One of life's small daily pleasures is to able to tell Siri to switch off all the lights when I go to bed. It always feels very satisfying for some strange reason.
Hopefully not Siri Dahl
Is that a dish made with lentils?
I made it for my wife once. Thought she’d like it.
What a mistake that was !!
Over salted baby food she’d worked all day and I served her that !!
Twenty years ago I had a paneer dahl in Sparkhill which still stands as the best vegetarian dish I've ever had. Proper authentic place. Not only did you have to get the wine at the corner shop, they wouldn't even handle the used bottles and you had to put them in the bin yourself.
If you ever end up in Glasgow - give "Ranjits Kitchen" a try. Basic premise is "Mums cooking, in a tiny restaurant". Absolutely nothing fancy, pretentious, difficult. No wine menu, nout. Though their salt lassi are great.
The smartphones and tablets are making people have sex less. At least 50% less. I bet most of you have sex less often than half what you did 10-15 years ago. That's why we have less babies.
Reading PB is what makes people have less sex. I bet most of you would be having sex right now if you weren’t reading this.
Sadly the wife’s asleep, and still getting over a big, so pb it is.
The smartphones and tablets are making people have sex less. At least 50% less. I bet most of you have sex less often than half what you did 10-15 years ago. That's why we have less babies.
Reading PB is what makes people have less sex. I bet most of you would be having sex right now if you weren’t reading this.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Wrong
There are multiple ways to achieve growth without importing labour.
Investing in productivity is one way. Another is moving the economy towards higher paid, higher productivity industries that already exist.
Cheap importer labour is the cheap boiled sweets of economics - feels good at first. Terrible as a long term diet.
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
In practice, yes.
In practice growing the economy with minimum wage labour deflates productivity and worsens our economy per capita.
Growth needs to be per capita or it is meaningless.
That's not an anti-immigration argument, we should maximise skilled migration to supplement our skills for the same reason as to why we have universal education.
Immigration also increases per capita wealth. Critically it increases the wealth of the average non-immigrant for reasons @Eabhal and have mentioned above. It obviously increases overall wealth too, and that's also important.
No, it does not. Lump of labour is a fallacy and per capita, it is neither beneficial nor worsening by itself on its own right.
Boosting skills allows us to have a more talented, educated and skilled workforce that improves our economy. Bringing in people to do minimum wage, unskilled works just deflates our education it does not improve it.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
No, you're missing the point. People don't need to aspire to these things. If they want these things, great. If they want them but can't achieve them, that's where politics and policies should come in. If they don't want them, then that's their choice.
People are individuals, with their own hopes and aims and desires. We are not all programmed to equally want marriage and kids. In modern life, there are more choices than there were 40, 50, 60 years ago. People are free to have other aspirations or goals.
So I haven't posted here in a long time because life... got extremely busy. BUT, I was looking at polling that was putting the Greens as potential Official Opposition and I remembered that on election day - I literally said that as a leftist who didn't vote Labour that I was very happy with the result and saw a bright future for the Greens. Now, even I didn't quite imagine a future THIS bright for the Greens (somewhat spoiled by the majorities predicted for Reform), but still, I thought I'd tag back in the relevant article I wrote way back when to see what people think now...
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Wrong
There are multiple ways to achieve growth without importing labour.
Investing in productivity is one way. Another is moving the economy towards higher paid, higher productivity industries that already exist.
Cheap importer labour is the cheap boiled sweets of economics - feels good at first. Terrible as a long term diet.
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
In practice, yes.
In practice growing the economy with minimum wage labour deflates productivity and worsens our economy per capita.
Growth needs to be per capita or it is meaningless.
That's not an anti-immigration argument, we should maximise skilled migration to supplement our skills for the same reason as to why we have universal education.
“One of Britain's most distinguished scientists, Prof Sir Paul Nurse, says the government is "shooting itself in the foot" with its visa system for science researchers.”
Perhaps the NHS surcharge would be less of a problem if we paid postdocs more than £35k.
Alternatively, universities are welcome to stump up the surety and the surcharge. As I believe NHS trusts do.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Wrong
There are multiple ways to achieve growth without importing labour.
Investing in productivity is one way. Another is moving the economy towards higher paid, higher productivity industries that already exist.
Cheap importer labour is the cheap boiled sweets of economics - feels good at first. Terrible as a long term diet.
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
In practice, yes.
In practice growing the economy with minimum wage labour deflates productivity and worsens our economy per capita.
Growth needs to be per capita or it is meaningless.
That's not an anti-immigration argument, we should maximise skilled migration to supplement our skills for the same reason as to why we have universal education.
“One of Britain's most distinguished scientists, Prof Sir Paul Nurse, says the government is "shooting itself in the foot" with its visa system for science researchers.”
Perhaps the NHS surcharge would be less of a problem if we paid postdocs more than £35k.
Alternatively, universities are welcome to stump up the surety and the surcharge. As I believe NHS trusts do.
Having said that, if Labour are throwing money around, getting rid of the anachronistic NHS surcharge for everyone makes sense.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
No, you're missing the point. People don't need to aspire to these things. If they want these things, great. If they want them but can't achieve them, that's where politics and policies should come in. If they don't want them, then that's their choice.
People are individuals, with their own hopes and aims and desires. We are not all programmed to equally want marriage and kids. In modern life, there are more choices than there were 40, 50, 60 years ago. People are free to have other aspirations or goals.
Given our 1.4 fertility rate they do, otherwise younger people will be having to pay more and more tax to fund an ageing population.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
No, you're missing the point. People don't need to aspire to these things. If they want these things, great. If they want them but can't achieve them, that's where politics and policies should come in. If they don't want them, then that's their choice.
People are individuals, with their own hopes and aims and desires. We are not all programmed to equally want marriage and kids. In modern life, there are more choices than there were 40, 50, 60 years ago. People are free to have other aspirations or goals.
Given our 1.4 fertility rate they do, otherwise younger people will be having to pay more and more tax to fund an ageing population.
Nobody makes individual decisions of that importance based on collective impacts or suppositions like that. "I'm having a kid to help reduce the burden on a future aging population". "I'm raising a family to save me paying less tax in 30 years". These aren't the equations people go through when deciding whether they want children or not. Even if they were I'm not sure they're particularly conducive to good parenting.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
No, you're missing the point. People don't need to aspire to these things. If they want these things, great. If they want them but can't achieve them, that's where politics and policies should come in. If they don't want them, then that's their choice.
People are individuals, with their own hopes and aims and desires. We are not all programmed to equally want marriage and kids. In modern life, there are more choices than there were 40, 50, 60 years ago. People are free to have other aspirations or goals.
Given our 1.4 fertility rate they do, otherwise younger people will be having to pay more and more tax to fund an ageing population.
Nobody makes individual decisions of that importance based on collective impacts or suppositions like that. "I'm having a kid to help reduce the burden on a future aging population". "I'm raising a family to save me paying less tax in 30 years". These aren't the equations people go through when deciding whether they want children or not. Even if they were I'm not sure they're particularly conducive to good parenting.
They should be directing government policy though which needs to be more pro family, and increasing child benefit for all parents eligible not just those on UC and supporting marriage. Even if we don't go down the ban abortion, ban divorce, ban women of child bearing age having full time careers, ban contraception route.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Wrong
There are multiple ways to achieve growth without importing labour.
Investing in productivity is one way. Another is moving the economy towards higher paid, higher productivity industries that already exist.
Cheap importer labour is the cheap boiled sweets of economics - feels good at first. Terrible as a long term diet.
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
In practice, yes.
In practice growing the economy with minimum wage labour deflates productivity and worsens our economy per capita.
Growth needs to be per capita or it is meaningless.
That's not an anti-immigration argument, we should maximise skilled migration to supplement our skills for the same reason as to why we have universal education.
“One of Britain's most distinguished scientists, Prof Sir Paul Nurse, says the government is "shooting itself in the foot" with its visa system for science researchers.”
Perhaps the NHS surcharge would be less of a problem if we paid postdocs more than £35k.
Alternatively, universities are welcome to stump up the surety and the surcharge. As I believe NHS trusts do.
£35-40k a year for a post-doc is a joke in STEM subjects. Another thing that hardly ever gets a mention when it comes to general university / knowledge economy, the PhD stipend is also incredibly poor now, it hasn't kept up with inflation at all over the past 20 years, its less than minimum wage now (~£20k a year outside London) and off the top of my head nearly something like £8-9k below what it should be if it had kept up with inflation. I have heard from loads of academics that they finding it really hard to convince talented UK students to stay on or recruit them for PhDs in STEM. Not only not kept up with inflation, but universities aren't cheap places to be anymore nor is student accomodation.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Wrong
There are multiple ways to achieve growth without importing labour.
Investing in productivity is one way. Another is moving the economy towards higher paid, higher productivity industries that already exist.
Cheap importer labour is the cheap boiled sweets of economics - feels good at first. Terrible as a long term diet.
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
In practice, yes.
In practice growing the economy with minimum wage labour deflates productivity and worsens our economy per capita.
Growth needs to be per capita or it is meaningless.
That's not an anti-immigration argument, we should maximise skilled migration to supplement our skills for the same reason as to why we have universal education.
“One of Britain's most distinguished scientists, Prof Sir Paul Nurse, says the government is "shooting itself in the foot" with its visa system for science researchers.”
Perhaps the NHS surcharge would be less of a problem if we paid postdocs more than £35k.
Alternatively, universities are welcome to stump up the surety and the surcharge. As I believe NHS trusts do.
£35-40k a year for a post-doc is a joke in STEM subjects. Another thing that hardly ever gets a mention when it comes to general university / knowledge economy, the PhD stipend is also incredibly poor now, it hasn't kept up with inflation at all over the past 20 years, its less than minimum wage now (£20k outside London) and off the top of my head nearly something like £8-9k below what it should be if it had kept up with inflation. I have heard from loads of academics that they finding it really hard to convince talented UK students to stay on or recruit them for PhDs in STEM. Not only not kept up with inflation, but universities aren't cheap places to be anymore nor is student accomodation.
I got £14001 in 2015 for my stipend. Luckily I had other sources of income.
I'm in Santa Monica now on business. I just tried a robotaxi for the first time and was extremely impressed after the initial 20 seconds of weirdness looking at the empty driver's seat from the passenger's side:
- extremely smooth acceleration and driving - excellent lane control - dealt with LA's lunatic drivers fine - no worry if the driver if drunk, high or tired - no need to make awkward conversation - no worries about tipping - half the price of an Uber (with an initial 30% discount)
Overall an excellent experience and I'm looking forward to them starting in London in the spring if the current government doesn't screw it up somehow.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Wrong
There are multiple ways to achieve growth without importing labour.
Investing in productivity is one way. Another is moving the economy towards higher paid, higher productivity industries that already exist.
Cheap importer labour is the cheap boiled sweets of economics - feels good at first. Terrible as a long term diet.
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
In practice, yes.
In practice growing the economy with minimum wage labour deflates productivity and worsens our economy per capita.
Growth needs to be per capita or it is meaningless.
That's not an anti-immigration argument, we should maximise skilled migration to supplement our skills for the same reason as to why we have universal education.
“One of Britain's most distinguished scientists, Prof Sir Paul Nurse, says the government is "shooting itself in the foot" with its visa system for science researchers.”
Perhaps the NHS surcharge would be less of a problem if we paid postdocs more than £35k.
Alternatively, universities are welcome to stump up the surety and the surcharge. As I believe NHS trusts do.
£35-40k a year for a post-doc is a joke in STEM subjects. Another thing that hardly ever gets a mention when it comes to general university / knowledge economy, the PhD stipend is also incredibly poor now, it hasn't kept up with inflation at all over the past 20 years, its less than minimum wage now (£20k outside London) and off the top of my head nearly something like £8-9k below what it should be if it had kept up with inflation. I have heard from loads of academics that they finding it really hard to convince talented UK students to stay on or recruit them for PhDs in STEM. Not only not kept up with inflation, but universities aren't cheap places to be anymore nor is student accomodation.
I got £14001 in 2015 for my stipend. Luckily I had other sources of income.
I believe I got ~£13k when I did mine 20+ years ago. I think the min was £12k at the time which wasn't loaddddss of money, but unis were still pretty cheap and post-grads didn't want for anything. It then just ticked up I think with inflation (but universities got a lot more expensive) and then lost peg to inflation about 10 years ago and now is miles behind..
I'm in Santa Monica now on business. I just tried a robotaxi for the first time and was extremely impressed after the initial 20 seconds of weirdness looking at the empty driver's seat from the passenger's side:
- extremely smooth acceleration and driving - excellent lane control - dealt with LA's lunatic drivers fine - no worry if the driver if drunk, high or tired - no need to make awkward conversation - no worries about tipping - half the price of an Uber (with an initial 30% discount)
Overall an excellent experience and I'm looking forward to them starting in London in the spring if the current government doesn't screw it up somehow.
The only type of taxi I use in London is the traditional black cab with someone who spent years learning The Knowledge.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
No, you're missing the point. People don't need to aspire to these things. If they want these things, great. If they want them but can't achieve them, that's where politics and policies should come in. If they don't want them, then that's their choice.
People are individuals, with their own hopes and aims and desires. We are not all programmed to equally want marriage and kids. In modern life, there are more choices than there were 40, 50, 60 years ago. People are free to have other aspirations or goals.
That's it in a nutshell, there's far more choice for people to live their lives now, and that won't include what kirk bosses or scripture dictates. You wouldn't find many 22 year olds doing gap years in Thailand in 1964, more likely they'd be working as a company secretary or housewife with a kid - changed days now
Surely the Conservatives should be advocating freedom of choice, and the state shouldn't be dictating what individuals do with their lives?
"Noreena Hertz We failed Gen Z on social media – we cannot fail them on AI, too If we do not want a generation whose first instinct is to confide in a machine, we as adults need to regain young people’s trust" (£)
Done a double check, its not £8k behind for PhDs, its more like £3k behind, but living costs both food but also far worse accommodation are so much higher. £8k behind inflation is post-doc money.
I'm in Santa Monica now on business. I just tried a robotaxi for the first time and was extremely impressed after the initial 20 seconds of weirdness looking at the empty driver's seat from the passenger's side:
- extremely smooth acceleration and driving - excellent lane control - dealt with LA's lunatic drivers fine - no worry if the driver if drunk, high or tired - no need to make awkward conversation - no worries about tipping - half the price of an Uber (with an initial 30% discount)
Overall an excellent experience and I'm looking forward to them starting in London in the spring if the current government doesn't screw it up somehow.
The only type of taxi I use in London is the traditional black cab with someone who spent years learning The Knowledge.
Presumably you also eat at Wimpy's, use rotary phones, fax machines and wrote that on a Commodore 64?
Done a double check, its not £8k behind for PhDs, its more like £3k behind, but living costs both food but also far worse accommodation are so much higher. £8k behind inflation is post-doc money.
By comparison, minimum wage was ~£4 per hour, now its over £12 per hour.
Done a double check, its not £8k behind for PhDs, its more like £3k behind, but living costs both food but also far worse accommodation are so much higher. £8k behind inflation is post-doc money.
By comparison, minimum wage was ~£4 per hour, now its over £12 per hour.
First minimum wage, 1998, was £3.60. This is £7.05 in today's money per BoE inflation calculator.
The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.
So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.
Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.
Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.
It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.
Which is where most Greens now come from.
The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.
Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.
I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.
Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…
Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.
They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.
I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.
Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard. Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.
Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.
I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.
But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.
Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.
Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.
I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.
Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.
The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.
I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.
If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.
Which is why per-capita GDP would be a more useful headline measure, and therefore target.
Per capita GDP also increases with immigration, albeit not by much, because immigrants are doing the menial jobs and allowing people already here to go up the food chain. Immigration also improves productivity which eventually translates into higher GDP both per capita and total. Total GDP matters because that's how we afford public services etc
Even more simple - only 34 million out of 69 million people in the UK are in work. Immigrants are much more likely to be working age, so they will almost certainly make a significant contribution to GDP per capita. However, immigration tends not to improve labour productivity, which is output per hour worked, and tends to to be suppressed when business/government can depend on cheap labour rather than investment (including training/education). It improves output only.*
GDP only matters to the fiscal position if you are taxing that output. Indeed, the complicated reason that Labour ended up with more cash than expected is because the bits of the economy we tax are expected to grow faster than expected - overall GDP was revised downward over the medium-term.
*there are edge cases where a minimum-wage carer might allow a higher productivity worker to go back into work rather than care for a relative.
Excellent points. It's a pretty stark choice. If you want more growth, better lifestyles, better healthcare etc, managed immigration is the practical way to achieve it. If you don't like immigration because of societal cohesion and so on, you are are in practice committing to relative decline.
The alternative to make a pretty significant investment in the people who already live here. More spending on education and early years, government capital spending in areas with low productivity (or tax rates that make business investment in those areas more attractive), signal to business that the era of cheap labour is over (minimum wage is one, assuming low immigration allows you sustain full employment), measures to increase the fertility rate to 2.1 for a self-sustaining population.
You'll note that this is a lot of spending/tax cuts not for pensioners in the SE of England. So immigration it is.
With reference to your self-sustaining figure of 2.1, the current England and Wales fertility rate is at a record low of 1.41, and an even lower 1.25 in Scotland. By contrast in 2010 it was 1.9 and 1.7 in 2017.
That's what you get when too many families are fearful of financial insecurity, not least when you specifically force into poverty low income benefit-dependent families who have the temerity to have more than 2 children, even when most of those families are in work.
I'd love to agree - but my understanding is that the collapse in the fertility rate is almost entirely to do with more women having other stuff to do other than have kids (as a result of better employment opportunities), and teen pregnancy falling significantly. If women do decide to have kids, the window for having more than two is very small.
That's why you get counter-intuitive results like housing not being a big issue - if you can afford a big flat/house, it's likely you earn a good salary, and therefore the opportunity cost of having kids (travel etc) is much higher. This is a theme not just in the UK, but across the world.
I agree with a lot of this
I cannot overstate how much women and couples are taking less tradtional choices over their lives throughout their 20s and 30s, and in many cases a lot of people getting into late 30s and end up not wanting to have kids. Sometimes after spending a year or two abroad travelling, or focusing more on developing their career, and other times they simply don't want to.
I think this is being undersold as many on the forum think the reasons for people not wanting to have kids is purely economic - it's not. It seems particularly prevalent amongst higher earners/university educated
People seem bemused that other people have realised that, fuck, it isn't actually the 60's and you're not foreced to have to go down the dank old man pub/social club on a Friday night, meet someone at 18, marry them at 19, have your 2.4 children by your early 20's and then spend the rest of your 50 years of married life together "for the kids" hating each other bitterly whilst you scrape together enough from your awful job down the factory to pay off the mortgage on your mouldy 3 bedroom semi all because that's what you are expected to do.
People have options, opportunities, and have found that, hey, I *don't* actually need to just churn out the next generation because that's all there is to do with this life.
Well even if they want more fun in their 20s they should certainly be starting to think of having a family in their 30s and try and find someone to marry
No, you're missing the point. People don't need to aspire to these things. If they want these things, great. If they want them but can't achieve them, that's where politics and policies should come in. If they don't want them, then that's their choice.
People are individuals, with their own hopes and aims and desires. We are not all programmed to equally want marriage and kids. In modern life, there are more choices than there were 40, 50, 60 years ago. People are free to have other aspirations or goals.
Given our 1.4 fertility rate they do, otherwise younger people will be having to pay more and more tax to fund an ageing population.
Not a great sell though, is it? 'Have more kids or we will tax you more so that the current older generation can keep getting a pension at 66 and when you get to state pension age it'll be 68*, and keep paying down your student debt for as long as it takes'
I know some very intelligent people (moreso than me) who don't want kids. That's their choice. For others who don't have kids, they maybe can't. The wrong thing to do would be to judge or force them, everyone pays taxes which contribute to the education system, whether they have kids or not.
I don't think the reason the fertility rate has dropped below 1.5 is due to the lack of God in people's lives. Looking at my parents generation, a lot more women now have full time jobs than 40/50 years ago. I think that's a good thing
Comments
Boosting skills allows us to have a more talented, educated and skilled workforce that improves our economy. Bringing in people to do minimum wage, unskilled works just deflates our education it does not improve it.
Education, education, education is key.
People are individuals, with their own hopes and aims and desires. We are not all programmed to equally want marriage and kids. In modern life, there are more choices than there were 40, 50, 60 years ago. People are free to have other aspirations or goals.
Alternatively, universities are welcome to stump up the surety and the surcharge. As I believe NHS trusts do.
https://x.com/UnderSecPD/status/1997375690115563591
In Europe you can refer to Americans as pigs, but not convicted rapists
- extremely smooth acceleration and driving
- excellent lane control
- dealt with LA's lunatic drivers fine
- no worry if the driver if drunk, high or tired
- no need to make awkward conversation
- no worries about tipping
- half the price of an Uber (with an initial 30% discount)
Overall an excellent experience and I'm looking forward to them starting in London in the spring if the current government doesn't screw it up somehow.
Surely the Conservatives should be advocating freedom of choice, and the state shouldn't be dictating what individuals do with their lives?
We failed Gen Z on social media – we cannot fail them on AI, too
If we do not want a generation whose first instinct is to confide in a machine, we as adults need to regain young people’s trust" (£)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/06/we-failed-gen-z-on-social-media-we-cannot-fail-them-on-ai/
I know some very intelligent people (moreso than me) who don't want kids. That's their choice. For others who don't have kids, they maybe can't. The wrong thing to do would be to judge or force them, everyone pays taxes which contribute to the education system, whether they have kids or not.
I don't think the reason the fertility rate has dropped below 1.5 is due to the lack of God in people's lives. Looking at my parents generation, a lot more women now have full time jobs than 40/50 years ago. I think that's a good thing
*minimum, more likely 70 or means tested
hoursminutes do we think England will last in todays play?But you probably do want an NHS account!
"Beware of extrapolation from small datasets"