One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
With our ballooning surplus and endlessly overflowing national coffers, I'm ever so grateful they've found a way to finally spend some of our excess cash.
The two child cap is basically ideological. We can't have all those lower classes breeding..... Instead we are importing populations of unknown provenance and (ideologically) we don't like that either.
Politics has a way of producing the worst possible outcomes.
So removing the two child cap would encourage lower class immigrants to breed more.
An even worse possible outcome.
The immediate political elephant trap is nothing to do with encouraging breeding but rather the already bred. No doubt Nigel Farage has a crack team of Reform economists working out precisely how much will go immediately to the wrong sort of families simply because they already have more children.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Increasingly though the right does intend "remigration" and not just of illegal immigrants, so does intend to turn the clock back.
No, the right doesn’t, the far right does and only a small minority
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Increasingly though the right does intend "remigration" and not just of illegal immigrants, so does intend to turn the clock back.
I won't be voting for it. It's up to the rest of the political class who inflicted the past upon this country to work out how best to prevent it.
Very inadequate edition of Newsnight last night. First its budget was cut, and now it's time has been cut. Most of the reporting has gone, and presenters have been imported from five live. As one might expect, the results are that the tone of the programme ismoving towards banal, rushed infotainment.
It is like tax, you see. Cut the BBC, defund the BBC, close down the BBC – except for the programmes I watch and the stations I listen to.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
How do you see 'the future'?
Because the vision of the likes of Robinson is *really* bleak.
What I'd like to see is a major reform of universities. I think they are a big problem when it comes to immigration.
What I suspect will happen is that Farage will win in 2029 and not a lot will change.
How do the rest stop Farage from winning? Stop the boats.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
Apologies for misnaming you. It was predictive text
An odd move by Kemi coming out against a Palestinian state. I can understand her desire to get herself noticed but this would seem a strange choice. One unlikely to be supported even by her dwindling fan base
But strongly supported by the American right who are considering donations to Reform.
Banning foreign money in British politics is now an urgent priority.
It is banned.
The question is how do you control UK companies which have a legitimate interest in the political environment but which have foreign owners.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
Trouble is, that was the modelling that underpinned Boris's immigration model.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
Do they only pay tax for benefits / services used by white people , VAT on goods bought from or served by white people. You are making a right fool of yourself.
Very inadequate edition of Newsnight last night. First its budget was cut, and now it's time has been cut. Most of the reporting has gone, and presenters have been imported from five live. As one might expect, the results are that the tone of the programme ismoving towards banal, rushed infotainment.
It is like tax, you see. Cut the BBC, defund the BBC, close down the BBC – except for the programmes I watch and the stations I listen to.
Nothing to stop a change in funding model where people pay for the channels they want
Very inadequate edition of Newsnight last night. First its budget was cut, and now it's time has been cut. Most of the reporting has gone, and presenters have been imported from five live. Thd results are that the atmosphere is moving to banal, rushed infotainment.
And it’s neither informative or entertaining, lose lose.
Interesting interview on BBC News last night with a few of Tommy Robinson's flag wavers. They were asked why they chose to follow the several times convicted Tommy?
They said they were just ordinary working people who thought it was time that the English reclaimed their country. They were publicans and said Tommy represented the working class. When they were asked what they meant by 'The English' they preferred not to say
This is where the 'White British' shite that spread recently - including on here - is so pernicious. It's not just about Muslims; it's not just about boat people. It's about anyone who is seen as being 'different'.
The ugliness of the people on that march cannot be exaggerated. The confusion between them and the Faragists if such a confusion exists is probably a good thing. No self respecting person would want to tarnished by association with those gruesome fascists
I find it depressing that you think nobody can have a better approach to immigration than Nigel Farage. As if it’s a topic only he is allowed to talk about. It’s like saying only Putin can opine on who should run the Donbas.
Ed’s “But we've got thought-through policies about how you would do that in a humane way, unlike people like Farage and the Conservatives” is where a lot of voters in this country are - not that you’d know that from media that presents the entire country as roiling xenophobes.
Upon reading the piece, this was their old policy:
The party's manifesto says it would work with Europol and the French authorities to "stop the smuggling and trafficking gangs" behind the crossings.
So a version of 'smash the gangs' that has now been bitterly exposed because it isn't an actual policy, it's a statement of pro-European sentiment. It's a pose not a policy.
Now he says:
"We need to process the applications really quickly, deport people who have no right to be here, and if they have a right to be here, get them working so the taxpayer isn't paying for the hotels,"
But at the current grant rate, which is the highest in the known world, an acceleration of processing would result in an explosion of grants, the news of which would spread like wildfire and result in an explosion of crossings. If processing was accelerated and the grant rate brought right down (Japan only grants 2% of asylum claims ffs), it might have a beneficial effect, but he's not brave enough to say (or presumably do) that.
He says we need to deport people - why didn't anyone else think of that? The law allows endless legal challenges to deportations. He doesn't mention any change to the law to end these bottomless challenges, so his allusion to deportations is utterly hollow.
He is laughably off the pace in every regard. And the only reason this adjustment in tone is happening at all is because the Lib Dems are soggy centrists, so they have to respond to shifts in the Overton window, by moving right but saying 'we would do it in a *nice* way'. They have no principles whatsoever than being a blander version of the flavour of the month.
With our ballooning surplus and endlessly overflowing national coffers, I'm ever so grateful they've found a way to finally spend some of our excess cash.
The two child cap is basically ideological. We can't have all those lower classes breeding..... Instead we are importing populations of unknown provenance and (ideologically) we don't like that either.
Politics has a way of producing the worst possible outcomes.
So removing the two child cap would encourage lower class immigrants to breed more.
An even worse possible outcome.
The immediate political elephant trap is nothing to do with encouraging breeding but rather the already bred. No doubt Nigel Farage has a crack team of Reform economists working out precisely how much will go immediately to the wrong sort of families simply because they already have more children.
Indeed.
And it wont just be theoretical either.
There will be endless examples of real life families in the media.
I think the best "hope" for the Tories is for Labour turn in on each other over the public finances. The Tories need to present themselves as the only party that can take the tough decisions.
It might be that we have to go through a Reform government before the Conservatives look electable again.
Interesting interview on BBC News last night with a few of Tommy Robinson's flag wavers. They were asked why they chose to follow the several times convicted Tommy?
They said they were just ordinary working people who thought it was time that the English reclaimed their country. They were publicans and said Tommy represented the working class. When they were asked what they meant by 'The English' they preferred not to say
This is where the 'White British' shite that spread recently - including on here - is so pernicious. It's not just about Muslims; it's not just about boat people. It's about anyone who is seen as being 'different'.
The narrative seems to be we’re not providing for our own because the government’s resources are being devoted to illegal migrants arriving on boats. It needs to be dismantled. But not sure how.
Some falsehoods are so deeply embedded in the psyche that they are almost impossible to dismantle. Especially when cynical politicians and breathless commentators hype them up.
In the good old days, the wiser older members of the pack would have taken such people to one side, warned them about lying and kicked them out into the snow for a repeat offence. Now we elevate them.
It’s partly the fault of successive governments failing to educate or inform the public. Or even try to do so.
The numbers who appear to believe that “spending on migrants”, overseas aid, and MPs’ expenses are among the top three items of government expenditure are utterly bonkers.
But then you consider just how little ministers do to explain the realities of our finances (probably because they too realise that emotion trumps reason), then it’s not entirely surprising. Even Thatcher, who was quite good at getting across the idea that we can’t in the long run spend more than we earn, didn’t really educate the public - and played fast and loose with asset sales to boost current expenditure for tactical rather than sound financial reasons.
I wonder what proportion of the electorate have even a vaguely accurate grasp of the nation’s finances ?
With our ballooning surplus and endlessly overflowing national coffers, I'm ever so grateful they've found a way to finally spend some of our excess cash.
The two child cap is basically ideological. We can't have all those lower classes breeding..... Instead we are importing populations of unknown provenance and (ideologically) we don't like that either.
Politics has a way of producing the worst possible outcomes.
So removing the two child cap would encourage lower class immigrants to breed more.
An even worse possible outcome.
The immediate political elephant trap is nothing to do with encouraging breeding but rather the already bred. No doubt Nigel Farage has a crack team of Reform economists working out precisely how much will go immediately to the wrong sort of families simply because they already have more children.
Indeed.
And it wont just be theoretical either.
There will be endless examples of real life families in the media.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
Utter bollox given we see the results of uncontrolled immigration. Other countries manage to have a sensible immigration system where they decide who gets in under what conditions. Taking every tom , dick and Harry regardless of legality, skills , etc is madness and we are seeing the results of it now and it will get worse due to the incompetent cowardly do gooders running the country.
The inaugural finals of the UK Excel Championship have come and gone, and there is now one spreadsheet wrangler to rule them all, at least in the United Kingdom.
The winner is self-proclaimed Excel enthusiast Ha Dang, a qualified accountant working for a Leeds-based company. The victory means that Dang will head to Las Vegas this December to represent the UK in the finals of the Microsoft Excel World Championship. https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/uk_excel_champ_crowned/
Interesting interview on BBC News last night with a few of Tommy Robinson's flag wavers. They were asked why they chose to follow the several times convicted Tommy?
They said they were just ordinary working people who thought it was time that the English reclaimed their country. They were publicans and said Tommy represented the working class. When they were asked what they meant by 'The English' they preferred not to say
This is where the 'White British' shite that spread recently - including on here - is so pernicious. It's not just about Muslims; it's not just about boat people. It's about anyone who is seen as being 'different'.
The ugliness of the people on that march cannot be exaggerated. The confusion between them and the Faragists if such a confusion exists is probably a good thing. No self respecting person would want to tarnished by association with those gruesome fascists
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
Stop being immature.
I'm an advocate of controlled and planned for migration.
That requires an acceptance that all immigrants bring pressures on services, infrastructure, housing and the environment.
An odd move by Kemi coming out against a Palestinian state. I can understand her desire to get herself noticed but this would seem a strange choice. One unlikely to be supported even by her dwindling fan base
But strongly supported by the American right who are considering donations to Reform.
Banning foreign money in British politics is now an urgent priority.
With our ballooning surplus and endlessly overflowing national coffers, I'm ever so grateful they've found a way to finally spend some of our excess cash.
The two child cap is basically ideological. We can't have all those lower classes breeding..... Instead we are importing populations of unknown provenance and (ideologically) we don't like that either.
Politics has a way of producing the worst possible outcomes.
So removing the two child cap would encourage lower class immigrants to breed more.
An even worse possible outcome.
The immediate political elephant trap is nothing to do with encouraging breeding but rather the already bred. No doubt Nigel Farage has a crack team of Reform economists working out precisely how much will go immediately to the wrong sort of families simply because they already have more children.
Indeed.
And it wont just be theoretical either.
There will be endless examples of real life families in the media.
Good news for the Tories. Lifeline actually.
Is Reform UK still supporting this change? A Farage error, surely.
Interesting interview on BBC News last night with a few of Tommy Robinson's flag wavers. They were asked why they chose to follow the several times convicted Tommy?
They said they were just ordinary working people who thought it was time that the English reclaimed their country. They were publicans and said Tommy represented the working class. When they were asked what they meant by 'The English' they preferred not to say
This is where the 'White British' shite that spread recently - including on here - is so pernicious. It's not just about Muslims; it's not just about boat people. It's about anyone who is seen as being 'different'.
The narrative seems to be we’re not providing for our own because the government’s resources are being devoted to illegal migrants arriving on boats. It needs to be dismantled. But not sure how.
Some falsehoods are so deeply embedded in the psyche that they are almost impossible to dismantle. Especially when cynical politicians and breathless commentators hype them up.
In the good old days, the wiser older members of the pack would have taken such people to one side, warned them about lying and kicked them out into the snow for a repeat offence. Now we elevate them.
It’s partly the fault of successive governments failing to educate or inform the public. Or even try to do so.
The numbers who appear to believe that “spending on migrants”, overseas aid, and MPs’ expenses are among the top three items of government expenditure are utterly bonkers.
But then you consider just how little ministers do to explain the realities of our finances (probably because they too realise that emotion trumps reason), then it’s not entirely surprising. Even Thatcher, who was quite good at getting across the idea that we can’t in the long run spend more than we earn, didn’t really educate the public - and played fast and loose with asset sales to boost current expenditure for tactical rather than sound financial reasons.
I wonder what proportion of the electorate have even a vaguely accurate grasp of the nation’s finances ?
Also- any politician who tries to explain... anything really... gets gonged off the stage before they have begun. Doing it properly takes more than a three word slogan, and doing it improperly gets heckled as "talking Britain down".
Interesting interview on BBC News last night with a few of Tommy Robinson's flag wavers being asked why they chose to follow the several times convicted Tommy? They said they were just ordinary working people who thought it was time that the English reclaimed their country. They were publicans and said Tommy represented the working class. When they were asked what they meant by 'The English' they preferred not to say
Sir Trevor Phillips of Sky who joined the protests to gauge opinion said he was really surprised just how many quite ordinary people were ar the March who reject Tommy Robinson and all he stands for but they simply felt ignored and found this March the best way to protest
It is a mistake the left are making, and continue to make, that the 150,000 demonstrators are far right and as long as the left continue this the stronger Reform will grow
The far right is the left’s fault exhibit 3,572.
I’m going to create a hashtag for future PB usage, so we can track the phenomenon. #FRITLF
But it’s pretty close to a truism
If the government doesn’t address (or counter) the concerns of the population they will turn to someone who promises them a solution.
The inaugural finals of the UK Excel Championship have come and gone, and there is now one spreadsheet wrangler to rule them all, at least in the United Kingdom.
The winner is self-proclaimed Excel enthusiast Ha Dang, a qualified accountant working for a Leeds-based company. The victory means that Dang will head to Las Vegas this December to represent the UK in the finals of the Microsoft Excel World Championship. https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/uk_excel_champ_crowned/
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
Trouble is, that was the modelling that underpinned Boris's immigration model.
And we know how that ended up.
No, it wasn’t.
The real issue is that cheap labour has been used to try and control prices.
At first this worked quite well - and still works in some sectors. Do the maths on Deliveroo and work out how much one of their e-bikers takes home at the end of the day. Spoiler - less than minimum wage.
So we get the semi-demi-racist “British people won’t work hard” - a kind of inverted Oriental Lassitude. What that actually means is that for a number of years, jobs like that don’t pay enough. You are better off on benefits. Strangely, given the choice of more money for less work…
The slight problem is that it doesn’t take the immigrants long to work out that being a Deliveroo rider sucks. So they leave and try and do something else. So you need a replacement…
Immigration became the Cheap Boiled Sweets of the labour market. Instead of investing in productivity, pile in some cheaper labour. The Diet Will Start On Monday.
Interesting interview on BBC News last night with a few of Tommy Robinson's flag wavers. They were asked why they chose to follow the several times convicted Tommy?
They said they were just ordinary working people who thought it was time that the English reclaimed their country. They were publicans and said Tommy represented the working class. When they were asked what they meant by 'The English' they preferred not to say
This is where the 'White British' shite that spread recently - including on here - is so pernicious. It's not just about Muslims; it's not just about boat people. It's about anyone who is seen as being 'different'.
The ugliness of the people on that march cannot be exaggerated. The confusion between them and the Faragists if such a confusion exists is probably a good thing. No self respecting person would want to tarnished by association with those gruesome fascists
What did I say about sneering condescension?
Is it a bit like calling the anti Palestine kids being slaughtered marches 'Hamas'?
Interesting interview on BBC News last night with a few of Tommy Robinson's flag wavers. They were asked why they chose to follow the several times convicted Tommy?
They said they were just ordinary working people who thought it was time that the English reclaimed their country. They were publicans and said Tommy represented the working class. When they were asked what they meant by 'The English' they preferred not to say
This is where the 'White British' shite that spread recently - including on here - is so pernicious. It's not just about Muslims; it's not just about boat people. It's about anyone who is seen as being 'different'.
The ugliness of the people on that march cannot be exaggerated. The confusion between them and the Faragists if such a confusion exists is probably a good thing. No self respecting person would want to tarnished by association with those gruesome fascists
Interesting interview on BBC News last night with a few of Tommy Robinson's flag wavers. They were asked why they chose to follow the several times convicted Tommy?
They said they were just ordinary working people who thought it was time that the English reclaimed their country. They were publicans and said Tommy represented the working class. When they were asked what they meant by 'The English' they preferred not to say
This is where the 'White British' shite that spread recently - including on here - is so pernicious. It's not just about Muslims; it's not just about boat people. It's about anyone who is seen as being 'different'.
The ugliness of the people on that march cannot be exaggerated. The confusion between them and the Faragists if such a confusion exists is probably a good thing. No self respecting person would want to tarnished by association with those gruesome fascists
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
Trouble is, that was the modelling that underpinned Boris's immigration model.
And we know how that ended up.
Hats off to the Conservatives over one element of the Labour immigration crisis. The boil of New Labour's EU succession nation immigration catastrophe was lanced by the Tories and net migration from the EU in the last year of the Conservative administration was a very impressive (just shy of) minus 100,000.
No queuing behind the Poles at the GP surgery now. Can we cancel Brexit?
Very inadequate edition of Newsnight last night. First its budget was cut, and now it's time has been cut. Most of the reporting has gone, and presenters have been imported from five live. As one might expect, the results are that the tone of the programme ismoving towards banal, rushed infotainment.
It is like tax, you see. Cut the BBC, defund the BBC, close down the BBC – except for the programmes I watch and the stations I listen to.
But the changes have been implemented by BBC management. They have actively CHOSEN to dumb down Newsnight. Then look at some of the programming choices they have supported.
It doesn't give confidence that they know what they are doing.
And to think, they could have been the world's pre-eminent news brand.
TL/DR; the firm that runs check-in and boarding for major European airports is under the cyber-cosh.
Looks like JLR won’t be back up and running til November. Same company that used to lecture suppliers on security and business continuity 😂😂
Seriously the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) needs to pull its finger out and move beyond writing helpful guides.
Good news on arresting those two hackers last week that had attacked Transport for London amongst other victims, but closer inspection shows the NCA was merely acting on an FBI tip-off.
Interesting interview on BBC News last night with a few of Tommy Robinson's flag wavers. They were asked why they chose to follow the several times convicted Tommy?
They said they were just ordinary working people who thought it was time that the English reclaimed their country. They were publicans and said Tommy represented the working class. When they were asked what they meant by 'The English' they preferred not to say
This is where the 'White British' shite that spread recently - including on here - is so pernicious. It's not just about Muslims; it's not just about boat people. It's about anyone who is seen as being 'different'.
The narrative seems to be we’re not providing for our own because the government’s resources are being devoted to illegal migrants arriving on boats. It needs to be dismantled. But not sure how.
Some falsehoods are so deeply embedded in the psyche that they are almost impossible to dismantle. Especially when cynical politicians and breathless commentators hype them up.
In the good old days, the wiser older members of the pack would have taken such people to one side, warned them about lying and kicked them out into the snow for a repeat offence. Now we elevate them.
It’s partly the fault of successive governments failing to educate or inform the public. Or even try to do so.
The numbers who appear to believe that “spending on migrants”, overseas aid, and MPs’ expenses are among the top three items of government expenditure are utterly bonkers.
But then you consider just how little ministers do to explain the realities of our finances (probably because they too realise that emotion trumps reason), then it’s not entirely surprising. Even Thatcher, who was quite good at getting across the idea that we can’t in the long run spend more than we earn, didn’t really educate the public - and played fast and loose with asset sales to boost current expenditure for tactical rather than sound financial reasons.
I wonder what proportion of the electorate have even a vaguely accurate grasp of the nation’s finances ?
Also- any politician who tries to explain... anything really... gets gonged off the stage before they have begun. Doing it properly takes more than a three word slogan, and doing it improperly gets heckled as "talking Britain down".
I am not sure this is right. The problem is sytematic in that the political system from all parties and government is to distort, simplify, select, straw man (if that's a verb), pivot and evade.
There is endless space in the media for politics to operate rationally, truthfully and without blame spreading. Notice that the moment senior politicians retire they mostly instantly adopt those sorts of roles; this proves they can do it; they only don't because they believe it is politically damaging. The evidence that this is so is wearing thin. We end up believing nothing.
Decades of this have brought us to the position where pollinbg indicates possible death for both the big party scorpions. Maybe it's now too late for them to learn
With our ballooning surplus and endlessly overflowing national coffers, I'm ever so grateful they've found a way to finally spend some of our excess cash.
The two child cap is basically ideological. We can't have all those lower classes breeding..... Instead we are importing populations of unknown provenance and (ideologically) we don't like that either.
Politics has a way of producing the worst possible outcomes.
So removing the two child cap would encourage lower class immigrants to breed more.
An even worse possible outcome.
The immediate political elephant trap is nothing to do with encouraging breeding but rather the already bred. No doubt Nigel Farage has a crack team of Reform economists working out precisely how much will go immediately to the wrong sort of families simply because they already have more children.
Indeed.
And it wont just be theoretical either.
There will be endless examples of real life families in the media.
Good news for the Tories. Lifeline actually.
Is Reform UK still supporting this change? A Farage error, surely.
An odd move by Kemi coming out against a Palestinian state. I can understand her desire to get herself noticed but this would seem a strange choice. One unlikely to be supported even by her dwindling fan base
But strongly supported by the American right who are considering donations to Reform.
Banning foreign money in British politics is now an urgent priority.
On checking, it's paywalled, but if it's the story reported elsewhere, that is a UK company. A subsidiary of a foreign firm, but still a UK company.
One can set up a paper subsidiary overnight though. There would need to be a definition...
This does not seem to be a paper subsidiary but an actual distributor, in the case of the company I have in mind.
Sure, but then we end up privileging businesses involving physical products. If they delivered software electronically rather than pills physically, would they be any more or less foreign?
Very inadequate edition of Newsnight last night. First its budget was cut, and now it's time has been cut. Most of the reporting has gone, and presenters have been imported from five live. As one might expect, the results are that the tone of the programme ismoving towards banal, rushed infotainment.
It is like tax, you see. Cut the BBC, defund the BBC, close down the BBC – except for the programmes I watch and the stations I listen to.
But the changes have been implemented by BBC management. They have actively CHOSEN to dumb down Newsnight. Then look at some of the programming choices they have supported.
It doesn't give confidence that they know what they are doing.
And to think, they could have been the world's pre-eminent news brand.
That is what I am getting at. The BBC has had to make cuts. You are complaining they cut the programmes you watch, instead of cutting the programmes you do not watch. And others will make the same complaints, albeit with slightly different programmes in mind.
Interesting interview on BBC News last night with a few of Tommy Robinson's flag wavers. They were asked why they chose to follow the several times convicted Tommy?
They said they were just ordinary working people who thought it was time that the English reclaimed their country. They were publicans and said Tommy represented the working class. When they were asked what they meant by 'The English' they preferred not to say
This is where the 'White British' shite that spread recently - including on here - is so pernicious. It's not just about Muslims; it's not just about boat people. It's about anyone who is seen as being 'different'.
The narrative seems to be we’re not providing for our own because the government’s resources are being devoted to illegal migrants arriving on boats. It needs to be dismantled. But not sure how.
Some falsehoods are so deeply embedded in the psyche that they are almost impossible to dismantle. Especially when cynical politicians and breathless commentators hype them up.
In the good old days, the wiser older members of the pack would have taken such people to one side, warned them about lying and kicked them out into the snow for a repeat offence. Now we elevate them.
It’s partly the fault of successive governments failing to educate or inform the public. Or even try to do so.
The numbers who appear to believe that “spending on migrants”, overseas aid, and MPs’ expenses are among the top three items of government expenditure are utterly bonkers.
But then you consider just how little ministers do to explain the realities of our finances (probably because they too realise that emotion trumps reason), then it’s not entirely surprising. Even Thatcher, who was quite good at getting across the idea that we can’t in the long run spend more than we earn, didn’t really educate the public - and played fast and loose with asset sales to boost current expenditure for tactical rather than sound financial reasons.
I wonder what proportion of the electorate have even a vaguely accurate grasp of the nation’s finances ?
Also- any politician who tries to explain... anything really... gets gonged off the stage before they have begun. Doing it properly takes more than a three word slogan, and doing it improperly gets heckled as "talking Britain down".
It’s not something you can do on the hustings. It should be a sustained effort to get the basic realities across to the electorate. And it would take years. But it should be done.
MP’s expenses, for example, are something like 0.01% of total public expenditure. For a significant part of the electorate to think they are 10,000 times more than that, is utterly corrosive of democracy.
With our ballooning surplus and endlessly overflowing national coffers, I'm ever so grateful they've found a way to finally spend some of our excess cash.
The two child cap is basically ideological. We can't have all those lower classes breeding..... Instead we are importing populations of unknown provenance and (ideologically) we don't like that either.
Politics has a way of producing the worst possible outcomes.
Yes free money for all we are rich and don't know what to do with all that cash.
It's an argument I suppose. Who do you think provides for your pension, NHS and other services. If we are going to tax the working population to provide for those not working / contributing then it would make sense to have a working population going forward to tax.
An alternative funding mechanism - borrowing for other nations' working populations - is a way forward until the amount they want for their wealth becomes too much for a declining working population which is also supporting a larger non-working population.
Quite a few of the people on the march were ugly characters, but not all. It's those outside Robinson's hardcore who are the most politically and socially significant.
If Labour decide to spend another £3.5bn on welfarism in the current circumstances, without so much of a peep at wider reform, then I’m afraid they won’t be getting my vote at the next election. This will likely not come as a huge surprise given I’ve been hugely unimpressed with them so far, but I did in fairness vote for them in 2024.
An odd move by Kemi coming out against a Palestinian state. I can understand her desire to get herself noticed but this would seem a strange choice. One unlikely to be supported even by her dwindling fan base
But strongly supported by the American right who are considering donations to Reform.
Banning foreign money in British politics is now an urgent priority.
On checking, it's paywalled, but if it's the story reported elsewhere, that is a UK company. A subsidiary of a foreign firm, but still a UK company.
One can set up a paper subsidiary overnight though. There would need to be a definition...
This does not seem to be a paper subsidiary but an actual distributor, in the case of the company I have in mind.
Sure, but then we end up privileging businesses involving physical products. If they delivered software electronically rather than pills physically, would they be any more or less foreign?
Aw, be fair. I didn't say physical distributor - the situation could apply just as much to your software delivered online, or consultancy, or indeed nothing at all in the case of your paper subsidiary. It's the control that counts, but how does one define that, by shareholding or directorship?
TL/DR; the firm that runs check-in and boarding for major European airports is under the cyber-cosh.
Looks like JLR won’t be back up and running til November. Same company that used to lecture suppliers on security and business continuity 😂😂
It must be doubtful that JLR can survive long enough to implement their panned "Copy nothing" campaign. They have already copied the standard playbook - of forcing out the CEO for a disastrous attempt to rebrand...
TL/DR; the firm that runs check-in and boarding for major European airports is under the cyber-cosh.
Looks like JLR won’t be back up and running til November. Same company that used to lecture suppliers on security and business continuity 😂😂
Seriously the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) needs to pull its finger out and move beyond writing helpful guides.
Good news on arresting those two hackers last week that had attacked Transport for London amongst other victims, but closer inspection shows the NCA was merely acting on an FBI tip-off.
With our ballooning surplus and endlessly overflowing national coffers, I'm ever so grateful they've found a way to finally spend some of our excess cash.
The two child cap is basically ideological. We can't have all those lower classes breeding..... Instead we are importing populations of unknown provenance and (ideologically) we don't like that either.
Politics has a way of producing the worst possible outcomes.
Yes free money for all we are rich and don't know what to do with all that cash.
It's an argument I suppose. Who do you think provides for your pension, NHS and other services. If we are going to tax the working population to provide for those not working / contributing then it would make sense to have a working population going forward to tax.
An alternative funding mechanism - borrowing for other nations' working populations - is a way forward until the amount they want for their wealth becomes too much for a declining working population which is also supporting a larger non-working population.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
Trouble is, that was the modelling that underpinned Boris's immigration model.
And we know how that ended up.
Hats off to the Conservatives over one element of the Labour immigration crisis. The boil of New Labour's EU succession nation immigration catastrophe was lanced by the Tories and net migration from the EU in the last year of the Conservative administration was a very impressive (just shy of) minus 100,000.
No queuing behind the Poles at the GP surgery now. Can we cancel Brexit?
Yes, over the last decade all of Iberian nurses and Greek doctors have been replaced by Keralans, Filipinos, Egyptians, Ghanaians and Zimbabweans. A lovely bunch to work with in the main, and pretty much all brought families with them for permanent settlement.
Very inadequate edition of Newsnight last night. First its budget was cut, and now it's time has been cut. Most of the reporting has gone, and presenters have been imported from five live. As one might expect, the results are that the tone of the programme ismoving towards banal, rushed infotainment.
It is like tax, you see. Cut the BBC, defund the BBC, close down the BBC – except for the programmes I watch and the stations I listen to.
But the changes have been implemented by BBC management. They have actively CHOSEN to dumb down Newsnight. Then look at some of the programming choices they have supported.
It doesn't give confidence that they know what they are doing.
And to think, they could have been the world's pre-eminent news brand.
It makes more sense when you remember that the current Director-General is, fot most of his career, a Pepsi and P&G marketing executive. Tony Hall, preceding him, was one of Birt's people.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
Stop being immature.
I'm an advocate of controlled and planned for migration.
That requires an acceptance that all immigrants bring pressures on services, infrastructure, housing and the environment.
So do the many Brits who choose not to contribute.
With our ballooning surplus and endlessly overflowing national coffers, I'm ever so grateful they've found a way to finally spend some of our excess cash.
The two child cap is basically ideological. We can't have all those lower classes breeding..... Instead we are importing populations of unknown provenance and (ideologically) we don't like that either.
Politics has a way of producing the worst possible outcomes.
Yes free money for all we are rich and don't know what to do with all that cash.
It's an argument I suppose. Who do you think provides for your pension, NHS and other services. If we are going to tax the working population to provide for those not working / contributing then it would make sense to have a working population going forward to tax.
An alternative funding mechanism - borrowing for other nations' working populations - is a way forward until the amount they want for their wealth becomes too much for a declining working population which is also supporting a larger non-working population.
Binary choice seems to be debt or immigration.
Not really we’re blessed with both
So- which price are you prepared to pay?
More tax to reduce immigration? More immigration to reduce taxes?
Or are you willing for the government to cut services that you might use to reduce the revenue the government needs?
It's a first-order approximation, I totally agree. But the dials are linked. And the toxicity of the lies that the government spends a fortune on asylum or MPs' expenses is that it implies that any pain is unnecessary.
With our ballooning surplus and endlessly overflowing national coffers, I'm ever so grateful they've found a way to finally spend some of our excess cash.
The two child cap is basically ideological. We can't have all those lower classes breeding..... Instead we are importing populations of unknown provenance and (ideologically) we don't like that either.
Politics has a way of producing the worst possible outcomes.
Yes free money for all we are rich and don't know what to do with all that cash.
It's an argument I suppose. Who do you think provides for your pension, NHS and other services. If we are going to tax the working population to provide for those not working / contributing then it would make sense to have a working population going forward to tax.
An alternative funding mechanism - borrowing for other nations' working populations - is a way forward until the amount they want for their wealth becomes too much for a declining working population which is also supporting a larger non-working population.
Binary choice seems to be debt or immigration.
Scrapping the 2 child limit on benefits may also helping the longer run by attenuating the declining fertility rate, albeit a modest effect. Remember that for the majority of people on benefits it is a temporary state and they are back in the full time workforce fairly promptly.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
Stop being immature.
I'm an advocate of controlled and planned for migration.
That requires an acceptance that all immigrants bring pressures on services, infrastructure, housing and the environment.
So do the many Brits who choose not to contribute.
This is where it all gets a bit messed up. One could make the case for an open door immigration policy combined with the abolition/major rolling back of the NHS and welfare state. Then there would be no arguments about "contributing".
TL/DR; the firm that runs check-in and boarding for major European airports is under the cyber-cosh.
Looks like JLR won’t be back up and running til November. Same company that used to lecture suppliers on security and business continuity 😂😂
Seriously the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) needs to pull its finger out and move beyond writing helpful guides.
Good news on arresting those two hackers last week that had attacked Transport for London amongst other victims, but closer inspection shows the NCA was merely acting on an FBI tip-off.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
Trouble is, that was the modelling that underpinned Boris's immigration model.
And we know how that ended up.
Hats off to the Conservatives over one element of the Labour immigration crisis. The boil of New Labour's EU succession nation immigration catastrophe was lanced by the Tories and net migration from the EU in the last year of the Conservative administration was a very impressive (just shy of) minus 100,000.
No queuing behind the Poles at the GP surgery now. Can we cancel Brexit?
Yes, over the last decade all of Iberian nurses and Greek doctors have been replaced by Keralans, Filipinos, Egyptians, Ghanaians and Zimbabweans. A lovely bunch to work with in the main, and pretty much all brought families with them for permanent settlement.
A definite Brexit benefit.
Of course there's never been any third world immigration to Leicester until the last decade.
Meanwhile the number of EU NHS workers has likely increased:
Very inadequate edition of Newsnight last night. First its budget was cut, and now it's time has been cut. Most of the reporting has gone, and presenters have been imported from five live. As one might expect, the results are that the tone of the programme ismoving towards banal, rushed infotainment.
It is like tax, you see. Cut the BBC, defund the BBC, close down the BBC – except for the programmes I watch and the stations I listen to.
But the changes have been implemented by BBC management. They have actively CHOSEN to dumb down Newsnight. Then look at some of the programming choices they have supported.
It doesn't give confidence that they know what they are doing.
And to think, they could have been the world's pre-eminent news brand.
That is what I am getting at. The BBC has had to make cuts. You are complaining they cut the programmes you watch, instead of cutting the programmes you do not watch. And others will make the same complaints, albeit with slightly different programmes in mind.
I think though that, even though they fall into the “programmes I don’t watch” category, there are plenty of light entertainment shows that the BbC should be cutting before news and documentary making etc.
For example there is a new show on the BBC where they have sent off a load of fame-whores to a tropical island and they are getting coupled up and various other rubbish. Here is the description from the internet:
“ Move over Love Island! Davina McCall promises 'carnage' on ...Davina McCall's latest BBC show is the new dating series Stranded on Honeymoon Island, which airs on BBC One. In the show, 12 singles are matched at a speed dating event, then married and immediately sent to a tropical island to live out their honeymoon together, fending for themselves and seeing if their relationships can survive the forces of nature and isolation. ”
Why in the name of all that is holy is the BBC spending what will be considerable sums making this programme. There are so many similar things like Love Island or Married at first sight made by the commercial stations.
The BbC doesn’t need to park their tanks on their rivals lawns to steal ratings. Leave this to ITV, C4, C5.
Just because I wouldn’t watch this it doesn’t mean I’m being unfair calling for it to be cut - it should be self evident to the powers that be in the BBC.
If the new, improved, electable Conservative Party is tacking to the right to see off Reform, is Kemi the face of it? Or should it be the fragrant Katie Lam?
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
Stop being immature.
I'm an advocate of controlled and planned for migration.
That requires an acceptance that all immigrants bring pressures on services, infrastructure, housing and the environment.
So do the many Brits who choose not to contribute.
This is where it all gets a bit messed up. One could make the case for an open door immigration policy combined with the abolition/major rolling back of the NHS and welfare state. Then there would be no arguments about "contributing".
Even in places with a much thinner welfare state, such as the USA or Queens land, a very high percentage of the medical and nursing workforce is immigrant. Universities and Silicone Valley too.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
What about the needs of the people wanting to come here or 'needing' to come here? Do you see the country as an exclusive members only club? What if one of the exclusive members wants to introduce a partner who isn't currently an exclusive member?
Morning all. The challenge for the Tories imo is activating some realism on their position and maximum potential in the next few years. They arent forming the next government. Therefore they need to work out what, at best, they can achieve. For the next GE work out the best 200 seats in the country for them - Blue Wall, big Rural in the North, rural East, Scots borders, Labour marginals with below average Reform vote, North, West and Wealthy Central London and where they don't hold them get PPCs in right now and work the arse off them relentlessly. Go into an election to win 90 to 150 of them and hang on. For the locals, identify the councils that can be clung on to and focus on them and throw everything at winning a mayoralty or two, in London they'll definitely lose Bexley to Ref and probably Bromley too (but remaining largest party in NOC) but there is potential for 1 to 3 pick ups further West - Westminster very likely and both Barnet and Wandsworth can be targeted, get a win ot two to celebrate and build on. Holyrood - its going to be their worst ever seat result so try and hold on to constituencies to at least have 'a base' to work from. Ettrick etc, Dumfriesshire should stay blue and I guess West Aberdeenshire, Banff, Ayr, D and G, Perthshire and Eastwood will be where the rest of the effort is entirely focused, winning the initial 2 plus any of those would be 'something' but they realistically are looking at 4th or 5th in seats Senedd - turning out the vote is key to maximising seats. They ought to get something in at least the following pairs - Monmouth/Torfaen, Clwyd (these two are the only ones where 2 seats are possible imo), Bangor/Ynys mon, Vale of Glamorgan pair, Pembrokeshire pair, Brecon pair, so working those heavily to GOTV. They should be aiming for 10 to 12 to stay in the game.
Its dirty work striving only to underachieve vs history but its all they can and should do for now. The alternative is no longer being a thing
I agree completely - Gareth's thread was good as ever but a bit thin on solutions.
The potential glittering prize is (I think) the London Mayoralty, with (I think) newly hunky Boris. He clearly still harbours ambitions, and he's not getting the leadership back just now. Reform seem to be nowhere, without an obvious candidate, and there aren't many Tories who could potentially get Reform voters back onside, and appeal to floating voters who remember London being better when he ran it. Brexit is a big weakness in London, but his opposite weaknesses on immigration and being a big sponger are less salient in London.
As well as finding elections that they can win, the Tories also need to find issues where they can win.
The economy is one. Not surprised Kemi keeps going on the economy (though it was ill-judged when she had Rayner to go on). Fiscal competence is (surprisingly) a Tory strength.
Law and Order they should contest Reform for. Come up with some clever policies. They should align themselves with the 'crush crime' initiative though that is nonpolitical so would need careful handling.
They also need to be absolutely united around some core values, even if that means losing some people.
The big, not unachievable imo goal, is to add to the seat count next election, become a Reform coalition partner but get most of the Tory agenda through, and then effect a backward takeover of Reform.
TL/DR; the firm that runs check-in and boarding for major European airports is under the cyber-cosh.
Looks like JLR won’t be back up and running til November. Same company that used to lecture suppliers on security and business continuity 😂😂
It must be doubtful that JLR can survive long enough to implement their panned "Copy nothing" campaign. They have already copied the standard playbook - of forcing out the CEO for a disastrous attempt to rebrand...
Can't we all assume Jaguar is now dead? It has gone the way of every other marque representing Coventry's finest. We can rejoice at the beauty of the E-type, the grace and pace of the MK2 and the XJ6 which for a couple of decades was the finest luxury car one could buy from anywhere in the World. Now, just a memory like Triumph, Alvis and Humber.
The Land Rover marque (although didn't the marketing boffins try to kill it off earlier in the year?) still has cache and a modern lineup. Would anyone notice if they were made in Pune or at Damson Lane?
If the new, improved, electable Conservative Party is tacking to the right to see off Reform, is Kemi the face of it? Or should it be the fragrant Katie Lam?
Increasingly it looks that we will be inauguration new Tory and Labour leaders at the 2026 party conferences.
Trump has just taken a shotgun and blown both feet off the US economy with the stroke of a pen...
H1-B fee, $100k per employee per year
As often with Trump he is kinda of right that the H1-B has been abused, it was too cheap, and a backdoor to bring in cheaper Labour, a lot from India with some dubious qualifications or just to undercut US workers. But it also is how most tech companies bring in genuine talent.
Even the likes of Google aren't going to pay $100k per year per employee for all the best of the best of the best, who were already probably not using H1-B route anyway. Canada will be rubbing his hands, as big tech can easily setup more offices in the likes of Vancouver (especially the ones like Adobe that already have big presence in Seattle).
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
Trouble is, that was the modelling that underpinned Boris's immigration model.
And we know how that ended up.
Hats off to the Conservatives over one element of the Labour immigration crisis. The boil of New Labour's EU succession nation immigration catastrophe was lanced by the Tories and net migration from the EU in the last year of the Conservative administration was a very impressive (just shy of) minus 100,000.
No queuing behind the Poles at the GP surgery now. Can we cancel Brexit?
Yes, over the last decade all of Iberian nurses and Greek doctors have been replaced by Keralans, Filipinos, Egyptians, Ghanaians and Zimbabweans. A lovely bunch to work with in the main, and pretty much all brought families with them for permanent settlement.
A definite Brexit benefit.
Of course there's never been any third world immigration to Leicester until the last decade.
Meanwhile the number of EU NHS workers has likely increased:
Very inadequate edition of Newsnight last night. First its budget was cut, and now it's time has been cut. Most of the reporting has gone, and presenters have been imported from five live. As one might expect, the results are that the tone of the programme ismoving towards banal, rushed infotainment.
It is like tax, you see. Cut the BBC, defund the BBC, close down the BBC – except for the programmes I watch and the stations I listen to.
But the changes have been implemented by BBC management. They have actively CHOSEN to dumb down Newsnight. Then look at some of the programming choices they have supported.
It doesn't give confidence that they know what they are doing.
And to think, they could have been the world's pre-eminent news brand.
That is what I am getting at. The BBC has had to make cuts. You are complaining they cut the programmes you watch, instead of cutting the programmes you do not watch. And others will make the same complaints, albeit with slightly different programmes in mind.
I think though that, even though they fall into the “programmes I don’t watch” category, there are plenty of light entertainment shows that the BbC should be cutting before news and documentary making etc.
For example there is a new show on the BBC where they have sent off a load of fame-whores to a tropical island and they are getting coupled up and various other rubbish. Here is the description from the internet:
“ Move over Love Island! Davina McCall promises 'carnage' on ...Davina McCall's latest BBC show is the new dating series Stranded on Honeymoon Island, which airs on BBC One. In the show, 12 singles are matched at a speed dating event, then married and immediately sent to a tropical island to live out their honeymoon together, fending for themselves and seeing if their relationships can survive the forces of nature and isolation. ”
Why in the name of all that is holy is the BBC spending what will be considerable sums making this programme. There are so many similar things like Love Island or Married at first sight made by the commercial stations.
The BbC doesn’t need to park their tanks on their rivals lawns to steal ratings. Leave this to ITV, C4, C5.
Just because I wouldn’t watch this it doesn’t mean I’m being unfair calling for it to be cut - it should be self evident to the powers that be in the BBC.
If the BBC opted out of popular programming, it would not be sighted in the ratings and the clamour to close down the BBC completely would be harder to resist. Remember the Reithian principles – inform, educate, and entertain, not just inform and educate.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
Stop being immature.
I'm an advocate of controlled and planned for migration.
That requires an acceptance that all immigrants bring pressures on services, infrastructure, housing and the environment.
So do the many Brits who choose not to contribute.
This is where it all gets a bit messed up. One could make the case for an open door immigration policy combined with the abolition/major rolling back of the NHS and welfare state. Then there would be no arguments about "contributing".
Even in places with a much thinner welfare state, such as the USA or Queens land, a very high percentage of the medical and nursing workforce is immigrant. Universities and Silicone Valley too.
Who said it wasn't? Indeed, I'd expect that to be the case.
Mrs Sultana is now consulting lawyers. Why is it left wing splinter groups so often allow principles to disappear out the window when personal ambition is at stake?
If the new, improved, electable Conservative Party is tacking to the right to see off Reform, is Kemi the face of it? Or should it be the fragrant Katie Lam?
Increasingly it looks that we will be inauguration new Tory and Labour leaders at the 2026 party conferences.
The Conservatives changing leaders is something I can definitely see happening. But Labour? The culture and rules make that much more difficult. Not impossible, but what's the point? Except for 'spend even more, forever' MPs aren't brimming with ideas.
Except Miliband. Whose ideas will be not so much electoral kryptonite as electoral cyanide. "Why, yes, voter, you are paying far more for energy and water. It's for the planet, you scum."
Mrs Sultana is now consulting lawyers. Why is it left wing splinter groups so often allow principles to disappear out the window when personal ambition is at stake?
Very inadequate edition of Newsnight last night. First its budget was cut, and now it's time has been cut. Most of the reporting has gone, and presenters have been imported from five live. As one might expect, the results are that the tone of the programme ismoving towards banal, rushed infotainment.
It is like tax, you see. Cut the BBC, defund the BBC, close down the BBC – except for the programmes I watch and the stations I listen to.
But the changes have been implemented by BBC management. They have actively CHOSEN to dumb down Newsnight. Then look at some of the programming choices they have supported.
It doesn't give confidence that they know what they are doing.
And to think, they could have been the world's pre-eminent news brand.
That is what I am getting at. The BBC has had to make cuts. You are complaining they cut the programmes you watch, instead of cutting the programmes you do not watch. And others will make the same complaints, albeit with slightly different programmes in mind.
I think though that, even though they fall into the “programmes I don’t watch” category, there are plenty of light entertainment shows that the BbC should be cutting before news and documentary making etc.
For example there is a new show on the BBC where they have sent off a load of fame-whores to a tropical island and they are getting coupled up and various other rubbish. Here is the description from the internet:
“ Move over Love Island! Davina McCall promises 'carnage' on ...Davina McCall's latest BBC show is the new dating series Stranded on Honeymoon Island, which airs on BBC One. In the show, 12 singles are matched at a speed dating event, then married and immediately sent to a tropical island to live out their honeymoon together, fending for themselves and seeing if their relationships can survive the forces of nature and isolation. ”
Why in the name of all that is holy is the BBC spending what will be considerable sums making this programme. There are so many similar things like Love Island or Married at first sight made by the commercial stations.
The BbC doesn’t need to park their tanks on their rivals lawns to steal ratings. Leave this to ITV, C4, C5.
Just because I wouldn’t watch this it doesn’t mean I’m being unfair calling for it to be cut - it should be self evident to the powers that be in the BBC.
If the BBC opted out of popular programming, it would not be sighted in the ratings and the clamour to close down the BBC completely would be harder to resist. Remember the Reithian principles – inform, educate, and entertain, not just inform and educate.
The problem is that the entertainment aspect has far taken over from the inform aspect. 5 Live was a 1990's project to bring the infotainment ethos to BBC radio, and now that ethos is being transferred to what is supposed to be the BBC's flagship long-form news and discussion programme.
If the new, improved, electable Conservative Party is tacking to the right to see off Reform, is Kemi the face of it? Or should it be the fragrant Katie Lam?
Increasingly it looks that we will be inauguration new Tory and Labour leaders at the 2026 party conferences.
Unfortunately, bad as the incumbents are, I wouldn't want to bet much that their successors will be upgrades. One of the problems of our times is that we're all much better at describing what we don't want than we are at describing what we do.
Right- off to the butcher's. Which may be an apt metaphor for the fate of high-profile politicians.
Morning all. The challenge for the Tories imo is activating some realism on their position and maximum potential in the next few years. They arent forming the next government. Therefore they need to work out what, at best, they can achieve. For the next GE work out the best 200 seats in the country for them - Blue Wall, big Rural in the North, rural East, Scots borders, Labour marginals with below average Reform vote, North, West and Wealthy Central London and where they don't hold them get PPCs in right now and work the arse off them relentlessly. Go into an election to win 90 to 150 of them and hang on. For the locals, identify the councils that can be clung on to and focus on them and throw everything at winning a mayoralty or two, in London they'll definitely lose Bexley to Ref and probably Bromley too (but remaining largest party in NOC) but there is potential for 1 to 3 pick ups further West - Westminster very likely and both Barnet and Wandsworth can be targeted, get a win ot two to celebrate and build on. Holyrood - its going to be their worst ever seat result so try and hold on to constituencies to at least have 'a base' to work from. Ettrick etc, Dumfriesshire should stay blue and I guess West Aberdeenshire, Banff, Ayr, D and G, Perthshire and Eastwood will be where the rest of the effort is entirely focused, winning the initial 2 plus any of those would be 'something' but they realistically are looking at 4th or 5th in seats Senedd - turning out the vote is key to maximising seats. They ought to get something in at least the following pairs - Monmouth/Torfaen, Clwyd (these two are the only ones where 2 seats are possible imo), Bangor/Ynys mon, Vale of Glamorgan pair, Pembrokeshire pair, Brecon pair, so working those heavily to GOTV. They should be aiming for 10 to 12 to stay in the game.
Its dirty work striving only to underachieve vs history but its all they can and should do for now. The alternative is no longer being a thing
I agree completely - Gareth's thread was good as ever but a bit thin on solutions.
The potential glittering prize is (I think) the London Mayoralty, with (I think) newly hunky Boris. He clearly still harbours ambitions, and he's not getting the leadership back just now. Reform seem to be nowhere, without an obvious candidate, and there aren't many Tories who could potentially get Reform voters back onside, and appeal to floating voters who remember London being better when he ran it. Brexit is a big weakness in London, but his opposite weaknesses on immigration and being a big sponger are less salient in London.
As well as finding elections that they can win, the Tories also need to find issues where they can win.
The economy is one. Not surprised Kemi keeps going on the economy (though it was ill-judged when she had Rayner to go on). Fiscal competence is (surprisingly) a Tory strength.
Law and Order they should contest Reform for. Come up with some clever policies. They should align themselves with the 'crush crime' initiative though that is nonpolitical so would need careful handling.
They also need to be absolutely united around some core values, even if that means losing some people.
The big, not unachievable imo goal, is to add to the seat count next election, become a Reform coalition partner but get most of the Tory agenda through, and then effect a backward takeover of Reform.
You should join the Conservative Party and offer your views. AFAIK Conservative policies are banned until close to 2029 which is leaving a vacuum for Nigel to fill.
Or, if I am mistaken, and the Conservatives do have policies, why are they so poor in highlighting them.
And your admiration for Boris ('newly hunky') has taken a oddly bromance turn.
Trump has just taken a shotgun and blown both feet off the US economy with the stroke of a pen...
H1-B fee, $100k per employee per year
As often with Trump he is kinda of right that the H1-B has been abused, it was too cheap, and a backdoor to bring in cheaper Labour, a lot from India with some dubious qualifications or just to undercut US workers. But it also is how most tech companies bring in genuine talent.
Even the likes of Google aren't going to pay $100k per year per employee for all the best of the best of the best, who were already probably not using H1-B route anyway.
You mock, yet as the front page of yesterday's Mail concluded Trump "bossed" the hapless Starmer with his very impressive oratory performance, and wowed the King with his hilarious raconteurship over the full two days of the State Visit.
Morning all. The challenge for the Tories imo is activating some realism on their position and maximum potential in the next few years. They arent forming the next government. Therefore they need to work out what, at best, they can achieve. For the next GE work out the best 200 seats in the country for them - Blue Wall, big Rural in the North, rural East, Scots borders, Labour marginals with below average Reform vote, North, West and Wealthy Central London and where they don't hold them get PPCs in right now and work the arse off them relentlessly. Go into an election to win 90 to 150 of them and hang on. For the locals, identify the councils that can be clung on to and focus on them and throw everything at winning a mayoralty or two, in London they'll definitely lose Bexley to Ref and probably Bromley too (but remaining largest party in NOC) but there is potential for 1 to 3 pick ups further West - Westminster very likely and both Barnet and Wandsworth can be targeted, get a win ot two to celebrate and build on. Holyrood - its going to be their worst ever seat result so try and hold on to constituencies to at least have 'a base' to work from. Ettrick etc, Dumfriesshire should stay blue and I guess West Aberdeenshire, Banff, Ayr, D and G, Perthshire and Eastwood will be where the rest of the effort is entirely focused, winning the initial 2 plus any of those would be 'something' but they realistically are looking at 4th or 5th in seats Senedd - turning out the vote is key to maximising seats. They ought to get something in at least the following pairs - Monmouth/Torfaen, Clwyd (these two are the only ones where 2 seats are possible imo), Bangor/Ynys mon, Vale of Glamorgan pair, Pembrokeshire pair, Brecon pair, so working those heavily to GOTV. They should be aiming for 10 to 12 to stay in the game.
Its dirty work striving only to underachieve vs history but its all they can and should do for now. The alternative is no longer being a thing
I agree completely - Gareth's thread was good as ever but a bit thin on solutions.
The potential glittering prize is (I think) the London Mayoralty, with (I think) newly hunky Boris. He clearly still harbours ambitions, and he's not getting the leadership back just now. Reform seem to be nowhere, without an obvious candidate, and there aren't many Tories who could potentially get Reform voters back onside, and appeal to floating voters who remember London being better when he ran it. Brexit is a big weakness in London, but his opposite weaknesses on immigration and being a big sponger are less salient in London.
As well as finding elections that they can win, the Tories also need to find issues where they can win.
The economy is one. Not surprised Kemi keeps going on the economy (though it was ill-judged when she had Rayner to go on). Fiscal competence is (surprisingly) a Tory strength.
Law and Order they should contest Reform for. Come up with some clever policies. They should align themselves with the 'crush crime' initiative though that is nonpolitical so would need careful handling.
They also need to be absolutely united around some core values, even if that means losing some people.
The big, not unachievable imo goal, is to add to the seat count next election, become a Reform coalition partner but get most of the Tory agenda through, and then effect a backward takeover of Reform.
You should join the Conservative Party and offer your views. AFAIK Conservative policies are banned until close to 2029 which is leaving a vacuum for Nigel to fill.
Or, if I am mistaken, and the Conservatives do have policies, why are they so poor in highlighting them.
And your admiration for Boris ('newly hunky') has taken a oddly bromance turn.
That was slightly tongue in cheek, but his recent holiday snaps do show him having lost about the weight of a linebacker.
I don't have an awful amount of admiration for Boris himself, but I do recognise his electoral appeal.
Morning all. The challenge for the Tories imo is activating some realism on their position and maximum potential in the next few years. They arent forming the next government. Therefore they need to work out what, at best, they can achieve. For the next GE work out the best 200 seats in the country for them - Blue Wall, big Rural in the North, rural East, Scots borders, Labour marginals with below average Reform vote, North, West and Wealthy Central London and where they don't hold them get PPCs in right now and work the arse off them relentlessly. Go into an election to win 90 to 150 of them and hang on. For the locals, identify the councils that can be clung on to and focus on them and throw everything at winning a mayoralty or two, in London they'll definitely lose Bexley to Ref and probably Bromley too (but remaining largest party in NOC) but there is potential for 1 to 3 pick ups further West - Westminster very likely and both Barnet and Wandsworth can be targeted, get a win ot two to celebrate and build on. Holyrood - its going to be their worst ever seat result so try and hold on to constituencies to at least have 'a base' to work from. Ettrick etc, Dumfriesshire should stay blue and I guess West Aberdeenshire, Banff, Ayr, D and G, Perthshire and Eastwood will be where the rest of the effort is entirely focused, winning the initial 2 plus any of those would be 'something' but they realistically are looking at 4th or 5th in seats Senedd - turning out the vote is key to maximising seats. They ought to get something in at least the following pairs - Monmouth/Torfaen, Clwyd (these two are the only ones where 2 seats are possible imo), Bangor/Ynys mon, Vale of Glamorgan pair, Pembrokeshire pair, Brecon pair, so working those heavily to GOTV. They should be aiming for 10 to 12 to stay in the game.
Its dirty work striving only to underachieve vs history but its all they can and should do for now. The alternative is no longer being a thing
I agree completely - Gareth's thread was good as ever but a bit thin on solutions.
The potential glittering prize is (I think) the London Mayoralty, with (I think) newly hunky Boris. He clearly still harbours ambitions, and he's not getting the leadership back just now. Reform seem to be nowhere, without an obvious candidate, and there aren't many Tories who could potentially get Reform voters back onside, and appeal to floating voters who remember London being better when he ran it. Brexit is a big weakness in London, but his opposite weaknesses on immigration and being a big sponger are less salient in London.
As well as finding elections that they can win, the Tories also need to find issues where they can win.
The economy is one. Not surprised Kemi keeps going on the economy (though it was ill-judged when she had Rayner to go on). Fiscal competence is (surprisingly) a Tory strength.
Law and Order they should contest Reform for. Come up with some clever policies. They should align themselves with the 'crush crime' initiative though that is nonpolitical so would need careful handling.
They also need to be absolutely united around some core values, even if that means losing some people.
The big, not unachievable imo goal, is to add to the seat count next election, become a Reform coalition partner but get most of the Tory agenda through, and then effect a backward takeover of Reform.
It was interesting, and not much commented on here, that last week there was a meeting of Tory and Reform grandees in a posh restaurant including with Boris, Truss and Farage
All was going swimmingly until Boris started to justify his Premiership when it got rather heated
However, as straws in the wind what were senior politicians doing meeting together, if not planning some future rapprochement and in time for the next GE ?
Any coming together would change the political narrative completely
Mrs Sultana is now consulting lawyers. Why is it left wing splinter groups so often allow principles to disappear out the window when personal ambition is at stake?
It is the belief that each of them is the personal guardian (appointed by the spirit of Lenin) of The Shrine Of The Tue Faith of Socialism.
This means that everyone else either agrees with you 100% or is a heretic.
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
Trouble is, that was the modelling that underpinned Boris's immigration model.
And we know how that ended up.
Hats off to the Conservatives over one element of the Labour immigration crisis. The boil of New Labour's EU succession nation immigration catastrophe was lanced by the Tories and net migration from the EU in the last year of the Conservative administration was a very impressive (just shy of) minus 100,000.
No queuing behind the Poles at the GP surgery now. Can we cancel Brexit?
Yes, over the last decade all of Iberian nurses and Greek doctors have been replaced by Keralans, Filipinos, Egyptians, Ghanaians and Zimbabweans. A lovely bunch to work with in the main, and pretty much all brought families with them for permanent settlement.
A definite Brexit benefit.
Of course there's never been any third world immigration to Leicester until the last decade.
Meanwhile the number of EU NHS workers has likely increased:
Note that the government prevents an increase in students at medical school.
The cap hasn’t increased in pace with the number employed in the NHS.
That's not quite true. Both the last government and this one have signed up to the NHS workforce plan to double medical school places*.
No funding attached of course, nor physical expansion of medical schools, nor reallocation of trained medical staff to education rather than clinical duties, nor funding for postgraduate training places etc etc.
If ever there was a case of virtue signalling...
*though judging by the applicants in last years interviews only about 10% would be "white British", the vast majority of applicants being second or third generation migrants. While some come from immigrant medical families, quite a number come from backgrounds where parents were unskilled immigrants. Perhaps Leicester is an outlier as seen to be positive about multiculturalism, and has a positive programme to widen access across SE classes, but I dont think by much.
Mrs Sultana is now consulting lawyers. Why is it left wing splinter groups so often allow principles to disappear out the window when personal ambition is at stake?
Mrs Sultana is now consulting lawyers. Why is it left wing splinter groups so often allow principles to disappear out the window when personal ambition is at stake?
Morning all. The challenge for the Tories imo is activating some realism on their position and maximum potential in the next few years. They arent forming the next government. Therefore they need to work out what, at best, they can achieve. For the next GE work out the best 200 seats in the country for them - Blue Wall, big Rural in the North, rural East, Scots borders, Labour marginals with below average Reform vote, North, West and Wealthy Central London and where they don't hold them get PPCs in right now and work the arse off them relentlessly. Go into an election to win 90 to 150 of them and hang on. For the locals, identify the councils that can be clung on to and focus on them and throw everything at winning a mayoralty or two, in London they'll definitely lose Bexley to Ref and probably Bromley too (but remaining largest party in NOC) but there is potential for 1 to 3 pick ups further West - Westminster very likely and both Barnet and Wandsworth can be targeted, get a win ot two to celebrate and build on. Holyrood - its going to be their worst ever seat result so try and hold on to constituencies to at least have 'a base' to work from. Ettrick etc, Dumfriesshire should stay blue and I guess West Aberdeenshire, Banff, Ayr, D and G, Perthshire and Eastwood will be where the rest of the effort is entirely focused, winning the initial 2 plus any of those would be 'something' but they realistically are looking at 4th or 5th in seats Senedd - turning out the vote is key to maximising seats. They ought to get something in at least the following pairs - Monmouth/Torfaen, Clwyd (these two are the only ones where 2 seats are possible imo), Bangor/Ynys mon, Vale of Glamorgan pair, Pembrokeshire pair, Brecon pair, so working those heavily to GOTV. They should be aiming for 10 to 12 to stay in the game.
Its dirty work striving only to underachieve vs history but its all they can and should do for now. The alternative is no longer being a thing
I agree completely - Gareth's thread was good as ever but a bit thin on solutions.
The potential glittering prize is (I think) the London Mayoralty, with (I think) newly hunky Boris. He clearly still harbours ambitions, and he's not getting the leadership back just now. Reform seem to be nowhere, without an obvious candidate, and there aren't many Tories who could potentially get Reform voters back onside, and appeal to floating voters who remember London being better when he ran it. Brexit is a big weakness in London, but his opposite weaknesses on immigration and being a big sponger are less salient in London.
As well as finding elections that they can win, the Tories also need to find issues where they can win.
The economy is one. Not surprised Kemi keeps going on the economy (though it was ill-judged when she had Rayner to go on). Fiscal competence is (surprisingly) a Tory strength.
Law and Order they should contest Reform for. Come up with some clever policies. They should align themselves with the 'crush crime' initiative though that is nonpolitical so would need careful handling.
They also need to be absolutely united around some core values, even if that means losing some people.
The big, not unachievable imo goal, is to add to the seat count next election, become a Reform coalition partner but get most of the Tory agenda through, and then effect a backward takeover of Reform.
It was interesting, and not much commented on here, that last week there was a meeting of Tory and Reform grandees in a posh restaurant including with Boris, Truss and Farage
All was going swimmingly until Boris started to justify his Premiership when it got rather heated
However, as straws in the wind what were senior politicians doing meeting together, if not planning some future rapprochement and in time for the next GE ?
Any coming together would change the political narrative completely
Trump has just taken a shotgun and blown both feet off the US economy with the stroke of a pen...
H1-B fee, $100k per employee per year
As often with Trump he is kinda of right that the H1-B has been abused, it was too cheap, and a backdoor to bring in cheaper Labour, a lot from India with some dubious qualifications or just to undercut US workers. But it also is how most tech companies bring in genuine talent.
Even the likes of Google aren't going to pay $100k per year per employee for all the best of the best of the best, who were already probably not using H1-B route anyway. Canada will be rubbing his hands, as big tech can easily setup more offices in the likes of Vancouver (especially the ones like Adobe that already have big presence in Seattle).
Friends of mine who fell foul of H1B quotas in the past got in on O1 visas. Perhaps an increase in applications there...
One observation on your successes for the 2010-24 government. Both gay marriage and net zero were and are controversial with the base, but not with the public at large. In the old days of big tent parties, that sort of thing was the mark of a confident, successful party, able to reach out to the wider public. Now, parties don't seem capable of that.
The big tents have collapsed here, much as they have in France, Germany, Spain. America seems to have a different pathology, where parties have drifted from the centre but the strength of the system has kept two parties in place- for now, anyway.
Question is why? Failings of the old big two? Impossibility of dealing with the times we are in by anybody? A failure of society where none of us is willing to compromise on anything?
One cheery thought to finish- five or six parties who hate each other is bad enough with a PR election. It turns FPTP into a complete lottery.
There will be many reasons. But a biggie in my mind is that t'Internet tells far too many people that there are easy solutions to the problems that face us. As an extreme example, why should we look for real solutions, when we can just chuck out the foreigners?
They do a lot of chucking out right enough, only 50,000+ in hotels and rising by the day, millions unaccounted for , but hey we have managed to swap two of them with France. Stupid people and do gooders cannot grasp that you cannot just dump millions of strangers in a country in a short time and think it will all be sweetness and light. You are biased entirely and don't want to even look at the topic given your own circumstances but you having a wife from outside the UK does not mean that it is right to allow unlimited people to flood into the country. It will end in tears for sure.
I'm not saying it is right to allow unlimited people into the country, and never have. The whole situation is a mess, and lots of people (including lawyers...) are making a lot of money out of it, whilst the public suffer.
*BUT* the talk is going far too far. Massive numbers of immigrants contribute to society, and even keep our services going. Yet it's becoming that anyone who cannot trace their Britishness back for umpteen generations is the enemy. It's not about boat people; it's about all immigrants.
We also need to remember that immigrants are people too, and someone calling for them to be drowned at sea should be put adrift into a boat in the North Sea to see how they like it.
I’m really sick of this ‘immigrants keep our services going’ guff. Our services keep going due to the contribution of ALL involved in it. Your line just diminishes the efforts of non migrants.
Not to mention that immigrants use services as well.
As well as require housing, contribute to transport congestion, add to pressure on the environment etc.
Okay. You and @Taz can only use public services that are not provided by immigrants. You will have to wait for a White British bin crew to come along to have your bins emptied; if you need A&E, you will have to wait for a White British ambulance crew, And when in hospital, you can only be treated by White British doctors and nurses. You can only get petrol from a petrol station that has White British staff, and only travel on public transport that has White British staff.
That'll go well for you.
This is very much a fait accompli.
And yes, we have to accept that what's happened has happened. We can't turn the clock back. But that doesn't mean the future isn't up for debate.
Exactly and my objection to Jessie was his ‘services are reliant on immigrants’ line as it diminishes efforts of others. It’s the same when politicians claim immigrants built Britain. Everyone did.
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
And your 'line' diminishes the work of immigrants.
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids. (**) In the case of retirees.
Trouble is, that was the modelling that underpinned Boris's immigration model.
And we know how that ended up.
Hats off to the Conservatives over one element of the Labour immigration crisis. The boil of New Labour's EU succession nation immigration catastrophe was lanced by the Tories and net migration from the EU in the last year of the Conservative administration was a very impressive (just shy of) minus 100,000.
No queuing behind the Poles at the GP surgery now. Can we cancel Brexit?
Yes, over the last decade all of Iberian nurses and Greek doctors have been replaced by Keralans, Filipinos, Egyptians, Ghanaians and Zimbabweans. A lovely bunch to work with in the main, and pretty much all brought families with them for permanent settlement.
A definite Brexit benefit.
Of course there's never been any third world immigration to Leicester until the last decade.
Meanwhile the number of EU NHS workers has likely increased:
Note that the government prevents an increase in students at medical school.
The cap hasn’t increased in pace with the number employed in the NHS.
That's not quite true. Both the last government and this one have signed up to the NHS workforce plan to double medical school places*.
No funding attached of course, nor physical expansion of medical schools, nor reallocation of trained medical staff to education rather than clinical duties, nor funding for postgraduate training places etc etc.
If ever there was a case of virtue signalling...
*though judging by the applicants in last years interviews only about 10% would be "white British", the vast majority of applicants being second or third generation migrants. While some come from immigrant medical families, quite a number come from backgrounds where parents were unskilled immigrants. Perhaps Leicester is an outlier as seen to be positive about multiculturalism, and has a positive programme to widen access across SE classes, but I dont think by much.
Has the cap on university places actually been changed - IIRC there was considerable sarcasm directed at the fact it hadn’t. Along with the absence of finance, or even planning for more trainees.
I find it depressing that you think nobody can have a better approach to immigration than Nigel Farage. As if it’s a topic only he is allowed to talk about. It’s like saying only Putin can opine on who should run the Donbas.
Ed’s “But we've got thought-through policies about how you would do that in a humane way, unlike people like Farage and the Conservatives” is where a lot of voters in this country are - not that you’d know that from media that presents the entire country as roiling xenophobes.
Upon reading the piece, this was their old policy:
The party's manifesto says it would work with Europol and the French authorities to "stop the smuggling and trafficking gangs" behind the crossings.
So a version of 'smash the gangs' that has now been bitterly exposed because it isn't an actual policy, it's a statement of pro-European sentiment. It's a pose not a policy.
Now he says:
"We need to process the applications really quickly, deport people who have no right to be here, and if they have a right to be here, get them working so the taxpayer isn't paying for the hotels,"
But at the current grant rate, which is the highest in the known world, an acceleration of processing would result in an explosion of grants, the news of which would spread like wildfire and result in an explosion of crossings. If processing was accelerated and the grant rate brought right down (Japan only grants 2% of asylum claims ffs), it might have a beneficial effect, but he's not brave enough to say (or presumably do) that.
He says we need to deport people - why didn't anyone else think of that? The law allows endless legal challenges to deportations. He doesn't mention any change to the law to end these bottomless challenges, so his allusion to deportations is utterly hollow.
He is laughably off the pace in every regard. And the only reason this adjustment in tone is happening at all is because the Lib Dems are soggy centrists, so they have to respond to shifts in the Overton window, by moving right but saying 'we would do it in a *nice* way'. They have no principles whatsoever than being a blander version of the flavour of the month.
While we don't usually agree, your last paras are why I've not considered joining the LibDems despite my dissatisfaction with Labour - the LibDem profile is subject to adjustment according to current moods, often without reallly engaging with the complexities. I'd argue that this is a major reason why they haven't benefited significantly from the collapse in major party support - everyone thinks they're quite nice some of the time, but not enough to switch votes.
The BBC is all over the shop. They keep trying and failing to attract da yuff. They get a hit show, but still stuck in the time warp where its fine to just make 6 episodes every 2-3 years. They make these bizarre decisions like hiring Wayne Rooney on big money. And then cut cheap shows like Hardtalk that is squarely in their remit.
As for Newsnight, its viewership numbers absolutely tanked when they tried to go "cool" with Evan Davis. I think they have recovered a bit, but it isn't an agenda setting programme where all the leading politicians felt they had to go on there and get a Paxo-ing, because at the time it was a key way of getting a message out to the engage public. Every so often they get a hit story, but it became quite rare even before all the cuts.
It is noticeable after Jenrick viral hit, a load of the Tories are really trying to be more engaging social media with flashy videos vs the Starmerbot (that seems stuck in social media of 2010). And politicians doing the podcast rounds, even old Uncle Vince popped up this week to do some. They clearly that is where to go these days.
Comments
I don’t object to immigration as long as it is controlled and in line with our needs
IMV it's quite simple: if you are here and are contributing, or have contributed (**), or will contribute (*), then you are absolutely 100% welcome regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality, or anything else.
After that, it gets much more complex.
(*) In the case of kids.
(**) In the case of retirees.
What I suspect will happen is that Farage will win in 2029 and not a lot will change.
How do the rest stop Farage from winning? Stop the boats.
The question is how do you control UK companies which have a legitimate interest in the political environment but which have foreign owners.
And we know how that ended up.
https://news.sky.com/story/heathrow-warns-of-delays-as-cyber-attack-disrupts-european-airports-13434407
TL/DR; the firm that runs check-in and boarding for major European airports is under the cyber-cosh.
The party's manifesto says it would work with Europol and the French authorities to "stop the smuggling and trafficking gangs" behind the crossings.
So a version of 'smash the gangs' that has now been bitterly exposed because it isn't an actual policy, it's a statement of pro-European sentiment. It's a pose not a policy.
Now he says:
"We need to process the applications really quickly, deport people who have no right to be here, and if they have a right to be here, get them working so the taxpayer isn't paying for the hotels,"
But at the current grant rate, which is the highest in the known world, an acceleration of processing would result in an explosion of grants, the news of which would spread like wildfire and result in an explosion of crossings. If processing was accelerated and the grant rate brought right down (Japan only grants 2% of asylum claims ffs), it might have a beneficial effect, but he's not brave enough to say (or presumably do) that.
He says we need to deport people - why didn't anyone else think of that? The law allows endless legal challenges to deportations. He doesn't mention any change to the law to end these bottomless challenges, so his allusion to deportations is utterly hollow.
He is laughably off the pace in every regard. And the only reason this adjustment in tone is happening at all is because the Lib Dems are soggy centrists, so they have to respond to shifts in the Overton window, by moving right but saying 'we would do it in a *nice* way'. They have no principles whatsoever than being a blander version of the flavour of the month.
It will hit outsourcing companies hardest
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/20/visa_h1b_reform/
And it wont just be theoretical either.
There will be endless examples of real life families in the media.
The numbers who appear to believe that “spending on migrants”, overseas aid, and MPs’ expenses are among the top three items of government expenditure are utterly bonkers.
But then you consider just how little ministers do to explain the realities of our finances (probably because they too realise that emotion trumps reason), then it’s not entirely surprising.
Even Thatcher, who was quite good at getting across the idea that we can’t in the long run spend more than we earn, didn’t really educate the public - and played fast and loose with asset sales to boost current expenditure for tactical rather than sound financial reasons.
I wonder what proportion of the electorate have even a vaguely accurate grasp of the nation’s finances ?
The winner is self-proclaimed Excel enthusiast Ha Dang, a qualified accountant working for a Leeds-based company. The victory means that Dang will head to Las Vegas this December to represent the UK in the finals of the Microsoft Excel World Championship.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/uk_excel_champ_crowned/
One for PB's many sports fans.
I'm an advocate of controlled and planned for migration.
That requires an acceptance that all immigrants bring pressures on services, infrastructure, housing and the environment.
If the government doesn’t address (or counter) the concerns of the population they will turn to someone who promises them a solution.
The real issue is that cheap labour has been used to try and control prices.
At first this worked quite well - and still works in some sectors. Do the maths on Deliveroo and work out how much one of their e-bikers takes home at the end of the day. Spoiler - less than minimum wage.
So we get the semi-demi-racist “British people won’t work hard” - a kind of inverted Oriental Lassitude. What that actually means is that for a number of years, jobs like that don’t pay enough. You are better off on benefits. Strangely, given the choice of more money for less work…
The slight problem is that it doesn’t take the immigrants long to work out that being a Deliveroo rider sucks. So they leave and try and do something else. So you need a replacement…
Immigration became the Cheap Boiled Sweets of the labour market. Instead of investing in productivity, pile in some cheaper labour. The Diet Will Start On Monday.
Now we have a tummy ache.
No queuing behind the Poles at the GP surgery now. Can we cancel Brexit?
It doesn't give confidence that they know what they are doing.
And to think, they could have been the world's pre-eminent news brand.
Good news on arresting those two hackers last week that had attacked Transport for London amongst other victims, but closer inspection shows the NCA was merely acting on an FBI tip-off.
London teenager accused of TfL cyber attack also faces hacking and money laundering charges in US
Thalha Jubair, 19, accused of at least 120 ‘computer network intrusions’ and extortion involving 47 US firms or organisations
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/thalha-jubair-tower-hamlets-cyber-attack-tfl-b1248660.html
There is endless space in the media for politics to operate rationally, truthfully and without blame spreading. Notice that the moment senior politicians retire they mostly instantly adopt those sorts of roles; this proves they can do it; they only don't because they believe it is politically damaging. The evidence that this is so is wearing thin. We end up believing nothing.
Decades of this have brought us to the position where pollinbg indicates possible death for both the big party scorpions. Maybe it's now too late for them to learn
It should be a sustained effort to get the basic realities across to the electorate.
And it would take years. But it should be done.
MP’s expenses, for example, are something like 0.01% of total public expenditure. For a significant part of the electorate to think they are 10,000 times more than that, is utterly corrosive of democracy.
An alternative funding mechanism - borrowing for other nations' working populations - is a way forward until the amount they want for their wealth becomes too much for a declining working population which is also supporting a larger non-working population.
Binary choice seems to be debt or immigration.
A definite Brexit benefit.
More tax to reduce immigration?
More immigration to reduce taxes?
Or are you willing for the government to cut services that you might use to reduce the revenue the government needs?
It's a first-order approximation, I totally agree. But the dials are linked. And the toxicity of the lies that the government spends a fortune on asylum or MPs' expenses is that it implies that any pain is unnecessary.
Meanwhile the number of EU NHS workers has likely increased:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7783/
Your increased numbers of NHS workers from the third world is largely driven by the increase in NHS workforce.
And is mirrored by a shortage of health workers throughout western Europe:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/14/a-ticking-time-bomb-healthcare-under-threat-across-western-europe
Do keep up!
For example there is a new show on the BBC where they have sent off a load of fame-whores to a tropical island and they are getting coupled up and various other rubbish. Here is the description from the internet:
“ Move over Love Island! Davina McCall promises 'carnage' on ...Davina McCall's latest BBC show is the new dating series Stranded on Honeymoon Island, which airs on BBC One. In the show, 12 singles are matched at a speed dating event, then married and immediately sent to a tropical island to live out their honeymoon together, fending for themselves and seeing if their relationships can survive the forces of nature and isolation. ”
Why in the name of all that is holy is the BBC spending what will be considerable sums making this programme. There are so many similar things like Love Island or Married at first sight made by the commercial stations.
The BbC doesn’t need to park their tanks on their rivals lawns to steal ratings. Leave this to ITV, C4, C5.
Just because I wouldn’t watch this it doesn’t mean I’m being unfair calling for it to be cut - it should be self evident to the powers that be in the BBC.
Why the LibDems don't publicise this instead of pandering to the waspi parasites I don't know.
Absolutely 100%
The potential glittering prize is (I think) the London Mayoralty, with (I think) newly hunky Boris. He clearly still harbours ambitions, and he's not getting the leadership back just now. Reform seem to be nowhere, without an obvious candidate, and there aren't many Tories who could potentially get Reform voters back onside, and appeal to floating voters who remember London being better when he ran it. Brexit is a big weakness in London, but his opposite weaknesses on immigration and being a big sponger are less salient in London.
As well as finding elections that they can win, the Tories also need to find issues where they can win.
The economy is one. Not surprised Kemi keeps going on the economy (though it was ill-judged when she had Rayner to go on). Fiscal competence is (surprisingly) a Tory strength.
Law and Order they should contest Reform for. Come up with some clever policies. They should align themselves with the 'crush crime' initiative though that is nonpolitical so would need careful handling.
They also need to be absolutely united around some core values, even if that means losing some people.
The big, not unachievable imo goal, is to add to the seat count next election, become a Reform coalition partner but get most of the Tory agenda through, and then effect a backward takeover of Reform.
The Land Rover marque (although didn't the marketing boffins try to kill it off earlier in the year?) still has cache and a modern lineup. Would anyone notice if they were made in Pune or at Damson Lane?
H1-B fee, $100k per employee per year
As often with Trump he is kinda of right that the H1-B has been abused, it was too cheap, and a backdoor to bring in cheaper Labour, a lot from India with some dubious qualifications or just to undercut US workers. But it also is how most tech companies bring in genuine talent.
Even the likes of Google aren't going to pay $100k per year per employee for all the best of the best of the best, who were already probably not using H1-B route anyway. Canada will be rubbing his hands, as big tech can easily setup more offices in the likes of Vancouver (especially the ones like Adobe that already have big presence in Seattle).
The cap hasn’t increased in pace with the number employed in the NHS.
Except Miliband. Whose ideas will be not so much electoral kryptonite as electoral cyanide. "Why, yes, voter, you are paying far more for energy and water. It's for the planet, you scum."
Right- off to the butcher's. Which may be an apt metaphor for the fate of high-profile politicians.
Or, if I am mistaken, and the Conservatives do have policies, why are they so poor in highlighting them.
And your admiration for Boris ('newly hunky') has taken a oddly bromance turn.
I don't have an awful amount of admiration for Boris himself, but I do recognise his electoral appeal.
All was going swimmingly until Boris started to justify his Premiership when it got rather heated
However, as straws in the wind what were senior politicians doing meeting together, if not planning some future rapprochement and in time for the next GE ?
Any coming together would change the political narrative completely
This means that everyone else either agrees with you 100% or is a heretic.
No funding attached of course, nor physical expansion of medical schools, nor reallocation of trained medical staff to education rather than clinical duties, nor funding for postgraduate training places etc etc.
If ever there was a case of virtue signalling...
*though judging by the applicants in last years interviews only about 10% would be "white British", the vast majority of applicants being second or third generation migrants. While some come from immigrant medical families, quite a number come from backgrounds where parents were unskilled immigrants. Perhaps Leicester is an outlier as seen to be positive about multiculturalism, and has a positive programme to widen access across SE classes, but I dont think by much.
As for Newsnight, its viewership numbers absolutely tanked when they tried to go "cool" with Evan Davis. I think they have recovered a bit, but it isn't an agenda setting programme where all the leading politicians felt they had to go on there and get a Paxo-ing, because at the time it was a key way of getting a message out to the engage public. Every so often they get a hit story, but it became quite rare even before all the cuts.
It is noticeable after Jenrick viral hit, a load of the Tories are really trying to be more engaging social media with flashy videos vs the Starmerbot (that seems stuck in social media of 2010). And politicians doing the podcast rounds, even old Uncle Vince popped up this week to do some. They clearly that is where to go these days.