as a root cause.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Of course this is a move back to the way shops used to be until the 1950s or whenever it was. Goods were probably put in front of the counter because crime was so rare at that time.
A 92-year-old care home resident in a wheelchair was sprayed in the face with synthetic pepper spray before being Tasered and hit with a baton by police officers, a jury has been told.
He had a knife, but he was a 92 year old bloke with one leg, but got not just pepper spray, but taser and baton'ed.....he should have claimed he was protesting for JSO and they would have instead ask him how many sugars he likes in his tea.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Of course this is a move back to the way shops used to be until the 1950s or whenever it was. Goods were probably put in front of the counter because crime was so rare at that time.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
More of this please, Keir. Maybe, in Farage, Keir has found an enemy which inspires him to do better.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Of course this is a move back to the way shops used to be until the 1950s or whenever it was. Goods were probably put in front of the counter because crime was so rare at that time.
We're holidaying near Poitiers in the summer. Any suggestions on things to see/ do / avoid? Puy du Pou and Futoroscope are on the list. What else? We're driving, so transport generally shouldn't be an issue.
You go and see the Battle of Poitiers, obviously.
Might be a challenge unless going via TARDIS.! Was Poitiers the high point for England in the middle ages? Must be in with a shout.
There is a nice memorial where you can go and glory in the possessions anglais.
This is where I am right now. Primrose Hill. 5 minutes from my flat. One of the most beautiful urban burbs of the world
Is there any reason why we can’t build like this again? No. King Charles is doing it. The French are doing it across France. Likewise the Germans and Dutch
Enough ticky tacky redbrick boxes. Build beauty
How much do those houses go for? I mean the whole house, not individual flats within.
Insane money. £3m? £6m?
The mad thing is when much of Primrose Hill was built it was seen as nice housing for the middle classes. Or even lower middle classes. Not billionaires
And many other houses built at the same time are no more. There is a certain amount of survivor's bias going on.
But this isn’t true
You can see it across london which has very large areas of period housing dating 1800-1930 (when things began to go wrong). They are nearly all charming (and now desirable)
It’s not survivor bias. They simply built more beautiful homes back then - even for quite poor people
Now take that Nuneaton development. Houses costing £400,000!! There is zero attempt at beauty. No thought for aesthetics. No human has sat down and thought - people will live here, how can we make it stand out, make it lovelier, add beauty and charm. It screams “maximum profit and minimum effort”
Its hideous. Ticky tacky identikit hideousness
Because of our planning system giving an oligopoly of developers control over developments.
And it is survivor bias. Plenty of utterly awful, shit homes were built in the late 19th century too. Which were subsequently bulldozed.
You’re largely wrong about survivor bias but I actually agree with you on your “liberate the designs” ethos. Let people build their own houses within a certain price range. At least then we’d get character and variety not this soulless redbrick duplication
I'm glad we can agree on the liberation issue as that's the main issue.
The survivor bias point is more nitpicking and relatively trivial in comparison, but the issue is that you are falling for thinking that all homes then were like those that have survived but the good ones have survived deliberately.
"Cratchitt's" house was not one of the slum houses, which is why its survived, and why its beautiful.
An estimated quarter of a million slum homes were cleared in the 1930s alone. You would definitely not be begging to live in any of them, if they'd survived as they were until today.
Cratchitt's House absolutely was one of those houses. Why? Because that's all that was there on Bayham Street in the 19th century. Early Victorian terraces, exactly like that
Back then they wee regarded as cheap houses in a bad area. But the basic aesthetics are handsome in a way that so much modern housing - in the UK - is not
Maybe the average Barratt Home estate will age beautifully into something noble? I cannot see it. Most will get bulldozed and something else will be built, because they are sad and ugly
Not ALL UK new build housing is this bad, but far too much is
You could improve the new housing estates by planting proper hedges and trees. You don't realise how much work they are doing to improve older estates until your neighbour cuts them down and turns their garden into a parking space.
I genuinely believe this should be illegal, as it impacts the beauty of an entire neighbourhood and lowers the value of everyone's home
One problem with the current system is that it incentivises cutting trees down pre-emptively.
They are a cost to the owner, and a benefit to not-the-owner, so most remove them, then demand that the ones left are protected for their pleasure, at maintenance cost to the owner who did not remove theirs.
The original idea of TPOs involved I think some public funding for costs, but of course that was left out. I'm not totally familair with ins and outs as it was all done between 1950 and 1970 approximately.
The last tree that I had to have removed that was at the end of its life, having been in the family for 90 years, cost me £3000 to deal with. That was around 2016.
The arrangements could be sorted, but no Govt will easily vote money for beautifying the public realm without a VERY good reason.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Exactly what I saw 2 weeks ago. Brazen.
Was that London.
I’ve seen so many videos like this. Just so brazen. They don’t care. There’s no consequence for their actions. Cannot blame the staff for not intervening. They may end up being stabbed. I know this is July 24 but this still goes on to this day, as you saw.
Why should the rest of us play by the rules and abide by the law when people who don’t just get away with it, and this is not just a hungry guy taking for himself.
We're holidaying near Poitiers in the summer. Any suggestions on things to see/ do / avoid? Puy du Pou and Futoroscope are on the list. What else? We're driving, so transport generally shouldn't be an issue.
You go and see the Battle of Poitiers, obviously.
Might be a challenge unless going via TARDIS.! Was Poitiers the high point for England in the middle ages? Must be in with a shout.
No, I think Scafell Pike was the high point for England in the middle ages.
Look at this stunning development on the outskirts of the town. They are new builds yet the express a timeless beauty, the elegance of the best Georgian townhouses married with the flamboyance of Victorian Gothic, even the adorable oddities of Tudor and Jacobean. Most of all, they scream: NUNEATON
These are houses that could only be in Nuneaton, the same way the Ca d'Oro could only exist on the Grand Canal. They have the intrinsic beauty of Nuneaton stonework and artistry, and capture the Nuneaton essence in their noom. Every single brick is, simply, Nuneaton, down to its atoms
Nuneaton is thankful you will never want to go there. The architecture of these new towns is specifically designed accordiing to stringent guidelines to keep the likes of SeanT out. And as someone who lives in a new town I too am thankful. Let's home more people from Hong Kong and less Camden ****s
Come on, we could do so much better than these identikit horrors. Surely.
We could. And if you came to my part of the town - built around 2000 - you can see that they succeeded.
But please don't ignore the important part of my post - you could have a lovely, well built an unique house in the middle of a 10-lane motorway and it'd be a shit house. The environment the house is in matters as much - in my view more - than the house itself. People are focusing too much on the building, and not where it sits.
This is where the 15-minute cities (and similar) are utterly correct - and the concepts' detractors are being silly. When my son was a toddler, being able to easily push him safely in a pram to nursery, the supermarket, five different playparks, a leisure centre, the doctor's, the library, etc, etc, was absolutely priceless. A friend of mine who lives in South London had to drive to get to most of those - except the supermarket, which was across a busy main road.
I know there are practicalities, but honestly, they just look so ... depressing.
You could surely have all these facilities with just a little less density, a bit more green, and a bit less uniformity.
When gardens are postage stamps overlooked by the 10 neighbours it is no wonder they all end up as astroturf.
[Edit: I think the house in the M62 would be quite an interesting place to live, to be honest]
At that density it's just silly not to build flats. You could put a half of the land over to 1-bed and 2-bed flats with a nice park, the other half to big family homes with decent gardens.
I agree. I'd much rather have a nice flat overlooking a park than one of these 'executive' houses.
One of the things that Britain has hardly ever (?) got right. My flat in Spain was central, properly built and nice. Apart from the mansion blocks in central London, English flats are mostly rubbish.
There are some beautiful tenements in Glasgow and Edinburgh. It’s a pity good tenements were never widespread south of the border
There are across Scotland.
Makes an incredible difference from what kind of stone they're built though. Aberdeen has plenty of tenements, but built of discomfiting granite rather than warm sandstone.
We're holidaying near Poitiers in the summer. Any suggestions on things to see/ do / avoid? Puy du Pou and Futoroscope are on the list. What else? We're driving, so transport generally shouldn't be an issue.
Avoid the area of Poitiers, one of the most boring corners of France
Boring areas are interesting; you get a truer feel for a place when it's not trying.
Anyway, nowhere in France is properly boring if you look properly.
I was kinda teasing, tho it is one of the less appealing regions of a generally beautiful country
In my experience, nowhere in the world is boring, if you look properly
Yes, even Wick. And Newent
Wick isn't boring. Its bleakness and emptiness are fascinating. I would love it if work sent me to Wick for a couple of days. I nearly got to go once, but a colleague got the gig. If you were told you had to spend two days in x, what value of x would provoke the greatest ennui? I suggest: Nuneaton.
Slough?
I'be interested to go to Slough becauae of The Office and the Betjeman poem. Not that interested. I'd rather be sent to Norwich. But more interested than Nuneaton.
I lived in slough from 87 to 2022....triple axe murder, stabbing death, gang violence, a non fatal stabbing, next door flat being torched, sectarian violence, a roof almost killing me when the wind ripped it off a block of flats all in a street I lived on. In addition arrested probably about 50 times for looking like a person of interest. Yes I wouldn't call it boring shall we say
We're holidaying near Poitiers in the summer. Any suggestions on things to see/ do / avoid? Puy du Pou and Futoroscope are on the list. What else? We're driving, so transport generally shouldn't be an issue.
You go and see the Battle of Poitiers, obviously.
I hope you're not too disappointed to learn that the battle finished some time ago. I'll avoid spoilers though.
We're holidaying near Poitiers in the summer. Any suggestions on things to see/ do / avoid? Puy du Pou and Futoroscope are on the list. What else? We're driving, so transport generally shouldn't be an issue.
You go and see the Battle of Poitiers, obviously.
Might be a challenge unless going via TARDIS.! Was Poitiers the high point for England in the middle ages? Must be in with a shout.
No, I think Scafell Pike was the high point for England in the middle ages.
As Wales was part of England, let's call it Snowdon
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
Was Trudeau also dealing with Brexit? The same policy mistake of massively opening the floodgates was made simultaneously by several Anglosphere countries, which suggests something deeper than Brexit as a root cause.
This is a year later than the British big rise in 2020, suggesting a different cause. I will dig out some of the graphs.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
Was Trudeau also dealing with Brexit? The same policy mistake of massively opening the floodgates was made simultaneously by several Anglosphere countries, which suggests something deeper than Brexit as a root cause.
This is a year later than the British big rise in 2020, suggesting a different cause. I will dig out some of the graphs.
As an aside, timber-frame buildings got a really bad reputation in the UK after a scandal in the 1980s that was reported in a TV program. A program that might not have been fully factual...
It's interesting that they're finally coming back into mainstream use.
As a further aside, an acquaintance bought a metal-framed house on an ex-USAF base. It's really hard to insure, or get people to work on it...
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
When are the 2024 numbers on this breakdown published?
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
Was Trudeau also dealing with Brexit? The same policy mistake of massively opening the floodgates was made simultaneously by several Anglosphere countries, which suggests something deeper than Brexit as a root cause.
This is a year later than the British big rise in 2020, suggesting a different cause. I will dig out some of the graphs.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
Yup, 2020 is the year. The year of Brexit victory.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
So it’s significantly dependants, from that graph.
Exactly what the Leave campaign promised the Asian population of east London and elsewhere - that Brexit would make it easier for them to bring their family over, and for Indian restaurants to get the workers they need.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
When are the 2024 numbers on this breakdown published?
I have remembered the song that was plagiarised, been somewhere in my head for 48 hours… ‘Love My Way’ by The Psychedelic Furs was outrageously ripped off by Electronic for the aptly titled ‘Getting Away With it”
As an aside, timber-frame buildings got a really bad reputation in the UK after a scandal in the 1980s that was reported in a TV program. A program that might not have been fully factual...
It's interesting that they're finally coming back into mainstream use.
As a further aside, an acquaintance bought a metal-framed house on an ex-USAF base. It's really hard to insure, or get people to work on it...
Programme.
This made me think on an early (c1984) documentary Adam Curtis was involved in :
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
Yup, 2020 is the year. The year of Brexit victory.
Care workers plus dependents were not a small fraction. Fortunately the last govt had the sense to block care workers bringing over dependents in early 2024. So this should subside.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
More of this please, Keir. Maybe, in Farage, Keir has found an enemy which inspires him to do better.
Or maybe, in Farage, Starmer has found the potential nemesis of the Tories and is deliberately magnifying Reform to undermine Kemi. Or a bit of both.
Similar to how the Dems spent tens of millions to boost MAGA candidates in GOP primaries ?
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
So it’s significantly dependants, from that graph.
Exactly what the Leave campaign promised the Asian population of east London and elsewhere - that Brexit would make it easier for them to bring their family over, and for Indian restaurants to get the workers they need.
Promised, and delivered…
Wow . A Leave promise that didn’t bite the dust . I’m in shock and need to go and lie down !
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
More of this please, Keir. Maybe, in Farage, Keir has found an enemy which inspires him to do better.
Or maybe, in Farage, Starmer has found the potential nemesis of the Tories and is deliberately magnifying Reform to undermine Kemi. Or a bit of both.
Similar to how the Dems spent tens of millions to boost MAGA candidates in GOP primaries ?
How well did that turn out ?
That did actually work . Most of the nut jobs failed to get elected .
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
So it’s significantly dependants, from that graph.
Exactly what the Leave campaign promised the Asian population of east London and elsewhere - that Brexit would make it easier for them to bring their family over, and for Indian restaurants to get the workers they need.
Promised, and delivered…
In 2024 the Sunak govt removed the ability to bring dependents so this will fall. Be interesting to see 2024 numbers Matt W asked about. Dependents were not just for min wage care workers coming to wipe old peoples bums, but also students coming to pay massive fees for tuition.
..."The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of. The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent. If it wasn’t, I would say so now, rather than later. Russia wants to do largescale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic “bloodbath” is over, and I agree. There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is UNLIMITED. Likewise, Ukraine can be a great beneficiary on Trade, in the process of rebuilding its Country. Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will begin immediately."
...there seemed to be little of substance to come out of the conversation, with Putin refusing to agree to a 30-day unconditional ceasefire, which had been the aim of Trump’s call. The Russian president showed no signs of backing down from his maximalist demands towards Ukraine, saying that for Russia an end to the war depended on its “root causes” being addressed. As my colleague Pjotr Sauer notes, these demands remain forcing Ukraine to “de-Nazify” and demilitarise, cutting back its armed forces, barring it from receiving western military support, and imposing sweeping limits on its sovereignty. And despite Trump’s claim of Russia’s readiness to begin peace talks, the Kremlin later said no timeline for negotiations had been discussed...
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
Yup, 2020 is the year. The year of Brexit victory.
Care workers plus dependents were not a small fraction. Fortunately the last govt had the sense to block care workers bringing over dependents in early 2024. So this should subside.
Can you please stop linking to that cesspit of radicalise hatred, Bluesky
It's a tiny niche site for extremists. Don't bring it here
It's actually quite funny how quickly bluecry has fallen off since the initial flurry. There's something about the people that go there which is a bit off.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
Was Trudeau also dealing with Brexit? The same policy mistake of massively opening the floodgates was made simultaneously by several Anglosphere countries, which suggests something deeper than Brexit as a root cause.
This is a year later than the British big rise in 2020, suggesting a different cause. I will dig out some of the graphs.
If you're saying that immigration would be lower if the UK had been in the EU then which groups would not have migrated here ?
Students (paying hefty fees) ? Ukrainian refugees ? Hong Kongers with money ? Health workers ? Care workers ? Asylum seekers ?
On the other hand there would certainly have been higher immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe if the UK had still been in the EU.
So is the big complaint that we had a few thousand more health and care workers from Nigeria rather than from Romania ?
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Of course this is a move back to the way shops used to be until the 1950s or whenever it was. Goods were probably put in front of the counter because crime was so rare at that time.
I don't think I've ever been in a Greggs where the produce wasn't behind the counter. Going back decades.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
So it’s significantly dependants, from that graph.
Exactly what the Leave campaign promised the Asian population of east London and elsewhere - that Brexit would make it easier for them to bring their family over, and for Indian restaurants to get the workers they need.
Promised, and delivered…
In 2024 the Sunak govt removed the ability to bring dependents so this will fall. Be interesting to see 2024 numbers Matt W asked about. Dependents were not just for min wage care workers coming to wipe old peoples bums, but also students coming to pay massive fees for tuition.
I'm thinking that may give Starmer most of the win he needs on immigration numbers at this stage of the Parliament.
It won't swing any Con or Ref zealots, but they aren't the ones he needs on side.
..."The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of. The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent. If it wasn’t, I would say so now, rather than later. Russia wants to do largescale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic “bloodbath” is over, and I agree. There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is UNLIMITED. Likewise, Ukraine can be a great beneficiary on Trade, in the process of rebuilding its Country. Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will begin immediately."
...there seemed to be little of substance to come out of the conversation, with Putin refusing to agree to a 30-day unconditional ceasefire, which had been the aim of Trump’s call. The Russian president showed no signs of backing down from his maximalist demands towards Ukraine, saying that for Russia an end to the war depended on its “root causes” being addressed. As my colleague Pjotr Sauer notes, these demands remain forcing Ukraine to “de-Nazify” and demilitarise, cutting back its armed forces, barring it from receiving western military support, and imposing sweeping limits on its sovereignty. And despite Trump’s claim of Russia’s readiness to begin peace talks, the Kremlin later said no timeline for negotiations had been discussed...
Trump claims success about everything he does.
How much he believes, or even remembers, is the unknown part.
Look at this stunning development on the outskirts of the town. They are new builds yet the express a timeless beauty, the elegance of the best Georgian townhouses married with the flamboyance of Victorian Gothic, even the adorable oddities of Tudor and Jacobean. Most of all, they scream: NUNEATON
These are houses that could only be in Nuneaton, the same way the Ca d'Oro could only exist on the Grand Canal. They have the intrinsic beauty of Nuneaton stonework and artistry, and capture the Nuneaton essence in their noom. Every single brick is, simply, Nuneaton, down to its atoms
Nuneaton is thankful you will never want to go there. The architecture of these new towns is specifically designed accordiing to stringent guidelines to keep the likes of SeanT out. And as someone who lives in a new town I too am thankful. Let's home more people from Hong Kong and less Camden ****s
Come on, we could do so much better than these identikit horrors. Surely.
We could. And if you came to my part of the town - built around 2000 - you can see that they succeeded.
But please don't ignore the important part of my post - you could have a lovely, well built an unique house in the middle of a 10-lane motorway and it'd be a shit house. The environment the house is in matters as much - in my view more - than the house itself. People are focusing too much on the building, and not where it sits.
This is where the 15-minute cities (and similar) are utterly correct - and the concepts' detractors are being silly. When my son was a toddler, being able to easily push him safely in a pram to nursery, the supermarket, five different playparks, a leisure centre, the doctor's, the library, etc, etc, was absolutely priceless. A friend of mine who lives in South London had to drive to get to most of those - except the supermarket, which was across a busy main road.
I know there are practicalities, but honestly, they just look so ... depressing.
You could surely have all these facilities with just a little less density, a bit more green, and a bit less uniformity.
When gardens are postage stamps overlooked by the 10 neighbours it is no wonder they all end up as astroturf.
[Edit: I think the house in the M62 would be quite an interesting place to live, to be honest]
At that density it's just silly not to build flats. You could put a half of the land over to 1-bed and 2-bed flats with a nice park, the other half to big family homes with decent gardens.
I agree. I'd much rather have a nice flat overlooking a park than one of these 'executive' houses.
One of the things that Britain has hardly ever (?) got right. My flat in Spain was central, properly built and nice. Apart from the mansion blocks in central London, English flats are mostly rubbish.
There are some beautiful tenements in Glasgow and Edinburgh. It’s a pity good tenements were never widespread south of the border
There are across Scotland.
Makes an incredible difference from what kind of stone they're built though. Aberdeen has plenty of tenements, but built of discomfiting granite rather than warm sandstone.
Factoid about Aberdeen tenements is that they tend to be two or three storeys plus an attic floor with dormer windows, rather than the normal four storeys and semi flat roof across the rest of Scotland. That's because the granite was so hard to work they wanted to use as little of it as possible while maximising the number of flats.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
Was Trudeau also dealing with Brexit? The same policy mistake of massively opening the floodgates was made simultaneously by several Anglosphere countries, which suggests something deeper than Brexit as a root cause.
This is a year later than the British big rise in 2020, suggesting a different cause. I will dig out some of the graphs.
2020 was Covid when there was a drop.
Genuine question, @williamglenn - you've indentified a definite pattern. in Anglosphere countries. Might be a Gazette article in it, for the Butt Plug Supplement, which focuses a lot on global migration, and stone butt plugs
At the moment though Farage's pro Trump Reform UK party leads our polls. We wait and see if left and liberal voters tactically vote enough to keep them out at the next GE
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
Yup, 2020 is the year. The year of Brexit victory.
Care workers plus dependents were not a small fraction. Fortunately the last govt had the sense to block care workers bringing over dependents in early 2024. So this should subside.
There are two different processes, because the government must have been quietly playing at different things.
A big rise in the dependents of health workers, in 2020, which the government must have chosen as a way to quietly plug gaps in some sectors, with health workers themselves still being a small fraction until later the next year, as originally discussed in the debate on this last year. The suddenly rise is in "other workers" later in 2020 is really interesting. The government must have known they were in deep economic trouble with the after-effects.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
More of this please, Keir. Maybe, in Farage, Keir has found an enemy which inspires him to do better.
Or maybe, in Farage, Starmer has found the potential nemesis of the Tories and is deliberately magnifying Reform to undermine Kemi. Or a bit of both.
Similar to how the Dems spent tens of millions to boost MAGA candidates in GOP primaries ?
How well did that turn out ?
That did actually work . Most of the nut jobs failed to get elected .
I'm not sure MAGA are gutted at the current state of control of the three branches of government.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar · 38s Hegseth: "There's a reason why our nation's most closely held secrets are contained in certain places with only access from certain people. Nobody takes that more seriously than me."
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
Was Trudeau also dealing with Brexit? The same policy mistake of massively opening the floodgates was made simultaneously by several Anglosphere countries, which suggests something deeper than Brexit as a root cause.
This is a year later than the British big rise in 2020, suggesting a different cause. I will dig out some of the graphs.
2020 was Covid when there was a drop.
Genuine question, @williamglenn - you've indentified a definite pattern. in Anglosphere countries. Might be a Gazette article in it, for the Butt Plug Supplement, which focuses a lot on global migration, and stone butt plugs
What's your take? Why did this happen?
It's not at the same times. The Trudeau surge starts around 2022.
Look at this stunning development on the outskirts of the town. They are new builds yet the express a timeless beauty, the elegance of the best Georgian townhouses married with the flamboyance of Victorian Gothic, even the adorable oddities of Tudor and Jacobean. Most of all, they scream: NUNEATON
These are houses that could only be in Nuneaton, the same way the Ca d'Oro could only exist on the Grand Canal. They have the intrinsic beauty of Nuneaton stonework and artistry, and capture the Nuneaton essence in their noom. Every single brick is, simply, Nuneaton, down to its atoms
Nuneaton is thankful you will never want to go there. The architecture of these new towns is specifically designed accordiing to stringent guidelines to keep the likes of SeanT out. And as someone who lives in a new town I too am thankful. Let's home more people from Hong Kong and less Camden ****s
Come on, we could do so much better than these identikit horrors. Surely.
We could. And if you came to my part of the town - built around 2000 - you can see that they succeeded.
But please don't ignore the important part of my post - you could have a lovely, well built an unique house in the middle of a 10-lane motorway and it'd be a shit house. The environment the house is in matters as much - in my view more - than the house itself. People are focusing too much on the building, and not where it sits.
This is where the 15-minute cities (and similar) are utterly correct - and the concepts' detractors are being silly. When my son was a toddler, being able to easily push him safely in a pram to nursery, the supermarket, five different playparks, a leisure centre, the doctor's, the library, etc, etc, was absolutely priceless. A friend of mine who lives in South London had to drive to get to most of those - except the supermarket, which was across a busy main road.
I know there are practicalities, but honestly, they just look so ... depressing.
You could surely have all these facilities with just a little less density, a bit more green, and a bit less uniformity.
When gardens are postage stamps overlooked by the 10 neighbours it is no wonder they all end up as astroturf.
[Edit: I think the house in the M62 would be quite an interesting place to live, to be honest]
At that density it's just silly not to build flats. You could put a half of the land over to 1-bed and 2-bed flats with a nice park, the other half to big family homes with decent gardens.
I agree. I'd much rather have a nice flat overlooking a park than one of these 'executive' houses.
One of the things that Britain has hardly ever (?) got right. My flat in Spain was central, properly built and nice. Apart from the mansion blocks in central London, English flats are mostly rubbish.
There are some beautiful tenements in Glasgow and Edinburgh. It’s a pity good tenements were never widespread south of the border
There are across Scotland.
Makes an incredible difference from what kind of stone they're built though. Aberdeen has plenty of tenements, but built of discomfiting granite rather than warm sandstone.
I have a soft spot (ironically) for the granite city, but the absolute imperviousness of the stone to weather does give an oddly 'new' look to it sometimes, like it was all built the other day.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
So it’s significantly dependants, from that graph.
Exactly what the Leave campaign promised the Asian population of east London and elsewhere - that Brexit would make it easier for them to bring their family over, and for Indian restaurants to get the workers they need.
Promised, and delivered…
In 2024 the Sunak govt removed the ability to bring dependents so this will fall. Be interesting to see 2024 numbers Matt W asked about. Dependents were not just for min wage care workers coming to wipe old peoples bums, but also students coming to pay massive fees for tuition.
I'm thinking that may give Starmer most of the win he needs on immigration numbers at this stage of the Parliament.
It won't swing any Con or Ref zealots, but they aren't the ones he needs on side.
But he still needs a comms strategy.
See post above provided by IanB and I agree with all you say.
He shouldn’t even bother pandering to the zealots, they will never change.
I’ve been critical of Labour but I have felt Starmer has grown in the role this year. His comms is poor as you say and There are probably plotters wanting to replace him too.
At the moment though Farage's pro Trump Reform UK party leads our polls. We wait and see if left and liberal voters tactically vote enough to keep them out at the next GE
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
Was Trudeau also dealing with Brexit? The same policy mistake of massively opening the floodgates was made simultaneously by several Anglosphere countries, which suggests something deeper than Brexit as a root cause.
This is a year later than the British big rise in 2020, suggesting a different cause. I will dig out some of the graphs.
2020 was Covid when there was a drop.
Genuine question, @williamglenn - you've indentified a definite pattern. in Anglosphere countries. Might be a Gazette article in it, for the Butt Plug Supplement, which focuses a lot on global migration, and stone butt plugs
What's your take? Why did this happen?
I’d previously assumed it was groupthink driven by economic policymakers but looking at the graph of visas being issued throughout the lockdowns maybe it was simply bureaucratic incompetence because the system carried on issuing visas and then everyone arrived at once when the pandemic was over.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
Yup, 2020 is the year. The year of Brexit victory.
Care workers plus dependents were not a small fraction. Fortunately the last govt had the sense to block care workers bringing over dependents in early 2024. So this should subside.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Of course this is a move back to the way shops used to be until the 1950s or whenever it was. Goods were probably put in front of the counter because crime was so rare at that time.
I don't think I've ever been in a Greggs where the produce wasn't behind the counter. Going back decades.
Does it look like it has just been moved? When they saw you approaching maybe? ;-)
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
You don't get it do you, it does not matter one jot how many sectors are struggling - you can't solve shortages by importing people since lump of labour does not exist.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
As we've already had this discussion in detail, several times, and care workers were just a small fraction, I refer you to the search function.
Over 220,000 people is "just a small fraction"?
And the same principle goes for most of the other sectors that were reporting "shortages". On the job training happens on the job, not over a "long term".
It takes a "long term" to do stuff that requires a university degree that is specifically for your career (as opposed to any degree being accepted). It does not take a "long term" to train for minimum wage work, which is precisely why employers are happy to accept anyone who'll take minimum wage regardless of their training or qualifications.
Greggs moves products from self service to behind the counter in ‘trial’ at 5 stores due to huge rise in shoplifting. Some stores are targetted by the same people every 20 minutes.
If only there was a group of people in London who were able to investigate and tackle crime.
Of course this is a move back to the way shops used to be until the 1950s or whenever it was. Goods were probably put in front of the counter because crime was so rare at that time.
I don't think I've ever been in a Greggs where the produce wasn't behind the counter. Going back decades.
Sandwiches, baguettes, potato wedges, and toasties are normally just inside the shop, to one side.
Keir Starmer has tonight told his MPs: “The Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power. We have a moral responsibility to make sure Farage never wins.”
And PM takes off gloves: “We have to be clear that every opportunity he has had in this Parliament to back working people he’s voted against. Telling the workers at Jaguar Land Rover they deserve to go bust. A state-slashing, NHS-privatising, Putin apologist. Without a single patriotic bone in his body. We will take to fight to him. We will fight as Labour.”
I’m happy to hear that. Farage is a fraud and it’s time he was held to account . Labour need to stop messing around and go for the jugular .
Labour very, very particularly need to mention Farage's responsibility for the huge post-Brexit rise in immigration, if they're finally going to say the truth.
Boris owns the Boriswave. It would be difficult to pin it on Farage.
I wouldn't agree there. Farage would have had no choice but to do the same, had been in power then, or watch the economy go into a depressing.
It shouldn't be too diffucult to highlight the actual figures of the number of sectors left dangerously short after Brexit , as referenced in detail in past discussions on here.
Nonsense, those sectors could have put up pay instead of bringing in people for minimum wage.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
We had a detailed discussion on all this on here, about a year ago, with figures from the Migration Observatory about the number of sectors struggling after Brexit.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic danage and recession comes tomorrow.
Was Trudeau also dealing with Brexit? The same policy mistake of massively opening the floodgates was made simultaneously by several Anglosphere countries, which suggests something deeper than Brexit as a root cause.
This is a year later than the British big rise in 2020, suggesting a different cause. I will dig out some of the graphs.
2020 was Covid when there was a drop.
Genuine question, @williamglenn - you've indentified a definite pattern. in Anglosphere countries. Might be a Gazette article in it, for the Butt Plug Supplement, which focuses a lot on global migration, and stone butt plugs
What's your take? Why did this happen?
I’d previously assumed it was groupthink driven by economic policymakers but looking at the graph of visas being issued throughout the lockdowns maybe it was simply bureaucratic incompetence because the system carried on issuing visas and then everyone arrived at once when the pandemic was over.
That certainly applies to students.
Likely also for an increased demand for health workers as a consequence of covid.
The UK had the Ukrainian and Hong Kongers migrants which presumably didn't apply so much in other anglosphere countries.
Comments
She died a few months ago. It now has two cars parked on it instead, no vegetation whatsoever - just tarmac. The biggest challenge is that a large proportion of the population have no sense of aesthetics at all.
I have remembered the song that was plagiarised, been somewhere in my head for 48 hours… ‘Love My Way’ by The Psychedelic Furs was outrageously ripped off by Electronic for the aptly titled ‘Getting Away With it”
An itch that has finally been scratched
https://youtu.be/LGD9i718kBU?si=8Fvu0lt_UjzvjNWV
Not sure that's the vote winner you think it is.
And importing people doesn't solve shortages as lump of labour is a fallacy.
The 34-year-old was arrested on Monday morning in Chelsea, south-west London on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life, the force said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg78zw7yqyo
Then once it's out of the factory it's going to be shipped down and erected on our self-build site in Dorset.
I'll leave you to guess whether we are going for a) identikit red0brick box, b) mock-Georgian Poundburyesque pastiche or c) something modern, efficient and beautiful.
Work starts on digging the foundations next week - very exciting and a bit nerve wracking.
-High immigration, not Brexit, is now his trump card. The two should be linked in the public mind, because that is the reality.
-It's a reality that the Tory press are also desperate to avoid,
-Many former Brexit voters still know nothing about the connection, because of the above.
-It takes on directly Farage's main appeal: apparent straight-forwardness and authenticity.
Boris being a fan of immigration, and Patel wanting easier migration from the subcontinent . . . both of which they made no secret of in advance even if some weren't listening . . . is why we had higher immigration.
It was a choice.
"Shortages" of labour is bullshit, since lump of labour is a fallacy. That fallacy cuts both ways. You can not say that immigration causes unemployment, as its a fallacy. You can not say for the same reason that immigration solves shortages, as its also a fallacy.
The only thing that fixes shortages is prices getting into equilibrium. Immigration is a sticking plaster that does nothing since it creates extra demand meaning more jobs are needed, which is why its a fallacy, there is no fixed lump of labour.
But these houses were always attractive, even when growing buddleia from the roof and with caved in ceilings and polystyrene false ceilings. Which is the state this house was in until 2011.
It's interesting that they're finally coming back into mainstream use.
As a further aside, an acquaintance bought a metal-framed house on an ex-USAF base. It's really hard to insure, or get people to work on it...
Kemi is so weak that "back me to beat Kemi" isn't a strong argument.
Farage is so loathsome that "back me to beat Farage" is.
Farage will well know that he would have faced exactly the same problem as Johnson, and the Tory Brexit ideologues around him ; to retran enougb workers from home is a long-term project , whereas economic
danage and recession comes tomorrow.
The houses are inevitably on the margins of pastiche but are pretty sturdily built and often quite attractive things.
The way to solve those shortages is to have some wage inflation so that firms which can't afford higher wages go bust and those bust firms no longer demand labour and the shortage is eliminated. The surviving firms should be the more productive ones that could afford the price increase.
Retraining minimum wage workers is not a long term project, its a short-term on the job one. Care workers aren't coming with an undergraduate degree, a school leaver can do it if they have a clean DBS and training is provided in-house.
Hope it all goes well. We 'finished' our extension about one year in (still some bits of decor left to do) and it was a hard year. Worth it though
Was Poitiers the high point for England in the middle ages? Must be in with a shout.
A 92-year-old care home resident in a wheelchair was sprayed in the face with synthetic pepper spray before being Tasered and hit with a baton by police officers, a jury has been told.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp8dv60dygro
He had a knife, but he was a 92 year old bloke with one leg, but got not just pepper spray, but taser and baton'ed.....he should have claimed he was protesting for JSO and they would have instead ask him how many sugars he likes in his tea.
https://bsky.app/profile/mortenmorland.bsky.social/post/3lpkcmmwji22s
THIS IS OBVIOUSLY WHAT YOU DO
https://bsky.app/profile/davidrlurie.bsky.social/post/3lpkcpyxtbc2l
Back then they wee regarded as cheap houses in a bad area. But the basic aesthetics are handsome in a way that so much modern housing - in the UK - is not
Maybe the average Barratt Home estate will age beautifully into something noble? I cannot see it. Most will get bulldozed and something else will be built, because they are sad and ugly
Not ALL UK new build housing is this bad, but far too much is
They are a cost to the owner, and a benefit to not-the-owner, so most remove them, then demand that the ones left are protected for their pleasure, at maintenance cost to the owner who did not remove theirs.
The original idea of TPOs involved I think some public funding for costs, but of course that was left out. I'm not totally familair with ins and outs as it was all done between 1950 and 1970 approximately.
The last tree that I had to have removed that was at the end of its life, having been in the family for 90 years, cost me £3000 to deal with. That was around 2016.
The arrangements could be sorted, but no Govt will easily vote money for beautifying the public realm without a VERY good reason.
PS Poundbury has its problems.
I’ve seen so many videos like this. Just so brazen. They don’t care. There’s no consequence for their actions. Cannot blame the staff for not intervening. They may end up being stabbed. I know this is July 24 but this still goes on to this day, as you saw.
Why should the rest of us play by the rules and abide by the law when people who don’t just get away with it, and this is not just a hungry guy taking for himself.
https://x.com/crimeldn/status/1813640875920236948?s=61
I will dig out some of the graphs.
https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2023/12/05/concerns-for-social-care-workforce-as-government-bars-overseas-staff-from-bringing-over-families/
“The government said that, in the year to September 2023, it issued visas to 101,000 care workers and senior care workers, and to 120,000 dependants accompanying them, about a quarter of whom were in work.“
The year of Brexit victory.
Exactly what the Leave campaign promised the Asian population of east London and elsewhere - that Brexit would make it easier for them to bring their family over, and for Indian restaurants to get the workers they need.
Promised, and delivered…
Richard Butler of the 'Furs worked with Depeche Mode on their most recent album, Memento Mori.
https://archive.org/details/inquiry-the-great-british-housing-disaster
And he has a new thing coming soon :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQc8625Y03g
How well did that turn out ?
Trump says Russia-Ukraine ceasefire discussions to start immediately but Kremlin denies timeline for talks – live
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/may/19/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-volodymyr-zelenskyy-ukraine-russia-us-politics-news-live
..."The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of. The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent. If it wasn’t, I would say so now, rather than later. Russia wants to do largescale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic “bloodbath” is over, and I agree. There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is UNLIMITED. Likewise, Ukraine can be a great beneficiary on Trade, in the process of rebuilding its Country. Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will begin immediately."
...there seemed to be little of substance to come out of the conversation, with Putin refusing to agree to a 30-day unconditional ceasefire, which had been the aim of Trump’s call. The Russian president showed no signs of backing down from his maximalist demands towards Ukraine, saying that for Russia an end to the war depended on its “root causes” being addressed. As my colleague Pjotr Sauer notes, these demands remain forcing Ukraine to “de-Nazify” and demilitarise, cutting back its armed forces, barring it from receiving western military support, and imposing sweeping limits on its sovereignty. And despite Trump’s claim of Russia’s readiness to begin peace talks, the Kremlin later said no timeline for negotiations had been discussed...
It's a tiny niche site for extremists. Don't bring it here
Students (paying hefty fees) ?
Ukrainian refugees ?
Hong Kongers with money ?
Health workers ?
Care workers ?
Asylum seekers ?
On the other hand there would certainly have been higher immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe if the UK had still been in the EU.
So is the big complaint that we had a few thousand more health and care workers from Nigeria rather than from Romania ?
It won't swing any Con or Ref zealots, but they aren't the ones he needs on side.
But he still needs a comms strategy.
Brexiteers: We don't need to be in the EU to have the good parts of trading with Europe.
Remainers: Yes we do!
Now:
Remainers: With this deal we have the good parts of trading with Europe without being in the EU!
Brexiteers: Welcome to the party...
How much he believes, or even remembers, is the unknown part.
What's your take? Why did this happen?
A big rise in the dependents of health workers, in 2020, which the government must have chosen as a way to quietly plug gaps in some sectors, with health workers themselves still being a small fraction until later the next year, as originally discussed in the debate on this last year. The suddenly rise is in "other workers" later in 2020 is really interesting. The government must have known they were in deep economic trouble with the after-effects.
It's
Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
·
38s
Hegseth: "There's a reason why our nation's most closely held secrets are contained in certain places with only access from certain people. Nobody takes that more seriously than me."
He shouldn’t even bother pandering to the zealots, they will never change.
I’ve been critical of Labour but I have felt Starmer has grown in the role this year. His comms is poor as you say and There are probably plotters wanting to replace him too.
Mobile posting problems again, unfortunately.
Starmer's EU deal is, indeed, a piece of excrement. He succeeded in fooling me because i was blind. It's bad, possibly terrible
He didn't even get e-gates. Fuck him, let Reform destroy him and his party, forever
And the same principle goes for most of the other sectors that were reporting "shortages". On the job training happens on the job, not over a "long term".
It takes a "long term" to do stuff that requires a university degree that is specifically for your career (as opposed to any degree being accepted). It does not take a "long term" to train for minimum wage work, which is precisely why employers are happy to accept anyone who'll take minimum wage regardless of their training or qualifications.
I thought it seemed a little unlike you.
Likely also for an increased demand for health workers as a consequence of covid.
The UK had the Ukrainian and Hong Kongers migrants which presumably didn't apply so much in other anglosphere countries.