Mailwatch(ed) Forum

And "girls" apparently.

Thin gruel there from Abbot trying to keep Tony Benn's moribund project to withdraw from the capitalist common market alive.

Suppose Labour has the evidence to show it reduced immigration and employ measures to halt asylum dingy crossings, will this satisfy Reform voters and persuade them to switch? Doubt it as Farage will have new hate movies prepared; the growth of mosques, foreigners having more babies than white English women, Asian sex predators on the rise. And it will all be Labour's fault.

The “boats” and “hotels” weren’t there as an issue 5 years ago. If they went away again, I think that would help the Government and hurt Farage. Whether fewer foreign care workers would do the same is a lot more doubtful.

The strongest argument for lower immigration is housing supply. Even if net immigration settles down at about 250,000, that’s a lot of extra homes needed just to stand still. Starmer ought to have made that argument instead of “island of strangers”.

Actually, I'm not apologizing to Tanja Bueltmann. Given the levels of net migration, how can it seriously be argued that policy has been anti-immigration?

Youngian wrote: ↑Mon May 12, 2025 12:58 pm Thin gruel there from Abbot trying to keep Tony Benn's moribund project to withdraw from the capitalist common market alive.

I didn't think of it in those terms. Of course Tony Benn wouldn't have put it like that.

There was quite a significant Labour Kipper element even after 1992. Given the damage MPs pissing about on Maastricht did to John Major, it's hard to think that exactly the same thing wouldn't have happened to Kinnock.

This from Seema Malhotra actually explains "island of strangers" a bit, in terms of the well-established notion of parallel communities, which I don't think anyone can say are a good thing.

What that really recognises is that, without ways in which we’ve got common ties that bind us together, the way in which we can communicate well with each other, neighbours can talk to each other, people can play a part and play a role in their communities, we risk being communities that live side by side, rather than work and walk together.

But it's a subject that deserves much greater care than this broad brush speech.

So I looked up the Starmer foreward. That quote about "incalculable economic damage" isn't actually a quote.

The damage this[the big increase under the Tories] has done to our country is incalculable. Public services and housing
access have been placed under too much pressure. Our economy has been distorted
by perverse incentives to import workers rather than invest in our own skills. In sectors
like engineering, for example, apprenticeships have almost halved while visas
doubled.

But arguably even worse is the wound this failure has opened when it comes to trust
in politics.

One aspect of economics is mentioned there, but clearly, the strongest bits are the first and the third bits. Pressure on services and trust.

There are plenty of bad bits in it, like "cheap labour" and "one nation experiment in open borders" but weird that the worst sounding quote isn't a quote. I don't get why the Guardian do this.

if employers want to bring workers from overseas, then they must also invest in the
skills of workers already in Britain.
We know that thousands of British businesses already do this – our strategy will back
them.

if employers want to bring workers from overseas, then they must also invest in the
skills of workers already in Britain.
We know that thousands of British businesses already do this – our strategy will back
them.

I mean, fine, but let's see what this strategy is. In the context of training, most people would agree that companies need to do more. But it's dangerous to set young people with shit skills and immigrants with good jobs in contrast to each other. To say the least.

Antonia Bance has a stance on visas that I'd call brave. On the other hand, she has experience of the TUC and is very focused on industry (as MP for Tipton and Wednesbury), so she's not like Jonathan Hinder. She thinks that there's scope locally to recruit more welders and suggests that it come off the shortage occupations list.

https://bsky.app/profile/antoniabance.b ... xfxpagic27

Public services being put under pressure is a recurrent “argument” put forward against immigration, as we saw repeatedly during the shameful campaign for the 2016 referendum.

But it deliberately conflates what are two separate issues. Farage’s UKIP used it as their key campaigning lie, as did Johnson . As I argued at the time, people exercising treaty rights on free movement of labour to work and live in any EU member state were arguably not actually “immigrants” in the conventionally understood sense at all. Most of them would stay in the UK working for limited periods of time before returning home, and of course, the treaty rights were mutual, and being exercised and enjoyed by many UK citizens living and working in other EU member states.

If there were pressures on local public services such as schools, GPs, and hospitals, etc, then that was a failing by the UK government that should have been, as an EU member state, making adequate provision for those areas affected by particularly intense levels of EU citizens living and working there. Instead of that, “immigrants” or EU citizens exercising treaty rights, got the blame, and the Tories were only too happy to go along with that lie.

Now that we no longer have EU citizens here on free movement, “thanks” to Brexit, we still have, unsurprisingly, the same problem, except the people that Farage rails against now genuinely are “immigrants”. And the failing is again the same - namely that of government to ensure that the provision of public services is adequate, particularly in areas of the country affected by (perhaps) larger concentrations of immigrants.

In short, if governments were doing their core job properly, immigration at any level would not be the “problem” it is perceived to be, and certainly not the poisonous source of grievance exploited by Farage, Badenoch, and now seemingly (though I hope not) by Keir Starmer.

If people are OK with the economic consequences of a shrinking population than go ahead and shrink it. Or maybe Labour have a new economic paradigm up their sleeve we don't know about. All these stupid bastards in Reform can come up with is have more babies.
On care reform, towns with shrinking populations have dirt cheap property and unemployed youth so why not granny farm old folks homes up to Burnley and Hull?

Abernathy wrote: ↑Mon May 12, 2025 3:42 pm Public services being put under pressure is a recurrent “argument” put forward against immigration, as we saw repeatedly during the shameful campaign for the 2016 referendum.

He's talking there about the period of the last government specifically, not immigration in general, which various people are claiming he did.

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Mon May 12, 2025 2:32 pm So I looked up the Starmer foreward. That quote about "incalculable economic damage" isn't actually a quote.

The damage this[the big increase under the Tories] has done to our country is incalculable. Public services and housing
access have been placed under too much pressure. Our economy has been distorted
by perverse incentives to import workers rather than invest in our own skills. In sectors
like engineering, for example, apprenticeships have almost halved while visas
doubled.

But arguably even worse is the wound this failure has opened when it comes to trust
in politics.

One aspect of economics is mentioned there, but clearly, the strongest bits are the first and the third bits. Pressure on services and trust.

There are plenty of bad bits in it, like "cheap labour" and "one nation experiment in open borders" but weird that the worst sounding quote isn't a quote. I don't get why the Guardian do this.

Sadly that doesn't matter. It's a fact now.

Just like Rachel Reeves being tougher than IDS, when she was taxing the City to introduce jobs for people who couldn't get one.

Watching Cooper's statement. It all sounds more moderate than Starmer's foreword.

McDonnell raised the "island of strangers" quote and compared it to Enoch Powell. The two quotes are actually different. Powell: "{the White British] found themselves made strangers in their own country". Starmer was talking about people not being able to speak English and living in parallel communities, and the issues with that.

Cooper's actually making a reasonable job of this. She'd be a better leader than Starmer, I think.

I'm actually surprised the amount isn't higher. I think there are quite a lot of the public who'd actually pay their share of that in extra tax. Or preferably have other people pay it, of course.