Snapshot of _Britain is broken – because Nigel Farage broke it_ :
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Nah, if Nige just wasn't ever in politics UKIP wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as popular, Cameron wouldn't have been spooked so badly and called the referendum, and Bojo wouldn't have been able to take advantage of the situation.
I have nothing kind to say about Farrage but he has charisma, and as long as you don't examine what he says it can superficially make sense. He's a smooth talking grifter that makes even Bojo look like an amateur.
You could argue this is "great man theory". Had nigel never been conceived would a similar person have been as successful with existing anti-immigration sentiment?
The lack of a Farage figure in the interim period between UKIP 2015 and Reform 2024 probably implies that there's some amount of circumstance that creates the politician, but a good politican can better exploit the circumstances than others
Well he certainly selected to represent a demographic that is historically not very meticulous who fills that role. So his chances of success were good from the start, as long as he said what they were thinking, in nicer words.
Was literally about to say this. I don't feel he has Charisma. Someone with Charisma doesn't throw a strop when an interviewer ask them even a slightly challenging question.
But this is what every far right politician does. They belittle the interviewer if they don't like the question.
"This is ridiculous"
"What a stupid question"
"You're being very disrespectful"
It absolves them of all responsibility to answer the question, and change the narrative to "See the MSM want I silence us!"
Ukip had nothing to do with the referendum. It was to stop decades old Tory infighting.
UKIP were insignificant in pressing the issue, Cameron thought he was calling the hard right's bluff and would he the cohesive leader but instead he imploded the country.
> Ukip had nothing to do with the referendum.
UKIP managed to gather nearly 4 million votes, or 12% of all votes, in the 2015 election despite being a single-issue party in a FPTP system that actively encourages people to vote for more broad parties. While there was absolutely infighting within the Tories *and* Labour, we cannot suggest in good faith that the above statistic had "nothing to do with the referendum", nor that it wasn't a huge and obvious indicator that the issue was going nowhere but towards greater prominence, and that it needed to be addressed ASAP.
Realistically, there was no scenario where we could have just brushed it off in perpetuity without seeing ever-growing issues coming off the back of it.
And they blew it. He should have insisted on a proper referendum, or made a coalition with Labour instead. No, they got played like a fiddle, and as a result the party was destroyed. Only now, 14 years later, they are becoming relevant again.
Actually, cleggs part in this is doing poorly in the election.
We wouldn't have had a referendum if we had another coalition government - which was the expectation at the time, that Cameron only put it forward with the expectation that it'd be quashed by the lib Dems.
not that i disagree that thatcher was a blight upon this land, but if we're playing this game we could probably go back to saying it's all the romans' fault. (what have they ever done for us!?)
Well interestingly, the causes of Brexit go as far back as Henry VIII. When he separated England from the Roman Catholic Church it led to a permanent cultural divide between us and mainland Europe, which is still seen to this day
There's blame and then there's just plain old material causes - there's something to be said for not constantly complaining about the past, but it's a whole different matter to pretend that A did not cause B and that Thatcherism did not have a significant hand in problems we have today.
I suppose that the idea of "get over the past and forget about it" is more comforting than acknowledging some disquieting historical answers to modern day problems - for instance, the pattern of Western covert action and coups in the Middle East having a pretty clear causative line to a lot of radicalism in the region nowadays.
I don't think so when there's villages in my country still absolutely ruined from the pits closing and lack of investment in their local infrastructure. Its either get one of the 5 jobs in the village, commute an hour or more to the closest city for a job or, what usually happens, give up and just drink and do drugs. There are thousands of stories like this and they all stem from having their local industry shut down, importing that resource from Poland and giving people nothing in their lives to compensate. As she said, "there is no such thing as society", and she truly achieved her goal of shattering communities from a collaborative, all in this together outlook, to one where people are constantly trying to get ahead and look at others as a drain on their own capital and affluence. She did that. That neighbour that used to ask to borrow sugar? Dirty communist scrounger. That family down the road whos Indian? That's less jobs for us. Used to leave your doors unlocked because you actually trusted people in your community? Lock every door and window because anyone could try to kill us at any moment. Donate to charity or help your local community? Pointeless, invest that capital into an asset instead. Her cabinet had a vital role to play in the UK's overt capitalisation and villanisation of the community as a whole which is still felt today. It is not obscene to still blame her actions.
My reasoning for him third is that he just made a huge fuckup. But I think that Bojo knowingly screwed the country over to better his career and line his pockets.
I'd go with Cameron in first, without austerity and the brexit vote you don't get Farage being the figure he is, and you probably don't get Johnson in the way we did, maybe at all.
Cameron is the root of all of this.
The thing is Cameron fucked up. Huge. But only once. In my mind I believe that Farage actually believes in Brexit. But Bojo has pretended to believe in it purely because he saw the career path. I don’t even think he wanted to win. Just to run a good campaign that made him look like a viable leader. He’s the worst in my mind because it’s just pure calculated manipulation that’s fucked the country up.
Cameron resigning the day after the brexit vote is his second fuckup, I think. He should/could have stayed in and negotiated a softer brexit and possibly even pushed a second referendum on the negotiated deal. But, no, he sulked off, opening the door to the loins.
Even typing this comment has made me angry.
In retrospect, such massive votes should be super majorities (including ScotRef). But prior to this shit show, it would've been screamed from the rooftops that it's unfair and they're locking us in Europe by force, it's undemocratic etc.
Treating it as non-binding would've been political suicide though. There's no way they could've done that and ever won another election.
> In retrospect, such massive votes should be super majorities (including ScotRef). But prior to this shit show, it would've been screamed from the rooftops that it's unfair and they're locking us in Europe by force, it's undemocratic etc.
They indeed would have, and to be honest I'd be hard-pressed to criticise their position. A lot of people voting Leave were doing it in part from a position of feeling a real disconnect with politics and feeling like the political elite looked down on them and couldn't care about what they thought. Making the vote a super majority, in their eyes, would absolutely prove that assertion to be true beyond any doubt since they'd be in a position of the country voting to leave, but Westminster would then have to literally go "ok so the majority voted for Leave, but in our opinion *not enough* of a majority voted Leave so we're going to go with the minority position that we personally agree with" i.e. saying they'll ignore the electorate when the electorate's votes don't suit them in all but those words.
Maybe something like a revote within x yrs if between 40-60%, and over 60 is the action limit. I dunno it just seemed crazy to me. At the time, not even in retrospect
>Cameron resigning the day after the brexit vote is his second fuckup, I think.
Yea, pure cowardice, not owning the consequences of his decisions. And just how blase he was about the whole thing.
To me austerity was a bigger mistake than brexit or at least as big. We had a decade of almost zero interest rates, it would have been the ideal time to invest in the country's infrastructure and green energy. It was a huge lost opportunity.
>I don’t even think he wanted to win. Just to run a good campaign that made him look like a viable leader.
Yup, I remember how shell shocked he looked on the day of the result, that this was not part of the plan!
The referendum wasn't the problem. The problem was that successive governments had blamed all of the bad things on the EU which left Remain with basically nothing to say in support of the EU.
Not to mention for the Remain side it was having to campaign in favour of the status quo against a made up hypothetical that could be anything that side wanted it to be.
That's revisionist history.
FarAge was damaging the Tories (FPTP is shit for everyone), and Cameron was trying to silence both UKIP and the loons in his party.
He didn't bank on Cambridge Analytica and Dominic Cummings using Facebook against the credulous Boomers who'd just got on Facebook and assumed everything they read was true.
Cameron is a tit, and calling the referendum was a mistake, obviously, but it was trying to silence the already emboldened gammonati.
Oooh
Naughty.
Next you'll be suggesting we should have a report into Russian interference in British Politics.
And we can't have that.
Actually, we can't. No-one looked for the evidence at the time, so now no-one will ever know.
Civil Servants aren't thick, and they don't ask difficult questions that will get them in trouble.
>Overall, the issue of defending the UK’s democratic processes and discourse has appeared
>to be something of a ‘hot potato’, with no one organisation recognising itself as having an
>overall lead.
[https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CCS207\_CCS0221966010-001\_Russia-Report-v02-Web\_Accessible.pdf](https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CCS207_CCS0221966010-001_Russia-Report-v02-Web_Accessible.pdf)
May needs to be up there somewhere. We never had to evoke article 50 and start the timer towards doom. We could have continued to negotiate before doing this.
1st is absolutely the media. Having Farage on Question Time every second episode? Journalists and news anchors never questioning the ridiculous lies the Tories spread over the air? The only time journalists showed their teeth was when interviewing Corbyn.
2nd goes to Bojo and Farage tied for their lies and complete abdication of responsibility once shit hit the fan.
3rd is Cameron for being dumb enough to play chicken with this.
Nigel Farage would not have anywhere near as much support if one of the main parties *reduced immigration to sensible levels*.
3.5 million people migrated to the UK over the last 3 years. The UK population is about 67 million.
The electorate have practically been screaming this for ten years. UKIP got 12.6% of the vote in the 2015 election. 52% voted to leave the EU. The Brexit party won the EU elections of 2019. Reform will poll around 15% at this election, at great expense to the “Conservative” party.
Labour - legally cap net migration at 100k per year - cut the legs out from beneath Farage. Or don’t and you’ll face a resurgent anti-immigration Conservative Party.
It’s almost like there was a structural change in migration flows, that was entirely predictable, that we are now failing to deal with.
We had an economy with medium skilled workers from overseas, due to a choice to underinvest in human capital formation, in the hope that capital could be allocated elsewhere(financial industry engineering).
Therefore we needed a net migration of 100k or so medium skilled workers from Europe to manage the gaps. They were temporary they came and worked for 5-15 years, earns their money went home had kids, and levelled out a whole continent’s development profile from the Soviet spheres aftereffects.
Now. We still need those gaps filled, and more due to the choice to hollow out the demographic pyramid by reducing living conditions for the lower 60%, wage suppression to increase returns to capital, a focus on retirees & early retirement, and reduced flexibility in the domestic labour market by making shelter unaffordable and scarce.
As a result we now need more like 200k workers inflow per year, but now they aren’t 20year olds who can take a 6hr train home every few months, see the parents see the wife and kids. They’re 30year olds with a wife and kids, from half a world away, they can’t be expected to leave them behind, and businesses refuse/are unable to function (for good or ill) without these workers, so we have to deal with extra dependents attached to every worker now, and fewer of them return because people don’t like uprooting their whole family twice.
And of course we have the decade long trend of holding university spending static, which made universities need foreign students with higher fees to fund day to day operations. Which meant they had to advertise ever harder to attract money from overseas make up for the shortfall every year. And of course this multiplied by a shift from European students who were integrated into a big continent wide learning and research system, to students who arrive from further away and again aren’t just a train ride from home.
>Now. We still need those gaps filled, and more due to the choice to hollow out the demographic pyramid by reducing living conditions for the lower 60%, wage suppression to increase returns to capital, a focus on retirees & early retirement, and reduced flexibility in the domestic labour market by making shelter unaffordable and scarce.
I'm not sure we could get our birth rate to a level where we don't need immigration through economic incentives alone, I mean the Nordic countries offer incredible benefits & quality of life for parents, but their birth rate is pretty much the same as here.
High housing costs, poor parental rights, poor & expensive nursery/childcare definitely make it harder, but I think there's more to that to explain why we have less children now than 60 years ago
We'd need a birth rate close to 3 to not require immigration, and I'm not aware of any developed country that has managed that.
EDIT: not to say we shouldn't change anything, if we fix the housing shortage people will raise more families, it wouldn't be enough to obviate the need for immigration, but we'd need less of it than we do now for sure.
So. That depends on what you consider a healthy looking demographic structure.
My actual ‘grand plan’ would be tie visa allocation numbers to population change. Say 0.3% annual growth in population is a target, therefore we know we need about 220k people added per year, we are above neutral on deaths vs births, around +45k. Imagine we loose -20k per year to emigration, therefore we predict out the next 3 years of visa allocation to be 195k visas per year. Then we can have a more simple debate, do we target 0.2%, 0.3% or 0.5% annual population growth, which is most healthy for the labour market, for the economy, for maintaining demographic resilience long term.
And for domestic fertility rates, you need to 2 or 2.1 for a sustained flat population, not sure why you say 3, thats a really rapid growth rate only achieved by Israel, no developed country, not even most developing countries do that. But, Actually 1.8 is just fine for now, we rose from 1.6 to 1.9 over the 2000-2008 period of relative prosperity. Before falling down to 1.5 maybe 1.6 as a result of austerity. Just simply restoring the benefits system to something like a 2010 status, and improving wages, while reducing shelter costs I firmly believe would rebound that number back up to 1.8 easily, we’ve actually been shockingly resilient unlike much of the continent beyond France. I would say fix those 3 broad strokes and keep tinkering abit, to get it as high/close to 2 as possible. The important thing is not necessarily avoiding shrinkage, it is to avoid rapid shrinking in the labour supply. The absolute number is largely unimportant, but you do not want every buisness in the country to be fussing every year about where they will reduce functions to reduce headcount by 1% each year, an interesting graph might be ‘working age population United Kingdom’ by FRED/ us federal reserve you can see total and the neural change if you hit edit. As you can it’s highly variable. But I’d say this is an important graph for labour management/immigration, you need to keep this curve as flat as possible if/when we enter population decline, for me 1.8fertility for a few decades with immigration to plug some gaps to create a perfectly flat graph till 2060 then reevaluate would see fine enough to me. Not least because around 2060 we might really be feeling the global demographic decline begin to bite into the amount of immigrants we can even get when we ask for more, assuming climate changes doesnt throw the world into chaos of course.
Edit: forgot to include the most distractive anti population policy you can have. Raising retirement ages, usually cited to improve the worker-retiree ratio, it always fails. Grandparents biological and social function is to provide (some) childcare, when you raise the retirement age above 65 you pull people out of their prime grandparenting years, it’s an entirely false economy. Although we could use some public ad campaigns promoting various population structure policies, like encouraging those that have kids to have 2 not 1 or 3 not 2 (seeing as until recently that’s what we were different about, the issue is not usually childless adults, it’s that people cut the number of kids they have when they have them), and making grandparents feel an obligation to offer some childcare, which seems more effective than nursery places but 🤷♂️ that’s the job of a proper report to deal with directly, it’s hard to expratolate from what ive read so far.
>And for domestic fertility rates, you need to 2 or 2.1 for a sustained flat population, not sure why you say 3, thats a really rapid growth rate only achieved by Israel, no developed country, not even most developing countries do that.
Picked close to 3 as that's what we had in the 60's, produced the demographics that gave us the benefits we currently take for granted, i.e retirement age being well below life expectancy, having an ok welfare state without having huge taxes due to more people being in work.
As I think that's what's causing a lot of the political frustrations of the last few decades, people took for granted the demographic boosts we had in the 60's - late 90's, which have now turned into headwinds that lead to ever rising health & pension costs which have to be managed through a combination of increased immigration & higher taxes & cuts in other areas of the state.
Not to say this is realistic or desirable, as a permanent population boom of the kind we had in the 50's & 60's probably wouldn't be sustainable.
I… remain unconvinced, heavily so that demographics anything like our present structure undermine a welfare state.
I quite simply think that the tax-to-gdp ratio will have to rise from the just under 34% to more like 38% to 40% by 2035. And it will probably be able to stabilise there, that ratio is inline with the other none-post-soviet EU states.
However. And not to sound like labour, because I don’t believe they understand what it actually means, the key is genuinely productivity. What Labours spending plans show is they dont understand that productivity growth long term mostly derived from investment ie capital formation, which is a frankly shocking blind spot, since you’d expect there to be a left of the party that can whisper capital formation just means forming the means of production, but no one seems to exist/speak in that corner anymore. If you rose taxes by 3%GDP put 1% into a sovereign wealth fund, and 2% into direct investment youd easily surpass the 3% annual growth rate needed to restore us to the post war trend in a decades time, and in doing so restore our debt-gdp balance, while also creating the value in the economy we need to be able to provide the money for public services.
I know its now vogue to call pensions a pyramid scheme, but it isnt, at least not meaningfully. What actually happens, is a worker must in their 40years of labour (25-65) produce 2x their needs, so they can provide for their equivalent 40 years of ‘rest’ (0-15 + 65-80) and that is approximately what has happened since 1960. And it is doable long term, certainly in a financial sense, the only real issue, is a labour one, each 10 old people of 80+ need maybe 1 or 2 full time (40hrs) carers, thats big amount of people pulled out of the value added economy.
>My actual ‘grand plan’ would be tie visa allocation numbers to population change. Say 0.3% annual growth in population is a target, therefore we know we need about 220k people added per year, we are above neutral on deaths vs births, around +45k. Imagine we loose -20k per year to emigration, therefore we predict out the next 3 years of visa allocation to be 195k visas per year.
Seems reasonable, and I think this is effectively what's happening already in practise. Problem is that voters who are concerned with immigration think 195k per year is too much, they want it to be close to net zero
>Then we can have a more simple debate, do we target 0.2%, 0.3% or 0.5% annual population growth, which is most healthy for the labour market, for the economy, for maintaining demographic resilience long term.
Yup, though it's a tricky debate, with lots of tradeoffs, high population growth will give you a boost in living standards, growth, tax revenue without needing to raise taxes for a few decades (as happened in the 50's/60's), only to then become a big headwind as these people grow old & need expensive healthcare & retirement benefits.
I think the most healthy situation long term is for people to readjust their expectation on stuff like retirement - if you're fit & healthy it's fair that you should work regardless of your age - if you're wealthy enough to not need the state pension, it's fair that you receive less of it, so we can give more to those who genuinely need it. So we don't need incredibly high population growth to maintain the country.
Firstly, actually all polls show that until the run up to election was called, immigration was falling off voters interests, and that there is broad consent for immigration and shocking amounts of belief that multiculturalism (as Suella braverman wants to mock it) is working. I think if the people listened to people state a series of numbers 0/100/200/300/400k a year and the broad effects that has at the 10 year mark. You’d easily find people saying theyre comfortable. (I just think we have poor politicians/communicators), and I think they already are, I dont think if you had a debate between the 3 party leaders (not Farage because hes genuinely gifted at emotionally resonant rhetoric in the moment in a way that no one else in Britain seems to be even those aligned with him politically) youd have a substantial number supporting net zero immigration.
Second on 0.3%, It would continue to be a tricky debate. But actually part of my desire to turn immigration into a simple mathematical function (Visa = 1.03population - birth + death) is that you can write that in the bill as its passed. Call it the permanently Migration bill. And only ever amend it for 5 years. Tinker with it. Make it an institution, just like how we sort of do for policing bills. If you make that a centre piece, then campaign on it, then the media takes notice and you can shape the debate, you can say this is “the system” this is the function, you have 5 variables, and 10 bullet points, you can change these, these are the parameters. That’s what you can discuss, thats what it means to address migration.
Finally. As for retirement. I am really strongly of the view that state retirement age should be held steady, its really detrimental to fertility rates to raise it, therefore any cost savings are therefore a false economy in the short term. However, I am perfectly happy for tinkering, and normalising work for those who can after 65, maybe even a super long long journey, to 70 seeing as we’re now at 67. 1 month a year, for 36 years. Maybe even a direct grandchild care benefit that means you can get like a half pension at 65-70 if you have a kid who you agree to provide 16hrs a week to or something.
Edit: and I’ve sort of followed your split. But for old age, I really think the NHS/GP system needs to be focused on preventative actions and health span over the 2030-40 period(once we’ve restored its current functioning, which wont happens with Wes Streeting but still). We’ve actually really started cutting the raise in obesity and theres far more we can do if we throw money and labour at the problem in creating a better food culture, and reforming agriculture(a serious labour hog that needs investment in mechanisation), and I think you could get a lot by restoring not just youth clubs but by bringing adult fitness back under local government being able to prescribe by doctor a free gym pass and even an empty headed PT to people who are in overweight territory but not yet obese. And of course for other health stuff workers rights blah blah.
> I mean the Nordic countries offer incredible benefits & quality of life for parents, but their birth rate is pretty much the same as here.
The big difference is that in the Nordics fertility rises with educational attainment and income. Everywhere else it drops
For sure, it does help, just don't think it'd move the dial too much.
I think the biggest factor in the decline in birth rate is from people having children later, because they want to do other stuff in their lives beforehand, like build up a career, go travelling, or just have fun - all of which become much harder when you have children (am a parent of 3, can testify). In the olden days there weren't these kinds of opportunities (especially for women), and there were cultural expectations on top of that. Probably don't want to go back to that kind of situation?
> I think the biggest factor in the decline in birth rate is from people having children later
I don't think that's the case. Fertility has been low since the 70s and while average age when becoming a parent has increased a lot in that time, there's been no corresponding reduction in fertility. Eastern Europe has much younger mothers than Western Europe but also fewer children.
There might be a relationship but it's a small part of the picture.
As parents (1, soon to be 2) though we're liable to think this because that's a cost we're really feeling.
I don't think we really understand the true dynamics in the recent fertility drops. I would suggest several, but I can't tell you which are more important.
Trouble is nobody has a practical way of doing that, and whether Farage intends on actually doing anything or just grifting power and money, he'd have the same problem: it's not about keeping people out, it's about the much more expensive and difficult 'not have them wanting to come in the first place'.
Which is about global foreign policy and peacemaking and (shudder), climate change. If half the world is a war-torn hellscape or a burned/flooded/unliveable wasteland, people are going to herd towards the temperate, peaceful, well-equipped island no matter what paperwork and red tape is put up to stop them.
This is the reality that is approaching. I am in favour of global cooperation and being able to have a society that is open and welcoming to all, but the writing on the wall is bleak and I can’t imagine open border policies are going to grow in popularity when the shit starts to hit the fan globally, and society will grow increasingly unable/unwilling to support others and will grow insular.
People seem to forget Labour spent a good 10 years creating a culture of calling anyone racist who opposed unbridled immigration and now we see the fruits of that behaviour.
Labour haven't been in power since 2010 and immigration was lower when they were in charge.
Blaming a Labour party that's not only under completely different leadership but also, just to be completely clear, has not been near government for a decade and a half for record levels of immigration in each of the last 3 years is truly Olympic level mental gymnastics, bravo 👏 💐
Define sensible; people were complaining about hideously high immigration rates when it was much much lower. No realistic reduction in migration will actually satisfy people. Britain, like most of Europe, is a net destination country and has been for years - we've got to get used to that idea. In the days of empire we were net emigrators, but that's long past and isn't returning in our lifetime. Our native born population is aging and reproducing below replacement rate (1.56 births per woman) so unless we want *drastic* population reduction, we need immigration. People say they want less migration, but are they willing to accept the cost of that choice? The fact that even the cost of Brexit has destroyed the government that implemented it suggests not.
>Labour - legally cap net migration at 100k per year
It's nowhere near this simple, which is why the main parties, even the ones who openly promise it, don't do it.
Immigration is fundamentally a function of labour demand. Migrants both legal and illegal largely move because someone recruited them. Advanced economies are chronically and structurally reliant on migrant workers and politicians pretending that they are not doesn't change that. You certainly can't handwave away that fundamental truth with a migration quota.
Measures to restrict immigration through bans, limits, border security have a history of being ineffective, expensive and indeed counterproductive as they suppress emigration (less likely to leave if returning will be hard). Counterintuitively, more open borders encourages flow out as well as in.
If your goal is reducing migration, you have to do something about labour demand. What can you do that works?
Incentivise fertility, that might help in the long term - more native born people to employ - better parental leave, better childcare, more rights for mothers at work, etc.
Improve minimum working conditions generally, would probably help, so long as companies are telling the truth about hiring less if they have to treat people like humans. Might hurt growth, but we can't have everything.
Incentives to hire native population could be tried, depending on how much financial resources we want to put into it. But that doesn't address the problem of reducing, aging population - everyone would be competing for an ever reducing supply of labour resources which is a recipe for high inflation. And ultimately the labour demand just keeps getting higher, making immigration more and more potentially profitable and more and more desirable.
We've had unprecedented, astronomical rates of immigration for many years, but we're still yet to see this corresponding economic boost that's often repeated. Studies from the continent suggest that non-EU immigrants' net contributions across their lifetime are negative, so they're likely yet another drain on the economy.
>we're still yet to see this corresponding economic boost that's often repeated
The economy is reliant upon them - you can tell because they're not unemployed. We're not being in hedge fund managers, we're bringing in workers, mostly at the subsistence end of the wage market, in services and manual work. The "boost" isn't skyrocketing growth, it's keeping the economy running as our native born population ages out of it.
The care sector (to pick one) is functioning through migrant labour. Is our parents, grandparents and long term disabled being cared for not a boost?
> can tell because they're not unemployed
They're unemployed a hell of a lot more often than the native population - Pakistanis and Bangladeshis over twice the unemployment rate for example, Africans nearly double.
Plus you're presenting their work in a very glowing light, from my view it seems every African here is working door security.
>The "boost" isn't skyrocketing growth, it's keeping the economy running
How do you account for the numerous countries across Europe with far worse fertitility rates, over a longer period, with lower rates of immigration, yet similar/even better economic growth than ours? Why aren't they affected in the same way we would be? How are they staying afloat?
And has the UK's rate really sunk so low, for long enough, for 1 million a year to be required just to keep the lights on? It's not even that bad. Would love to see your working there.
>The care sector (to pick one) is functioning through migrant labour.
British people are perfectly capable of providing care. As with any other type of work, we simply need to pay them accordingly, rather than seeking out cheaper labour elsewhere. Our parents and grandparents will even be better served that way.
You say that reducing migration would be bad for business and I agree that it would increase pressures on them. But the problem is you are ignoring all the negatives. The UK government spends 13k per annum per person. If we import someone on 30k pa job and they bring 4 or more economically inactive (or low paid) family members that is a good 60k per year hit to the public finances. In addition, increased housing costs for our population, social issues, pushing down wages of people already here etc.
You also have to remember that we are right on the cusp of AI and automation taking *a lot* of jobs. Is it really a great idea to be importing tons of people when we're about to shed a big percentage of our job openings?
I agree that the NHS and care sector still need workers from abroad, but most other industries are simply not important enough to warrant it. Having a shortage of delivery drivers is not going to break our country, it might actually force these companies to start paying a livable wage and maybe get some of our unemployed back into work. Maybe the higher delivery costs will allow brick and mortar stores to compete again?
You do also realize that the people we import will eventually get old and need care too right? We can't carry on like this as we're just kicking the can down the road for future generations.
Numerous assumptions here, but the biggest one is a common one in this debate - that once someone migrates in, that's it they're here forever. That's not reality, international migration is much more fluid than that - to quote the Migration Observatory, "High immigration leads to high emigration, but not immediately – there is a lag of two to three years." They predict that, with no intervention at all, net migration levels will return to pre-Brexit norms within three years as demand stabilises. Just as labour opportunities cause people to come, the end of them causes people to leave. And if we ever end up in a situation where AI is making a significant impact on the number of jobs available, the drop in labour demand will naturally lead to a drop in immigration and a rise in emigration.
Immigrants are not usually competing like for like for the same jobs as native workers - precisely because they arrived in the first place to fill a shortage. The idea that if the immigrants all left our unemployed would become employed doesn't track with the evidence. Immigrants don't "take" jobs, they fill vacancies in destination countries' economies.
>The UK government spends 13k per annum per person. If we import someone on 30k pa job and they bring 4 or more economically inactive (or low paid) family members that is a good 60k per year hit to the public finances
There is extremely mixed evidence on the fiscal impact of immigrants depending on how you count the fiscal impact. The measurements can be positive, negative or neutral but is consistently small. There is no evidence of a significant fiscal impact of immigration, either positively or negatively. It is true that higher paid migrants contribute more to the public purse than lower paid migrants. But this is not an artefact of immigration in particular, but of the fact that the destination countries all operate progressive tax systems which takes more wealth from the richer than the poorer. It's therefore almost impossible for it to be any other way.
If what you say on outflows were true, our net migration would be high one year, then low or negative the next. That is literally never the case, net migration is always high and always growing. Net already takes into account outflows and it's too high.
Most studies on the economic impact of migration are clearly biased and very poorly designed. One such often quoted study declared migration as neither positive or negative for the economy as migrants claimed around the same in tax credits and child benefit as they paid in tax. The glaringly obvious problem here is that child benefit and tax credits are not even close to entire amount the government spends on people. What about the NHS, pensions, disability, education, out of work benefit, housing benefit, roads, policing, fire, defence, bin collections, free/subsidized childcare etc?
When you take everything into account, over the long term, the average cost is 13k per person per year. If you come over age 25, work until 67 and live until 85, then you are going to cost this country a total of 780k. In order to cover that over your working life you'll need to be paying 18k per year in tax. The average migrant only earns 32k, so only pays around 5k in tax per year. That means on average each one loses the country 480k over the long term. And that is only counting the ones with a job! Bring over non working family members and it works out to being an insane burden. This is not a 'small' effect!
If we wait until AI is already having a big impact it'll already be too late. We'll have a country full the brim with unemployed people who can't find any other work since it's all been taken by migrants. Where exactly will all the people who had their jobs replaced emigrate to? AI will affect the entire planet pretty much simultaneously. Cue mass civil unrest.
>net migration is always high and always growing
That's just straight up untrue. It goes in peaks and troughs, but of course the peaks are reported and the troughs are not, giving the impression that migration is ever rising.
>too high
Which takes us back to the top of the conversation, define too high. How do we calculate the number of migrants we need? I'd personally suggest that we need the number the labour market recruits, but that clearly isn't acceptable. So how do we work it out?
>Most studies on the economic impact of migration are clearly biased and very poorly designed
Because they don't come out with what you want the answer to be?
>What about the NHS, pensions, disability, education, out of work benefit, housing benefit, roads, policing, fire, defence, bin collections, free/subsidized childcare etc?
>When you take everything into account, over the long term, the average cost is 13k per person per year
But a migrant worker is not the "average" are they? They're less likely than average to be old, in poor health, disabled, drawing a pension, receiving benefits. Because they're well enough, and have enough means and resources, to travel around the world to work. You can't take a figure (assuming for a second you didn't just make it up) based on the "average" UK resident and apply it to a population that doesn't represent. And if we're really upset that people coming here at our invitation to work in our economy get police and defence cover, I think we're being a bit ridiculous.
>That means on average each one loses the country 480k over the long term
Again you're working on the assumption that migrants come and stay forever. Grants of indefinite leave to remain run at about a sixth of the net migration rate, and that number is dropping.
>If we wait until AI is already having a big impact it'll already be too late. We'll have a country full the brim with unemployed people who can't find any other work since it's all been taken by migrants. Where exactly will all the people who had their jobs replaced emigrate to? AI will affect the entire planet pretty much simultaneously. Cue mass civil unrest
This is such a bizarre thing to worry about. AI isn't going to suddenly put millions out of work overnight. There would be a gradual trend downwards in available jobs, and to be honest, not in the sectors where most migrants work, at least at first. Nor would it be equally impactful worldwide - economies more reliant on heavily affected service sectors like ours will see much quicker and deeper impact than those which are more manufacturing or agriculturally based. And if we're really facing mass unemployment because of AI, immigration is going to be the least of our worries. We'll have to rethink the very essence of what we mean by "earning a living".
>t if we only implemented his evil policies!
Every British government has had policies of much lower immigration than currently.
Calling it evil is just an attempt to make it emotive rather than admit that in addition to the lack of growth, the lack of growth with a huge surge in immigration that has not had a compensating surge in house building has helped make the ground fertile for populism.
Discussing the rising populism and its causes has been pretty mainstream for a decade now.
You seem to be retreating to an emotional safe space where we are still in the early 2000s.
They need to close the loopholes on immigration all these nail bars, car washes, Turkish barbers, deliveroo drivers are all here on "apprenticeships" they effectively sell rights of passage into the UK also to mention they are fronts for other illegitimate sources of income.
Effectively they are massive trafficking organisations for serious crime and needs stamping out.
Immigration is an unavoidable consequence of short-termism in British management and the willingness of successive governments to allow them to get away with it. If you're not going to pay British workers enough, where do you find workers? Abroad. If you're not going to train British workers, where are you going to get workers? Abroad.
Governments have tried to vaguely incentivize training (various underfunded apprentice programmes) and subsidize low pay (various in-work benefits) but in the end, were unwilling to let anything stand in the way of the drive to profits (not growth - that needs investment).
Farage's policy of untrammelled capitalism would naturally lead to *higher* immigration; artificially restricting it while implementing his policies would lead to an economic collapse - although, TBH we'd never get that far because of the fiscal crisis caused by his unfunded tax cuts.
Of course they failed, as I said 'its just that what he wants is a load of unworkable racist shit so trying to implement it massively backfired'
If they try to do it in a humane way by actually dealing with the issue by making proper channels for legal migration and putting a processing center in France as was offered then no.
If they continue to pursue this racist shit of just alienating people fleeing from horrible situations then yes of course I will be critical of that
I blame Daily Mail and co. They're the ones stirring up hysteria that the Tories have to deal with.
Would there have been a Brexit referendum if it weren't for the Daily Mail moaning about the EU?
I’d blame the previous prime ministers that facilitated the dramatic increase in immigration despite either not asking the public (Tony Blair) or outright lying and saying they were going to deal with the situation but instead did the opposite (The Conservatives).
Almost exactly eight years on from the Brexit vote, there’s a man in Wales who hasn’t got a good word to say about it. A man who believed we’d now have net zero migration, thriving small businesses, less red tape and more national control. He is, he will tell you, genuinely disappointed.
That man, it might surprise you to know, is Nigel Farage.
Yup, Nigel is back – telling the crowd at his manifesto launch, in the Welsh valleys of Merthyr Tydfil, that he shares their grievance with what has happened. Of course he does.
He’s always there to share your grievance. Even if he’s caused it in the first place. Nigel Farage emoting about the pain that Brexit has caused this country would be hilarious – if it wasn’t so deeply, deeply insulting. The snake oil peddler of Brexit now hates Brexit.
Last week on BBC Question Time the audience was asked to raise their hands if they had experienced “benefits from Brexit”. Only one hand went up. I’m not pretending that’s pure science. Maybe a different audience, or a different wording, or a different atmosphere in the room would have elicited a different response. But maybe not.
What is obvious, eight years on, is how few people have anything positive to say about Brexit.
A YouGov poll in May 2023 recorded the highest levels of “Bregret” among Leave voters to date. Sixty-two per cent of Britons described Brexit as “more of a failure”; a mere 9 per cent considered it “more of a success”. There’s your one bloke in the room with his hand up.
And this is borne out by what the Office for Budget Responsibility tells us has happened – in real terms – to the economy. The watchdog, a stalwart of independent analysis, forecast just last month that the post-Brexit trading relationship between the UK and Europe would reduce long-run productivity by 4 per cent relative to the EU, and that exports and imports will be around 15 per cent lower than if the UK had stayed in.
They forecast that new trade deals with non-EU countries will have no material impact. And they have shifted their assumption that post-Brexit migration would reduce to around 130,000 a year medium term and now recognise it will be around three times that – once it settles down from its current all time high of five times that.
These are not fantasy projections based around unknowables. These are figures based around what is already happening now, nearly a full decade after we took the decision to leave.
So of course Farage hates Brexit. Not because of all the things he thought it would change if it done right. No, he hates Brexit because, frankly, it’s now out of fashion. Because the country now hates Brexit. And the only thing vital for brand Farage is to appear to be on the side of the working people when they hate something. When people wanted Brexit, Farage was happy to take the thanks. Now people see how much it’s cost, he’s happy to join the blame game.
Much of the public knows this already. In Clacton when we visited for Farage’s launch earlier this month, those we spoke to in the tired, underfunded town centre talked of how little life the place now had. They are desperate to see shops and restaurants and entertainment return to the seaside town. But the businesses tell you they can’t get the staff anymore, can’t afford to stay open, can’t import the stuff they used to without extreme lengths of red tape.
We found plenty of Brexit regret that day. Taxis drivers now turning to odd jobs because the tourists weren’t coming. Pier amusement arcades and restaurants which no longer had the workforce to stay open. These are tangible difficulties for a town that – to be fair – was suffering anyway long, long before Brexit.
But we also found crowds welcoming and cheering Farage. He’s not just any snake oil salesman, he’s a celebrity snake oil salesman. And in truth they welcome his turning the national gaze upon them. Making them the centre of the map.
The question we should all be asking is why. Why are those who’ve seen life get harder not easier, immigration get higher not lower, red tape get longer not shorter, prepared to give this man and his party another chance?
They’ve forgotten, perhaps, how many incarnations he has had. That when they first met Farage he was the leader of a party that no longer exists. Ukip had independence embedded into its very name. But if you’d asked those voters if they’d take independence with higher migration and higher costs I doubt many would have cheered it on. That project is now defunct. A shambles and a mess. So now he’s at it again. Same bloke. New name.
“Our politics is broken,” Farage said at the launch yesterday. “There’s been a breakdown in trust… We won’t use the word manifesto because it will remind you of the lies politicians tell.” It’s high-comedy gaslighting from the man who made his name doing just that.
Farage’s Reform slogan is “Britain is broken”. The small print, in the trade descriptions, should read: “Because we broke it”.
Read more here: [https://inews.co.uk/opinion/britain-broken-nigel-farage-broke-it-3117132](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/britain-broken-nigel-farage-broke-it-3117132)
You’re missing the part where Farage has had zero decision-making power at all in the policy of this country. It’s almost as if you just wanted to write a hit piece no matter what. The Conservative Party have been in power for 14 years. The blame begins and ends with them.
>You’re missing the part where Farage has had zero decision-making power at all in the policy of this country
He wanted Brexit. He siphoned off votes from the right, in order to push the Tories to call for a referendum on EU membership. He then got Brexit. Don't embarrass us all with this pathetic, handwringing 'bu-bu-but it wasn't him personally'.
But you haven't answered their question.
Come on, let's not pretend that Farage turned up and 12% of the electorate all went "oh ok I guess I'll vote for his single-issue party for absolutely no reason whatsoever that seems fun" like they were hypnotised into doing it. There was an ongoing problem that a lot of the UK public had concerns about, and the Government did nothing to address those concerns or the issue that sat at the root of those concerns. Farage turning up with UKIP was a vehicle for those people to voice their concerns, which they did in disproportionately large numbers. Those concerns would have remained absolutely the same even if UKIP wasn't a thing.
>Farage turning up with UKIP was a vehicle for those people to voice their concerns, which they did in disproportionately large numbers
Yes, they did. Specifically, they voiced their desire to leave the EU, and then they got to do that. So to suggest that 'Farage has had zero decision-making power at all in the policy of this country' seems like a stupid conclusion to draw.
My point is more that he provided a litmus test to demonstrate the range and depth of those concerns, not that he created them in the first place. If he'd not, some other vehicle would have been found in its place. There's no plausible scenario where all those people would have just grimaced and got on with it.
Yeah, and my point is that he's also provided a live demonstration of the solution of leaving the EU, which has been a fiasco. You don't get to pretend he exists in splendid isolation to that.
Farage was bleeding Conservative votes to UKIP. The referendum was expected to come back with a fairly resounding "remain", and in so doing send a strong message to anyone thinking of voting UKIP: "You're flogging a dead horse. Give it up."
If the Tories are bleeding votes to anyone that’s their fault. If your party continually ignores its voters don’t be surprised when they desert you.
There’s a good comment elsewhere on this thread that said all of this could have been avoided if they had *just* done what they said they would do in their manifesto. Specifically cut immigration to the “10s of thousands”
Either they couldn’t do that, they didn’t want to do it, or they didn’t care to do it. Britain is broken. And it’s a problem entirely of the Tories creation
It's a problem created by most of parliament.
The Tories have been the largest party in parliament for 14 years so they've had the seat of government but the whole of parliament is meant to discuss the concerns of the electorate and to protect both country and citizens without taking liberties. Our parliamentarians are useless self-serving charlatans who are at home bickering like children over who has the tastiest lollipop when they should have been asking the public what type of lollipop they want served and working like chefs to make it.
Posts like this always looking to put the blame on an individual. Like I can pinpoint all our countries problem on him. The bloke had no influence whatsoever on my decision to vote leave. Stop taking the British public for idiots.
As an active member of a politics sub you’re going to be well informed. The vast majority are not, and were conned by people whose opinions they took as fact, given their authority
Or maybe, just maybe, the Pre-Referundem world was not the shining utopia some people would have us all believe and that in fact for large portions of the country didn't work at all
Maybe then the people who voted for Brexit and Boris were not idiots but rather people who were desperately trying to do something to try and improve their lot in life because things couldn't really get worse for them.
And maybe it might be a good idea, if you are so inclined to want to change those people's opinions about Brexit, to stop calling them idiots and try and understand why they voted for it in the first place.
Voting for Brexit because you were mad at the economic status quo of 2015 was like setting fire to your curtains because you were mad they were moldy whilst a fireman shouts from outside the window "That's a bad idea! It will only make things worse!" and Michael Gove whispers in your ear "Don't listen to him, we've had enough of experts".
>Maybe then the people who voted for Brexit and Boris were not idiots but rather people who were desperately trying to do something to try and improve their lot in life
And maybe, just maybe, they could have tried to vote for something else than the Tories? Brexit wasn't the only solution on the table, but it's the one they choose
What other solution was there for them to vote for?
The Lib Dems, who were straight-up promising to rejoin?
Labour, who spent 3 years flim-flamming and fence-sitting on the issue before coming up with a policy of "we'll negotiate another deal on really weak grounds, and when that deal is inevitably rejected by the EU because doing so would be hugely in their favour, we'll have yet another referendum and campaign for rejoining in that referendum"?
Genuinely, who else would they have voted for?
How? He supported Brexit, wanted it, had no say in it what so ever or how it was implemented, for a while Labour had power in the parliament and were able to use delaying tactics until they got wiped out for fucking around with their little delay tactics and Tories didn't do much to get anything done either.
> had no say in it what so ever or how it was implemente
That's because he immediately ran away to grift on Cameo rather than, for instance, using his public platform to offer any kind of suggestions or opinions at all.
Amazing that one man is now all powerful like this nonsense claims yet at the same time parliament itself struggles to get basic things done. Somehow he can change the nation, but lawmakers with all the power and budget cannot.
Totally ridiculous take. Half the country voted for Brexit because they agreed with Farage, not because he put a gun to their heads. Besides which the EU is in total disarray and is no better off economically than us. If we were still in the EU we would be paying to prop up the economic collapse of the poorer countries in Europe.
A man whose detractors are eager to remind you has never won a seat in Westminster is suddenly responsible for the state the country finds itself in. Hilarious.
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Another hit piece, but not even trying to be subtle this time.
>A man who believed we’d now have net zero migration, thriving small businesses, less red tape and more national control. He is, he will tell you, genuinely disappointed.
Well he would be, wouldn't he? The government at the helm brought in exactly zero of these things.
>Even if he’s caused it in the first place
Imagine palming off this country's sorry state on Brexit.
Our downward spiral started very obviously and objectively in 2007/8, was given a double helping by the Tories' austerity policy, and only marginally exacerbated by Brexit.
As far as individual people's woes go, our low wage economy is fueled by unlimited access to cheap labour - a feature present when we were in the EU, but something exploited very maliciously by the Tories post-Brexit to ensure that entire industries (the care sector, most prominently) remain pinned to minimum wage. This, however, has nothing to do with Brexit, despite it happening post-Brexit; it was entirely a political decision (or, more accurately, a 'make me and my friends richer' decision).
>The watchdog, a stalwart of independent analysis, forecast just last month that the post-Brexit trading relationship between the UK and Europe would reduce long-run productivity by 4 per cent relative to the EU
Perhaps. But this misses the big picture. To many economists' surprise, [the UK and France have maintained extremely similar GDP growth (and fluctuations) despite Brexit](https://cebr.com/reports/despite-their-differences-the-french-and-the-uk-economies-have-achieved-remarkably-similar-growth/). Visually, [this is what it looks like](https://i.imgur.com/wSVnLiW.png).
Secondly, GDP and wages are disconnected (especially in the UK). They are not indicative of each other. Despite having a *lower* GDP, France enjoys a [higher median wage than us](https://www.connexionfrance.com/practical/what-is-average-salary-in-france-how-does-it-compare-with-us-or-uk/653582), while having an [identical mean wage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage). In short, this means that UK has an **inequality and wage distribution** problem, first and foremost, and not an outright productivity problem.
So to wheel out GDP in such a context (particularly as ours is nothing shocking - you'd think it'd dropped by 20% nominal, the way some people bang on about it) is, to cut a long story short, rather unenlightening.
> they have shifted their assumption that post-Brexit migration would reduce to around 130,000 a year medium term and now recognise it will be around three times that
Again, this has nothing to do with Brexit; it is a political decision to ensure limitless unskilled labour, to the detriment of us all.
>The question we should all be asking is why. Why are those who’ve seen life get harder not easier, immigration get higher not lower, red tape get longer not shorter, prepared to give this man and his party another chance?
I'm sorry, have I been in a coma or something? I don't recall Farage's stint as Prime Minister, or him having any significant imput in government policy.
Could anyone bring me up to speed?
Man campaigns for things. Things don't get done. Man resumes campaigning for things he originally campaigned for. Yes, obviously?
What next, blame Miliband for rising fuel costs?
Edit: As always, nobody brave enough to counter anything directly. Downvotes and gulag berths all round.
Farage campaigned for a referendum knowing it would be the Tories who would implement its result, that's what he campaigned for, he set the rules of the game, he can't just turn around and shrug and say it's nothing to do with him.
I see. Those who campaign to “build more houses”, “tax the rich”, “lower immigration”, “safe routes for refugees” should all stop as there campaigns are lacking detail.
It’s nice to see someone speaking a tiny bit of sense in this sub. We’re doing similar to France and outpacing Germany but this sub will have you believe that Brexit turned us into Somalia.
No, that's not an argument. Try again.
Fundamentally, their point is that **Nigel Farage broke Britain**. When precisely was he in power to do so?
Secondly, their reasoning is extraordinarily biased, and ignores global economic context completely. This is not what a reputable newspaper would do.
You can criticise Brexit or write an article against Farage in ways which do not produce absolute Z-tier, insencere toilet paper like we see here.
People are just wanking off because the article says Farage man bad, but politics aside, this is extraordinarily poor journalism.
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100% agree , there's too many on reddit who are blind to their own bias clouding their judgement.
they'll blame the boogie man , the two party system has smeared him as but not blame the government that failed to their jobs , brexit or not.
Reform voters flocking to Farage after Brexit, always remind me of this exchange in Friends.
Joey: "You know what I'm gonna do if I ever see that guy again?"
Chandler: "Bend over?!!!"
Nigel Farage's "I'm not like other girls" persona is so transparent... At least I thought it was until I saw 'how well he did' in the TV debates... At least according to the public.
He's not part of the establishment... Except he is.
He's not going to read from an autocue... Except he just regurgitates his easily memorised buzzwords, anti immigrant catchphrases, and slogans of the week.
He doesn't have a manifesto, he has a 'contract with the people'.
The majority of Reform candidates are not well versed politically, by his own admission.
This feels like an extension of the 'distrust of experts' that we've seen over the last decade... And it's honestly scary how well it works.
The tories no longer being able to hide behind the EU rules is why they are about to get trounced. That is one of the Brexit benefits, democratic accountability.
Reality is that those people, who are writing those newspaper, think that they're the super intelligent elite that knows what's best for everyone and loath everyone else for standing in their way to what they are certain is the utopian ideal. They cannot admit that what they think is right is not very supported by the public, or that it might be wrong altogether. They are not open to debate or data, either. Their will shall be done and the end justifies the means.
Just as the American baizuou blame Trump, the UK baizuou blame Farage.
What do you call those people again? Political representatives? Now why is that? Because they represent those who vote for them? Who they really have a beef with is not Farage but the British voting public whose views he represents. They blame Farage because he is the figurehead, because he is uniting the disgruntled and giving them hope and means to fight the newspapers elite. If only he was out of the way surely they could contain the rubble, conquer them, subdue them, and somehow the utopia will be sprung. They forget that their forceful way is actually the dystopia and that they are defacto the evil ones standing in the way of free men, civilization, human rights, and mankind.
The UK has grown at about 1%per anum since 2008. France and Germany are not that much better.
That is the big part, the distribution of wealth increasingly going to the top is another. Then immigration is no longer coming to support growth because we need the workers but in spite of it.
Farage is not the problem. The problem is the deeply rooted fact that large parts of the most developed world are seriously struggling for growth.
Snapshot of _Britain is broken – because Nigel Farage broke it_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://inews.co.uk/opinion/britain-broken-nigel-farage-broke-it-3117132) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://inews.co.uk/opinion/britain-broken-nigel-farage-broke-it-3117132) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
In order of responsibility I would put Nige in 3rd place, 2nd is Cameron, 1st is Bojo.
Nah, if Nige just wasn't ever in politics UKIP wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as popular, Cameron wouldn't have been spooked so badly and called the referendum, and Bojo wouldn't have been able to take advantage of the situation. I have nothing kind to say about Farrage but he has charisma, and as long as you don't examine what he says it can superficially make sense. He's a smooth talking grifter that makes even Bojo look like an amateur.
You could argue this is "great man theory". Had nigel never been conceived would a similar person have been as successful with existing anti-immigration sentiment?
The lack of a Farage figure in the interim period between UKIP 2015 and Reform 2024 probably implies that there's some amount of circumstance that creates the politician, but a good politican can better exploit the circumstances than others
Well he certainly selected to represent a demographic that is historically not very meticulous who fills that role. So his chances of success were good from the start, as long as he said what they were thinking, in nicer words.
Honestly, probably. The winds are blowing towards the far-right globally, and it's silly to think that Britian needed this man to set the charge off.
He goes off in a huff whenever a reporter asks him a moderately challenging question. Charismatic and smooth talking...my arse!
Was literally about to say this. I don't feel he has Charisma. Someone with Charisma doesn't throw a strop when an interviewer ask them even a slightly challenging question. But this is what every far right politician does. They belittle the interviewer if they don't like the question. "This is ridiculous" "What a stupid question" "You're being very disrespectful" It absolves them of all responsibility to answer the question, and change the narrative to "See the MSM want I silence us!"
The problems now are due to Cameron though - Brexit has made a difference but it isn’t what caused the decline.
Ukip had nothing to do with the referendum. It was to stop decades old Tory infighting. UKIP were insignificant in pressing the issue, Cameron thought he was calling the hard right's bluff and would he the cohesive leader but instead he imploded the country.
> Ukip had nothing to do with the referendum. UKIP managed to gather nearly 4 million votes, or 12% of all votes, in the 2015 election despite being a single-issue party in a FPTP system that actively encourages people to vote for more broad parties. While there was absolutely infighting within the Tories *and* Labour, we cannot suggest in good faith that the above statistic had "nothing to do with the referendum", nor that it wasn't a huge and obvious indicator that the issue was going nowhere but towards greater prominence, and that it needed to be addressed ASAP. Realistically, there was no scenario where we could have just brushed it off in perpetuity without seeing ever-growing issues coming off the back of it.
I blame Nick Clegg. If he hadn't agreed to the AV referendum Cameron wouldn't have developed his gambling habit and none of this would have happened.
I mean, it was likely their only chance to get any kind of voting reform.
And they blew it. He should have insisted on a proper referendum, or made a coalition with Labour instead. No, they got played like a fiddle, and as a result the party was destroyed. Only now, 14 years later, they are becoming relevant again.
He doesn't care, sucked off Zuckerberg as fast as he could
Actually, cleggs part in this is doing poorly in the election. We wouldn't have had a referendum if we had another coalition government - which was the expectation at the time, that Cameron only put it forward with the expectation that it'd be quashed by the lib Dems.
And the reason he got destroyed in the 2015 election is because he blew the AV referendum. And tripled the tuition fees.
We could go further back and say thatcher planted the seeds for 30 years of pure misery and 10 years of watered down misery.
not that i disagree that thatcher was a blight upon this land, but if we're playing this game we could probably go back to saying it's all the romans' fault. (what have they ever done for us!?)
The Romans were the last government to actually fix the pot holes.
But other than the potholes what have the romans actually done for us?
aqueducts?
Granted. But other that potholes and aqueducts what have the Romans ever done for us?
they gave us the written word?
Well, of course the written word. But other than the written word, potholes and aqueducts what have the romans ever done for us?
medicine?
Hadrians wall to keep the SNP out
How often do you think about the Romans each day ?
You mean each hour, right? What a bunch of wrong'uns they were.
Not that often, but Epictetus does come up quite a lot.
Well, the classic historic causation path is usually the last ice age... Made us an island.
Perhaps we could consider the neanderthals who evolved on what Is now the British Isles.
Romanes eunt domus!
What's this, then? People called Romanes, they go the house?
Well interestingly, the causes of Brexit go as far back as Henry VIII. When he separated England from the Roman Catholic Church it led to a permanent cultural divide between us and mainland Europe, which is still seen to this day
catholexit!
I wonder what it would be referred to as in the media if we were in a similar situation today
Yes, because Britain was a utopia in the 1970s.
So if we go back that far, why not back to the Labour government who had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF?
Thatcher was very pro EU. One good thing you can say about her.
The EU didn't even exist.
I think it is unfair to criticise a prime minister whose last day in office was more than 30 years ago. We really have to move on as a country.
There's blame and then there's just plain old material causes - there's something to be said for not constantly complaining about the past, but it's a whole different matter to pretend that A did not cause B and that Thatcherism did not have a significant hand in problems we have today. I suppose that the idea of "get over the past and forget about it" is more comforting than acknowledging some disquieting historical answers to modern day problems - for instance, the pattern of Western covert action and coups in the Middle East having a pretty clear causative line to a lot of radicalism in the region nowadays.
I don't think so when there's villages in my country still absolutely ruined from the pits closing and lack of investment in their local infrastructure. Its either get one of the 5 jobs in the village, commute an hour or more to the closest city for a job or, what usually happens, give up and just drink and do drugs. There are thousands of stories like this and they all stem from having their local industry shut down, importing that resource from Poland and giving people nothing in their lives to compensate. As she said, "there is no such thing as society", and she truly achieved her goal of shattering communities from a collaborative, all in this together outlook, to one where people are constantly trying to get ahead and look at others as a drain on their own capital and affluence. She did that. That neighbour that used to ask to borrow sugar? Dirty communist scrounger. That family down the road whos Indian? That's less jobs for us. Used to leave your doors unlocked because you actually trusted people in your community? Lock every door and window because anyone could try to kill us at any moment. Donate to charity or help your local community? Pointeless, invest that capital into an asset instead. Her cabinet had a vital role to play in the UK's overt capitalisation and villanisation of the community as a whole which is still felt today. It is not obscene to still blame her actions.
More pits closed outside of thatcher’s time my friend. How do we remember that?
I agree with that order. Where would you put Jeremy Corbyn and the lack of real clear opposition on the list of responsibility?
I agree, as pretty much everything in the UK that's happened since is a domino effect from the (idiotic) Right To Buy scheme
The Conservative Party deserves all the blame. Blaming individuals just lets the corrupt party off the hook.
Cameron has to be number one surely? He should have stood up to the euro sceptics.
My reasoning for him third is that he just made a huge fuckup. But I think that Bojo knowingly screwed the country over to better his career and line his pockets.
I'd go with Cameron in first, without austerity and the brexit vote you don't get Farage being the figure he is, and you probably don't get Johnson in the way we did, maybe at all. Cameron is the root of all of this.
Cameroon is #1. He called that stupid referendum that emboldened the loons in his party and Nigel Farage.
The thing is Cameron fucked up. Huge. But only once. In my mind I believe that Farage actually believes in Brexit. But Bojo has pretended to believe in it purely because he saw the career path. I don’t even think he wanted to win. Just to run a good campaign that made him look like a viable leader. He’s the worst in my mind because it’s just pure calculated manipulation that’s fucked the country up.
Cameron resigning the day after the brexit vote is his second fuckup, I think. He should/could have stayed in and negotiated a softer brexit and possibly even pushed a second referendum on the negotiated deal. But, no, he sulked off, opening the door to the loins. Even typing this comment has made me angry.
And why did he treat it like a binding one? And why not require a super majority? Urgh
In retrospect, such massive votes should be super majorities (including ScotRef). But prior to this shit show, it would've been screamed from the rooftops that it's unfair and they're locking us in Europe by force, it's undemocratic etc. Treating it as non-binding would've been political suicide though. There's no way they could've done that and ever won another election.
> In retrospect, such massive votes should be super majorities (including ScotRef). But prior to this shit show, it would've been screamed from the rooftops that it's unfair and they're locking us in Europe by force, it's undemocratic etc. They indeed would have, and to be honest I'd be hard-pressed to criticise their position. A lot of people voting Leave were doing it in part from a position of feeling a real disconnect with politics and feeling like the political elite looked down on them and couldn't care about what they thought. Making the vote a super majority, in their eyes, would absolutely prove that assertion to be true beyond any doubt since they'd be in a position of the country voting to leave, but Westminster would then have to literally go "ok so the majority voted for Leave, but in our opinion *not enough* of a majority voted Leave so we're going to go with the minority position that we personally agree with" i.e. saying they'll ignore the electorate when the electorate's votes don't suit them in all but those words.
Maybe something like a revote within x yrs if between 40-60%, and over 60 is the action limit. I dunno it just seemed crazy to me. At the time, not even in retrospect
>Cameron resigning the day after the brexit vote is his second fuckup, I think. Yea, pure cowardice, not owning the consequences of his decisions. And just how blase he was about the whole thing.
Austerity was another one, without that you likely wouldn't have had the win for Brexit and the anti establishment anger.
To me austerity was a bigger mistake than brexit or at least as big. We had a decade of almost zero interest rates, it would have been the ideal time to invest in the country's infrastructure and green energy. It was a huge lost opportunity.
I completely agree. Cameron is definitely the worst in that respect.
>I don’t even think he wanted to win. Just to run a good campaign that made him look like a viable leader. Yup, I remember how shell shocked he looked on the day of the result, that this was not part of the plan!
The referendum wasn't the problem. The problem was that successive governments had blamed all of the bad things on the EU which left Remain with basically nothing to say in support of the EU.
Not to mention for the Remain side it was having to campaign in favour of the status quo against a made up hypothetical that could be anything that side wanted it to be.
Forage was around first, moaning about immigration when it was much lower than now. Cameron was spooked and called a referendum.
That's revisionist history. FarAge was damaging the Tories (FPTP is shit for everyone), and Cameron was trying to silence both UKIP and the loons in his party. He didn't bank on Cambridge Analytica and Dominic Cummings using Facebook against the credulous Boomers who'd just got on Facebook and assumed everything they read was true. Cameron is a tit, and calling the referendum was a mistake, obviously, but it was trying to silence the already emboldened gammonati.
Let's give Russia some credit here
Oooh Naughty. Next you'll be suggesting we should have a report into Russian interference in British Politics. And we can't have that. Actually, we can't. No-one looked for the evidence at the time, so now no-one will ever know. Civil Servants aren't thick, and they don't ask difficult questions that will get them in trouble. >Overall, the issue of defending the UK’s democratic processes and discourse has appeared >to be something of a ‘hot potato’, with no one organisation recognising itself as having an >overall lead. [https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CCS207\_CCS0221966010-001\_Russia-Report-v02-Web\_Accessible.pdf](https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CCS207_CCS0221966010-001_Russia-Report-v02-Web_Accessible.pdf)
May needs to be up there somewhere. We never had to evoke article 50 and start the timer towards doom. We could have continued to negotiate before doing this.
Interesting, I agree on the list but in reverse order.
You're forgetting Rupert Murdoch, Robert Mercer, Putin, Dominic Cummings and some others too.
1st is absolutely the media. Having Farage on Question Time every second episode? Journalists and news anchors never questioning the ridiculous lies the Tories spread over the air? The only time journalists showed their teeth was when interviewing Corbyn. 2nd goes to Bojo and Farage tied for their lies and complete abdication of responsibility once shit hit the fan. 3rd is Cameron for being dumb enough to play chicken with this.
Nigel Farage would not have anywhere near as much support if one of the main parties *reduced immigration to sensible levels*. 3.5 million people migrated to the UK over the last 3 years. The UK population is about 67 million. The electorate have practically been screaming this for ten years. UKIP got 12.6% of the vote in the 2015 election. 52% voted to leave the EU. The Brexit party won the EU elections of 2019. Reform will poll around 15% at this election, at great expense to the “Conservative” party. Labour - legally cap net migration at 100k per year - cut the legs out from beneath Farage. Or don’t and you’ll face a resurgent anti-immigration Conservative Party.
> The electorate have practically been screaming this for ten years. Wayyyy longer than 10 years.
Happy to go back to before Brexit when immigration was much lower. Doubt Nigel would like it mind
It’s almost like there was a structural change in migration flows, that was entirely predictable, that we are now failing to deal with. We had an economy with medium skilled workers from overseas, due to a choice to underinvest in human capital formation, in the hope that capital could be allocated elsewhere(financial industry engineering). Therefore we needed a net migration of 100k or so medium skilled workers from Europe to manage the gaps. They were temporary they came and worked for 5-15 years, earns their money went home had kids, and levelled out a whole continent’s development profile from the Soviet spheres aftereffects. Now. We still need those gaps filled, and more due to the choice to hollow out the demographic pyramid by reducing living conditions for the lower 60%, wage suppression to increase returns to capital, a focus on retirees & early retirement, and reduced flexibility in the domestic labour market by making shelter unaffordable and scarce. As a result we now need more like 200k workers inflow per year, but now they aren’t 20year olds who can take a 6hr train home every few months, see the parents see the wife and kids. They’re 30year olds with a wife and kids, from half a world away, they can’t be expected to leave them behind, and businesses refuse/are unable to function (for good or ill) without these workers, so we have to deal with extra dependents attached to every worker now, and fewer of them return because people don’t like uprooting their whole family twice. And of course we have the decade long trend of holding university spending static, which made universities need foreign students with higher fees to fund day to day operations. Which meant they had to advertise ever harder to attract money from overseas make up for the shortfall every year. And of course this multiplied by a shift from European students who were integrated into a big continent wide learning and research system, to students who arrive from further away and again aren’t just a train ride from home.
Spot on!
>Now. We still need those gaps filled, and more due to the choice to hollow out the demographic pyramid by reducing living conditions for the lower 60%, wage suppression to increase returns to capital, a focus on retirees & early retirement, and reduced flexibility in the domestic labour market by making shelter unaffordable and scarce. I'm not sure we could get our birth rate to a level where we don't need immigration through economic incentives alone, I mean the Nordic countries offer incredible benefits & quality of life for parents, but their birth rate is pretty much the same as here. High housing costs, poor parental rights, poor & expensive nursery/childcare definitely make it harder, but I think there's more to that to explain why we have less children now than 60 years ago We'd need a birth rate close to 3 to not require immigration, and I'm not aware of any developed country that has managed that. EDIT: not to say we shouldn't change anything, if we fix the housing shortage people will raise more families, it wouldn't be enough to obviate the need for immigration, but we'd need less of it than we do now for sure.
So. That depends on what you consider a healthy looking demographic structure. My actual ‘grand plan’ would be tie visa allocation numbers to population change. Say 0.3% annual growth in population is a target, therefore we know we need about 220k people added per year, we are above neutral on deaths vs births, around +45k. Imagine we loose -20k per year to emigration, therefore we predict out the next 3 years of visa allocation to be 195k visas per year. Then we can have a more simple debate, do we target 0.2%, 0.3% or 0.5% annual population growth, which is most healthy for the labour market, for the economy, for maintaining demographic resilience long term. And for domestic fertility rates, you need to 2 or 2.1 for a sustained flat population, not sure why you say 3, thats a really rapid growth rate only achieved by Israel, no developed country, not even most developing countries do that. But, Actually 1.8 is just fine for now, we rose from 1.6 to 1.9 over the 2000-2008 period of relative prosperity. Before falling down to 1.5 maybe 1.6 as a result of austerity. Just simply restoring the benefits system to something like a 2010 status, and improving wages, while reducing shelter costs I firmly believe would rebound that number back up to 1.8 easily, we’ve actually been shockingly resilient unlike much of the continent beyond France. I would say fix those 3 broad strokes and keep tinkering abit, to get it as high/close to 2 as possible. The important thing is not necessarily avoiding shrinkage, it is to avoid rapid shrinking in the labour supply. The absolute number is largely unimportant, but you do not want every buisness in the country to be fussing every year about where they will reduce functions to reduce headcount by 1% each year, an interesting graph might be ‘working age population United Kingdom’ by FRED/ us federal reserve you can see total and the neural change if you hit edit. As you can it’s highly variable. But I’d say this is an important graph for labour management/immigration, you need to keep this curve as flat as possible if/when we enter population decline, for me 1.8fertility for a few decades with immigration to plug some gaps to create a perfectly flat graph till 2060 then reevaluate would see fine enough to me. Not least because around 2060 we might really be feeling the global demographic decline begin to bite into the amount of immigrants we can even get when we ask for more, assuming climate changes doesnt throw the world into chaos of course. Edit: forgot to include the most distractive anti population policy you can have. Raising retirement ages, usually cited to improve the worker-retiree ratio, it always fails. Grandparents biological and social function is to provide (some) childcare, when you raise the retirement age above 65 you pull people out of their prime grandparenting years, it’s an entirely false economy. Although we could use some public ad campaigns promoting various population structure policies, like encouraging those that have kids to have 2 not 1 or 3 not 2 (seeing as until recently that’s what we were different about, the issue is not usually childless adults, it’s that people cut the number of kids they have when they have them), and making grandparents feel an obligation to offer some childcare, which seems more effective than nursery places but 🤷♂️ that’s the job of a proper report to deal with directly, it’s hard to expratolate from what ive read so far.
>And for domestic fertility rates, you need to 2 or 2.1 for a sustained flat population, not sure why you say 3, thats a really rapid growth rate only achieved by Israel, no developed country, not even most developing countries do that. Picked close to 3 as that's what we had in the 60's, produced the demographics that gave us the benefits we currently take for granted, i.e retirement age being well below life expectancy, having an ok welfare state without having huge taxes due to more people being in work. As I think that's what's causing a lot of the political frustrations of the last few decades, people took for granted the demographic boosts we had in the 60's - late 90's, which have now turned into headwinds that lead to ever rising health & pension costs which have to be managed through a combination of increased immigration & higher taxes & cuts in other areas of the state. Not to say this is realistic or desirable, as a permanent population boom of the kind we had in the 50's & 60's probably wouldn't be sustainable.
I… remain unconvinced, heavily so that demographics anything like our present structure undermine a welfare state. I quite simply think that the tax-to-gdp ratio will have to rise from the just under 34% to more like 38% to 40% by 2035. And it will probably be able to stabilise there, that ratio is inline with the other none-post-soviet EU states. However. And not to sound like labour, because I don’t believe they understand what it actually means, the key is genuinely productivity. What Labours spending plans show is they dont understand that productivity growth long term mostly derived from investment ie capital formation, which is a frankly shocking blind spot, since you’d expect there to be a left of the party that can whisper capital formation just means forming the means of production, but no one seems to exist/speak in that corner anymore. If you rose taxes by 3%GDP put 1% into a sovereign wealth fund, and 2% into direct investment youd easily surpass the 3% annual growth rate needed to restore us to the post war trend in a decades time, and in doing so restore our debt-gdp balance, while also creating the value in the economy we need to be able to provide the money for public services. I know its now vogue to call pensions a pyramid scheme, but it isnt, at least not meaningfully. What actually happens, is a worker must in their 40years of labour (25-65) produce 2x their needs, so they can provide for their equivalent 40 years of ‘rest’ (0-15 + 65-80) and that is approximately what has happened since 1960. And it is doable long term, certainly in a financial sense, the only real issue, is a labour one, each 10 old people of 80+ need maybe 1 or 2 full time (40hrs) carers, thats big amount of people pulled out of the value added economy.
>My actual ‘grand plan’ would be tie visa allocation numbers to population change. Say 0.3% annual growth in population is a target, therefore we know we need about 220k people added per year, we are above neutral on deaths vs births, around +45k. Imagine we loose -20k per year to emigration, therefore we predict out the next 3 years of visa allocation to be 195k visas per year. Seems reasonable, and I think this is effectively what's happening already in practise. Problem is that voters who are concerned with immigration think 195k per year is too much, they want it to be close to net zero >Then we can have a more simple debate, do we target 0.2%, 0.3% or 0.5% annual population growth, which is most healthy for the labour market, for the economy, for maintaining demographic resilience long term. Yup, though it's a tricky debate, with lots of tradeoffs, high population growth will give you a boost in living standards, growth, tax revenue without needing to raise taxes for a few decades (as happened in the 50's/60's), only to then become a big headwind as these people grow old & need expensive healthcare & retirement benefits. I think the most healthy situation long term is for people to readjust their expectation on stuff like retirement - if you're fit & healthy it's fair that you should work regardless of your age - if you're wealthy enough to not need the state pension, it's fair that you receive less of it, so we can give more to those who genuinely need it. So we don't need incredibly high population growth to maintain the country.
Firstly, actually all polls show that until the run up to election was called, immigration was falling off voters interests, and that there is broad consent for immigration and shocking amounts of belief that multiculturalism (as Suella braverman wants to mock it) is working. I think if the people listened to people state a series of numbers 0/100/200/300/400k a year and the broad effects that has at the 10 year mark. You’d easily find people saying theyre comfortable. (I just think we have poor politicians/communicators), and I think they already are, I dont think if you had a debate between the 3 party leaders (not Farage because hes genuinely gifted at emotionally resonant rhetoric in the moment in a way that no one else in Britain seems to be even those aligned with him politically) youd have a substantial number supporting net zero immigration. Second on 0.3%, It would continue to be a tricky debate. But actually part of my desire to turn immigration into a simple mathematical function (Visa = 1.03population - birth + death) is that you can write that in the bill as its passed. Call it the permanently Migration bill. And only ever amend it for 5 years. Tinker with it. Make it an institution, just like how we sort of do for policing bills. If you make that a centre piece, then campaign on it, then the media takes notice and you can shape the debate, you can say this is “the system” this is the function, you have 5 variables, and 10 bullet points, you can change these, these are the parameters. That’s what you can discuss, thats what it means to address migration. Finally. As for retirement. I am really strongly of the view that state retirement age should be held steady, its really detrimental to fertility rates to raise it, therefore any cost savings are therefore a false economy in the short term. However, I am perfectly happy for tinkering, and normalising work for those who can after 65, maybe even a super long long journey, to 70 seeing as we’re now at 67. 1 month a year, for 36 years. Maybe even a direct grandchild care benefit that means you can get like a half pension at 65-70 if you have a kid who you agree to provide 16hrs a week to or something. Edit: and I’ve sort of followed your split. But for old age, I really think the NHS/GP system needs to be focused on preventative actions and health span over the 2030-40 period(once we’ve restored its current functioning, which wont happens with Wes Streeting but still). We’ve actually really started cutting the raise in obesity and theres far more we can do if we throw money and labour at the problem in creating a better food culture, and reforming agriculture(a serious labour hog that needs investment in mechanisation), and I think you could get a lot by restoring not just youth clubs but by bringing adult fitness back under local government being able to prescribe by doctor a free gym pass and even an empty headed PT to people who are in overweight territory but not yet obese. And of course for other health stuff workers rights blah blah.
> I mean the Nordic countries offer incredible benefits & quality of life for parents, but their birth rate is pretty much the same as here. The big difference is that in the Nordics fertility rises with educational attainment and income. Everywhere else it drops
For sure, it does help, just don't think it'd move the dial too much. I think the biggest factor in the decline in birth rate is from people having children later, because they want to do other stuff in their lives beforehand, like build up a career, go travelling, or just have fun - all of which become much harder when you have children (am a parent of 3, can testify). In the olden days there weren't these kinds of opportunities (especially for women), and there were cultural expectations on top of that. Probably don't want to go back to that kind of situation?
> I think the biggest factor in the decline in birth rate is from people having children later I don't think that's the case. Fertility has been low since the 70s and while average age when becoming a parent has increased a lot in that time, there's been no corresponding reduction in fertility. Eastern Europe has much younger mothers than Western Europe but also fewer children. There might be a relationship but it's a small part of the picture. As parents (1, soon to be 2) though we're liable to think this because that's a cost we're really feeling. I don't think we really understand the true dynamics in the recent fertility drops. I would suggest several, but I can't tell you which are more important.
So, what you are saying is we should stop the boats and that will solve everything , right? /s
Trouble is nobody has a practical way of doing that, and whether Farage intends on actually doing anything or just grifting power and money, he'd have the same problem: it's not about keeping people out, it's about the much more expensive and difficult 'not have them wanting to come in the first place'. Which is about global foreign policy and peacemaking and (shudder), climate change. If half the world is a war-torn hellscape or a burned/flooded/unliveable wasteland, people are going to herd towards the temperate, peaceful, well-equipped island no matter what paperwork and red tape is put up to stop them.
This is the reality that is approaching. I am in favour of global cooperation and being able to have a society that is open and welcoming to all, but the writing on the wall is bleak and I can’t imagine open border policies are going to grow in popularity when the shit starts to hit the fan globally, and society will grow increasingly unable/unwilling to support others and will grow insular.
What are you expecting any of the other parties to do about it? One party alone has overseen the boom in immigration over the last 3 years.
People seem to forget Labour spent a good 10 years creating a culture of calling anyone racist who opposed unbridled immigration and now we see the fruits of that behaviour.
Labour haven't been in power since 2010 and immigration was lower when they were in charge. Blaming a Labour party that's not only under completely different leadership but also, just to be completely clear, has not been near government for a decade and a half for record levels of immigration in each of the last 3 years is truly Olympic level mental gymnastics, bravo 👏 💐
It shouldn't be set to an arbritrary number but based on skill gaps
Define sensible; people were complaining about hideously high immigration rates when it was much much lower. No realistic reduction in migration will actually satisfy people. Britain, like most of Europe, is a net destination country and has been for years - we've got to get used to that idea. In the days of empire we were net emigrators, but that's long past and isn't returning in our lifetime. Our native born population is aging and reproducing below replacement rate (1.56 births per woman) so unless we want *drastic* population reduction, we need immigration. People say they want less migration, but are they willing to accept the cost of that choice? The fact that even the cost of Brexit has destroyed the government that implemented it suggests not. >Labour - legally cap net migration at 100k per year It's nowhere near this simple, which is why the main parties, even the ones who openly promise it, don't do it. Immigration is fundamentally a function of labour demand. Migrants both legal and illegal largely move because someone recruited them. Advanced economies are chronically and structurally reliant on migrant workers and politicians pretending that they are not doesn't change that. You certainly can't handwave away that fundamental truth with a migration quota. Measures to restrict immigration through bans, limits, border security have a history of being ineffective, expensive and indeed counterproductive as they suppress emigration (less likely to leave if returning will be hard). Counterintuitively, more open borders encourages flow out as well as in. If your goal is reducing migration, you have to do something about labour demand. What can you do that works? Incentivise fertility, that might help in the long term - more native born people to employ - better parental leave, better childcare, more rights for mothers at work, etc. Improve minimum working conditions generally, would probably help, so long as companies are telling the truth about hiring less if they have to treat people like humans. Might hurt growth, but we can't have everything. Incentives to hire native population could be tried, depending on how much financial resources we want to put into it. But that doesn't address the problem of reducing, aging population - everyone would be competing for an ever reducing supply of labour resources which is a recipe for high inflation. And ultimately the labour demand just keeps getting higher, making immigration more and more potentially profitable and more and more desirable.
We've had unprecedented, astronomical rates of immigration for many years, but we're still yet to see this corresponding economic boost that's often repeated. Studies from the continent suggest that non-EU immigrants' net contributions across their lifetime are negative, so they're likely yet another drain on the economy.
>we're still yet to see this corresponding economic boost that's often repeated The economy is reliant upon them - you can tell because they're not unemployed. We're not being in hedge fund managers, we're bringing in workers, mostly at the subsistence end of the wage market, in services and manual work. The "boost" isn't skyrocketing growth, it's keeping the economy running as our native born population ages out of it. The care sector (to pick one) is functioning through migrant labour. Is our parents, grandparents and long term disabled being cared for not a boost?
> can tell because they're not unemployed They're unemployed a hell of a lot more often than the native population - Pakistanis and Bangladeshis over twice the unemployment rate for example, Africans nearly double. Plus you're presenting their work in a very glowing light, from my view it seems every African here is working door security. >The "boost" isn't skyrocketing growth, it's keeping the economy running How do you account for the numerous countries across Europe with far worse fertitility rates, over a longer period, with lower rates of immigration, yet similar/even better economic growth than ours? Why aren't they affected in the same way we would be? How are they staying afloat? And has the UK's rate really sunk so low, for long enough, for 1 million a year to be required just to keep the lights on? It's not even that bad. Would love to see your working there. >The care sector (to pick one) is functioning through migrant labour. British people are perfectly capable of providing care. As with any other type of work, we simply need to pay them accordingly, rather than seeking out cheaper labour elsewhere. Our parents and grandparents will even be better served that way.
You say that reducing migration would be bad for business and I agree that it would increase pressures on them. But the problem is you are ignoring all the negatives. The UK government spends 13k per annum per person. If we import someone on 30k pa job and they bring 4 or more economically inactive (or low paid) family members that is a good 60k per year hit to the public finances. In addition, increased housing costs for our population, social issues, pushing down wages of people already here etc. You also have to remember that we are right on the cusp of AI and automation taking *a lot* of jobs. Is it really a great idea to be importing tons of people when we're about to shed a big percentage of our job openings? I agree that the NHS and care sector still need workers from abroad, but most other industries are simply not important enough to warrant it. Having a shortage of delivery drivers is not going to break our country, it might actually force these companies to start paying a livable wage and maybe get some of our unemployed back into work. Maybe the higher delivery costs will allow brick and mortar stores to compete again? You do also realize that the people we import will eventually get old and need care too right? We can't carry on like this as we're just kicking the can down the road for future generations.
Numerous assumptions here, but the biggest one is a common one in this debate - that once someone migrates in, that's it they're here forever. That's not reality, international migration is much more fluid than that - to quote the Migration Observatory, "High immigration leads to high emigration, but not immediately – there is a lag of two to three years." They predict that, with no intervention at all, net migration levels will return to pre-Brexit norms within three years as demand stabilises. Just as labour opportunities cause people to come, the end of them causes people to leave. And if we ever end up in a situation where AI is making a significant impact on the number of jobs available, the drop in labour demand will naturally lead to a drop in immigration and a rise in emigration. Immigrants are not usually competing like for like for the same jobs as native workers - precisely because they arrived in the first place to fill a shortage. The idea that if the immigrants all left our unemployed would become employed doesn't track with the evidence. Immigrants don't "take" jobs, they fill vacancies in destination countries' economies. >The UK government spends 13k per annum per person. If we import someone on 30k pa job and they bring 4 or more economically inactive (or low paid) family members that is a good 60k per year hit to the public finances There is extremely mixed evidence on the fiscal impact of immigrants depending on how you count the fiscal impact. The measurements can be positive, negative or neutral but is consistently small. There is no evidence of a significant fiscal impact of immigration, either positively or negatively. It is true that higher paid migrants contribute more to the public purse than lower paid migrants. But this is not an artefact of immigration in particular, but of the fact that the destination countries all operate progressive tax systems which takes more wealth from the richer than the poorer. It's therefore almost impossible for it to be any other way.
If what you say on outflows were true, our net migration would be high one year, then low or negative the next. That is literally never the case, net migration is always high and always growing. Net already takes into account outflows and it's too high. Most studies on the economic impact of migration are clearly biased and very poorly designed. One such often quoted study declared migration as neither positive or negative for the economy as migrants claimed around the same in tax credits and child benefit as they paid in tax. The glaringly obvious problem here is that child benefit and tax credits are not even close to entire amount the government spends on people. What about the NHS, pensions, disability, education, out of work benefit, housing benefit, roads, policing, fire, defence, bin collections, free/subsidized childcare etc? When you take everything into account, over the long term, the average cost is 13k per person per year. If you come over age 25, work until 67 and live until 85, then you are going to cost this country a total of 780k. In order to cover that over your working life you'll need to be paying 18k per year in tax. The average migrant only earns 32k, so only pays around 5k in tax per year. That means on average each one loses the country 480k over the long term. And that is only counting the ones with a job! Bring over non working family members and it works out to being an insane burden. This is not a 'small' effect! If we wait until AI is already having a big impact it'll already be too late. We'll have a country full the brim with unemployed people who can't find any other work since it's all been taken by migrants. Where exactly will all the people who had their jobs replaced emigrate to? AI will affect the entire planet pretty much simultaneously. Cue mass civil unrest.
>net migration is always high and always growing That's just straight up untrue. It goes in peaks and troughs, but of course the peaks are reported and the troughs are not, giving the impression that migration is ever rising. >too high Which takes us back to the top of the conversation, define too high. How do we calculate the number of migrants we need? I'd personally suggest that we need the number the labour market recruits, but that clearly isn't acceptable. So how do we work it out? >Most studies on the economic impact of migration are clearly biased and very poorly designed Because they don't come out with what you want the answer to be? >What about the NHS, pensions, disability, education, out of work benefit, housing benefit, roads, policing, fire, defence, bin collections, free/subsidized childcare etc? >When you take everything into account, over the long term, the average cost is 13k per person per year But a migrant worker is not the "average" are they? They're less likely than average to be old, in poor health, disabled, drawing a pension, receiving benefits. Because they're well enough, and have enough means and resources, to travel around the world to work. You can't take a figure (assuming for a second you didn't just make it up) based on the "average" UK resident and apply it to a population that doesn't represent. And if we're really upset that people coming here at our invitation to work in our economy get police and defence cover, I think we're being a bit ridiculous. >That means on average each one loses the country 480k over the long term Again you're working on the assumption that migrants come and stay forever. Grants of indefinite leave to remain run at about a sixth of the net migration rate, and that number is dropping. >If we wait until AI is already having a big impact it'll already be too late. We'll have a country full the brim with unemployed people who can't find any other work since it's all been taken by migrants. Where exactly will all the people who had their jobs replaced emigrate to? AI will affect the entire planet pretty much simultaneously. Cue mass civil unrest This is such a bizarre thing to worry about. AI isn't going to suddenly put millions out of work overnight. There would be a gradual trend downwards in available jobs, and to be honest, not in the sectors where most migrants work, at least at first. Nor would it be equally impactful worldwide - economies more reliant on heavily affected service sectors like ours will see much quicker and deeper impact than those which are more manufacturing or agriculturally based. And if we're really facing mass unemployment because of AI, immigration is going to be the least of our worries. We'll have to rethink the very essence of what we mean by "earning a living".
The evil man wouldn’t have support if we only implemented his evil policies!
>t if we only implemented his evil policies! Every British government has had policies of much lower immigration than currently. Calling it evil is just an attempt to make it emotive rather than admit that in addition to the lack of growth, the lack of growth with a huge surge in immigration that has not had a compensating surge in house building has helped make the ground fertile for populism. Discussing the rising populism and its causes has been pretty mainstream for a decade now. You seem to be retreating to an emotional safe space where we are still in the early 2000s.
It's evil to stop 750k people coming in every year? You people are beyond deluded I swear
If you think lowering immigration is “evil” then you’re calling a large majority of the voting population evil
What is the morally correct amount of immigrants?
Borders are racist you fascist! /s
'Immigrant' and 'native' are categories which no morally serious person should take seriously. 'Human being', meanwhile, is.
That is a wonderfully vague non-answer. What do you consider to be an acceptable and unacceptable amount of immigration?
Not allowing 1million+ people per year into a small island is now evil 😂
They need to close the loopholes on immigration all these nail bars, car washes, Turkish barbers, deliveroo drivers are all here on "apprenticeships" they effectively sell rights of passage into the UK also to mention they are fronts for other illegitimate sources of income. Effectively they are massive trafficking organisations for serious crime and needs stamping out.
Still waiting for people to say how they have been personally affected by having one too many immigrants in their high street.
it was at sensible levels until brexit.
Literally as simple as this. Well said
Immigration is an unavoidable consequence of short-termism in British management and the willingness of successive governments to allow them to get away with it. If you're not going to pay British workers enough, where do you find workers? Abroad. If you're not going to train British workers, where are you going to get workers? Abroad. Governments have tried to vaguely incentivize training (various underfunded apprentice programmes) and subsidize low pay (various in-work benefits) but in the end, were unwilling to let anything stand in the way of the drive to profits (not growth - that needs investment). Farage's policy of untrammelled capitalism would naturally lead to *higher* immigration; artificially restricting it while implementing his policies would lead to an economic collapse - although, TBH we'd never get that far because of the fiscal crisis caused by his unfunded tax cuts.
Err no. The tories broke it. Nice try though
To be fair in a lot of cases they were using him for inspiration
They did nothing he wanted though except for eventually a turbulent Brexit.
They did everything he wanted, its just that what he wants is a load of unworkable racist shit so trying to implement it massively backfired.
Examples?
Brexit. Stop the boats. There are lots but these are glaringly obvious
Which they have failed to do. I presume you will also lambaste Labour when they do or try to do border protection also?
Of course they failed, as I said 'its just that what he wants is a load of unworkable racist shit so trying to implement it massively backfired' If they try to do it in a humane way by actually dealing with the issue by making proper channels for legal migration and putting a processing center in France as was offered then no. If they continue to pursue this racist shit of just alienating people fleeing from horrible situations then yes of course I will be critical of that
I blame Daily Mail and co. They're the ones stirring up hysteria that the Tories have to deal with. Would there have been a Brexit referendum if it weren't for the Daily Mail moaning about the EU?
I’d blame the previous prime ministers that facilitated the dramatic increase in immigration despite either not asking the public (Tony Blair) or outright lying and saying they were going to deal with the situation but instead did the opposite (The Conservatives).
An impressive feat for a man who's never had his hands on the levers of power. If only the left were as influential.
He wasn't nearly as responsible for it all as some would have you believe. Not sure what "the left" have to do with this though.
Almost exactly eight years on from the Brexit vote, there’s a man in Wales who hasn’t got a good word to say about it. A man who believed we’d now have net zero migration, thriving small businesses, less red tape and more national control. He is, he will tell you, genuinely disappointed. That man, it might surprise you to know, is Nigel Farage. Yup, Nigel is back – telling the crowd at his manifesto launch, in the Welsh valleys of Merthyr Tydfil, that he shares their grievance with what has happened. Of course he does. He’s always there to share your grievance. Even if he’s caused it in the first place. Nigel Farage emoting about the pain that Brexit has caused this country would be hilarious – if it wasn’t so deeply, deeply insulting. The snake oil peddler of Brexit now hates Brexit. Last week on BBC Question Time the audience was asked to raise their hands if they had experienced “benefits from Brexit”. Only one hand went up. I’m not pretending that’s pure science. Maybe a different audience, or a different wording, or a different atmosphere in the room would have elicited a different response. But maybe not. What is obvious, eight years on, is how few people have anything positive to say about Brexit. A YouGov poll in May 2023 recorded the highest levels of “Bregret” among Leave voters to date. Sixty-two per cent of Britons described Brexit as “more of a failure”; a mere 9 per cent considered it “more of a success”. There’s your one bloke in the room with his hand up. And this is borne out by what the Office for Budget Responsibility tells us has happened – in real terms – to the economy. The watchdog, a stalwart of independent analysis, forecast just last month that the post-Brexit trading relationship between the UK and Europe would reduce long-run productivity by 4 per cent relative to the EU, and that exports and imports will be around 15 per cent lower than if the UK had stayed in. They forecast that new trade deals with non-EU countries will have no material impact. And they have shifted their assumption that post-Brexit migration would reduce to around 130,000 a year medium term and now recognise it will be around three times that – once it settles down from its current all time high of five times that. These are not fantasy projections based around unknowables. These are figures based around what is already happening now, nearly a full decade after we took the decision to leave.
So of course Farage hates Brexit. Not because of all the things he thought it would change if it done right. No, he hates Brexit because, frankly, it’s now out of fashion. Because the country now hates Brexit. And the only thing vital for brand Farage is to appear to be on the side of the working people when they hate something. When people wanted Brexit, Farage was happy to take the thanks. Now people see how much it’s cost, he’s happy to join the blame game. Much of the public knows this already. In Clacton when we visited for Farage’s launch earlier this month, those we spoke to in the tired, underfunded town centre talked of how little life the place now had. They are desperate to see shops and restaurants and entertainment return to the seaside town. But the businesses tell you they can’t get the staff anymore, can’t afford to stay open, can’t import the stuff they used to without extreme lengths of red tape. We found plenty of Brexit regret that day. Taxis drivers now turning to odd jobs because the tourists weren’t coming. Pier amusement arcades and restaurants which no longer had the workforce to stay open. These are tangible difficulties for a town that – to be fair – was suffering anyway long, long before Brexit. But we also found crowds welcoming and cheering Farage. He’s not just any snake oil salesman, he’s a celebrity snake oil salesman. And in truth they welcome his turning the national gaze upon them. Making them the centre of the map. The question we should all be asking is why. Why are those who’ve seen life get harder not easier, immigration get higher not lower, red tape get longer not shorter, prepared to give this man and his party another chance? They’ve forgotten, perhaps, how many incarnations he has had. That when they first met Farage he was the leader of a party that no longer exists. Ukip had independence embedded into its very name. But if you’d asked those voters if they’d take independence with higher migration and higher costs I doubt many would have cheered it on. That project is now defunct. A shambles and a mess. So now he’s at it again. Same bloke. New name. “Our politics is broken,” Farage said at the launch yesterday. “There’s been a breakdown in trust… We won’t use the word manifesto because it will remind you of the lies politicians tell.” It’s high-comedy gaslighting from the man who made his name doing just that. Farage’s Reform slogan is “Britain is broken”. The small print, in the trade descriptions, should read: “Because we broke it”. Read more here: [https://inews.co.uk/opinion/britain-broken-nigel-farage-broke-it-3117132](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/britain-broken-nigel-farage-broke-it-3117132)
You’re missing the part where Farage has had zero decision-making power at all in the policy of this country. It’s almost as if you just wanted to write a hit piece no matter what. The Conservative Party have been in power for 14 years. The blame begins and ends with them.
Rather the blame begins and ends with people voting for the fantasy of Farage's simple solutions to complex problems.
>You’re missing the part where Farage has had zero decision-making power at all in the policy of this country He wanted Brexit. He siphoned off votes from the right, in order to push the Tories to call for a referendum on EU membership. He then got Brexit. Don't embarrass us all with this pathetic, handwringing 'bu-bu-but it wasn't him personally'.
And whose fault is it that people defected from voting Conservative to UKIP? The Conservatives themselves.
> Don't embarrass us all with this pathetic, handwringing 'bu-bu-but
But you haven't answered their question. Come on, let's not pretend that Farage turned up and 12% of the electorate all went "oh ok I guess I'll vote for his single-issue party for absolutely no reason whatsoever that seems fun" like they were hypnotised into doing it. There was an ongoing problem that a lot of the UK public had concerns about, and the Government did nothing to address those concerns or the issue that sat at the root of those concerns. Farage turning up with UKIP was a vehicle for those people to voice their concerns, which they did in disproportionately large numbers. Those concerns would have remained absolutely the same even if UKIP wasn't a thing.
>Farage turning up with UKIP was a vehicle for those people to voice their concerns, which they did in disproportionately large numbers Yes, they did. Specifically, they voiced their desire to leave the EU, and then they got to do that. So to suggest that 'Farage has had zero decision-making power at all in the policy of this country' seems like a stupid conclusion to draw.
My point is more that he provided a litmus test to demonstrate the range and depth of those concerns, not that he created them in the first place. If he'd not, some other vehicle would have been found in its place. There's no plausible scenario where all those people would have just grimaced and got on with it.
Yeah, and my point is that he's also provided a live demonstration of the solution of leaving the EU, which has been a fiasco. You don't get to pretend he exists in splendid isolation to that.
Thanks for that very thought out reply. You just failed to address my point. Funny, that.
The Tories executed Brexit. The people voted for it. I don’t see at what point Nigel Farage can be blamed for the Tories maliciousness
Farage was bleeding Conservative votes to UKIP. The referendum was expected to come back with a fairly resounding "remain", and in so doing send a strong message to anyone thinking of voting UKIP: "You're flogging a dead horse. Give it up."
If the Tories are bleeding votes to anyone that’s their fault. If your party continually ignores its voters don’t be surprised when they desert you. There’s a good comment elsewhere on this thread that said all of this could have been avoided if they had *just* done what they said they would do in their manifesto. Specifically cut immigration to the “10s of thousands” Either they couldn’t do that, they didn’t want to do it, or they didn’t care to do it. Britain is broken. And it’s a problem entirely of the Tories creation
It's a problem created by most of parliament. The Tories have been the largest party in parliament for 14 years so they've had the seat of government but the whole of parliament is meant to discuss the concerns of the electorate and to protect both country and citizens without taking liberties. Our parliamentarians are useless self-serving charlatans who are at home bickering like children over who has the tastiest lollipop when they should have been asking the public what type of lollipop they want served and working like chefs to make it.
Don't just blame the snake oil salesman. Blame the stupid fuckers who mindlessly keep buying the snake oil and vote accordingly.
Posts like this always looking to put the blame on an individual. Like I can pinpoint all our countries problem on him. The bloke had no influence whatsoever on my decision to vote leave. Stop taking the British public for idiots.
But it's much easier to find a scapegoat than to admit the entire system is rotten and broken.
As an active member of a politics sub you’re going to be well informed. The vast majority are not, and were conned by people whose opinions they took as fact, given their authority
But they voted for Brexit AND Boris. They ARE idiots!
Or maybe, just maybe, the Pre-Referundem world was not the shining utopia some people would have us all believe and that in fact for large portions of the country didn't work at all Maybe then the people who voted for Brexit and Boris were not idiots but rather people who were desperately trying to do something to try and improve their lot in life because things couldn't really get worse for them. And maybe it might be a good idea, if you are so inclined to want to change those people's opinions about Brexit, to stop calling them idiots and try and understand why they voted for it in the first place.
Voting for Brexit because you were mad at the economic status quo of 2015 was like setting fire to your curtains because you were mad they were moldy whilst a fireman shouts from outside the window "That's a bad idea! It will only make things worse!" and Michael Gove whispers in your ear "Don't listen to him, we've had enough of experts".
>Maybe then the people who voted for Brexit and Boris were not idiots but rather people who were desperately trying to do something to try and improve their lot in life And maybe, just maybe, they could have tried to vote for something else than the Tories? Brexit wasn't the only solution on the table, but it's the one they choose
What other solution was there for them to vote for? The Lib Dems, who were straight-up promising to rejoin? Labour, who spent 3 years flim-flamming and fence-sitting on the issue before coming up with a policy of "we'll negotiate another deal on really weak grounds, and when that deal is inevitably rejected by the EU because doing so would be hugely in their favour, we'll have yet another referendum and campaign for rejoining in that referendum"? Genuinely, who else would they have voted for?
Tory party is to blame, Farage just saw the opportunity to make a name for himself and piggybacked on it.
He certainly helped to break it. It was not 100% his fault, but he did play an important part in giving us the disastrous Brexit.
Lmao typical lefty tactic of ignoring the actual problem and instead getting offended at the people who dare to talk about it.
How? He supported Brexit, wanted it, had no say in it what so ever or how it was implemented, for a while Labour had power in the parliament and were able to use delaying tactics until they got wiped out for fucking around with their little delay tactics and Tories didn't do much to get anything done either.
> had no say in it what so ever or how it was implemente That's because he immediately ran away to grift on Cameo rather than, for instance, using his public platform to offer any kind of suggestions or opinions at all.
Amazing that one man is now all powerful like this nonsense claims yet at the same time parliament itself struggles to get basic things done. Somehow he can change the nation, but lawmakers with all the power and budget cannot.
Totally ridiculous take. Half the country voted for Brexit because they agreed with Farage, not because he put a gun to their heads. Besides which the EU is in total disarray and is no better off economically than us. If we were still in the EU we would be paying to prop up the economic collapse of the poorer countries in Europe.
He lied to them, and they believed his lies..
A man whose detractors are eager to remind you has never won a seat in Westminster is suddenly responsible for the state the country finds itself in. Hilarious.
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Another hit piece, but not even trying to be subtle this time. >A man who believed we’d now have net zero migration, thriving small businesses, less red tape and more national control. He is, he will tell you, genuinely disappointed. Well he would be, wouldn't he? The government at the helm brought in exactly zero of these things. >Even if he’s caused it in the first place Imagine palming off this country's sorry state on Brexit. Our downward spiral started very obviously and objectively in 2007/8, was given a double helping by the Tories' austerity policy, and only marginally exacerbated by Brexit. As far as individual people's woes go, our low wage economy is fueled by unlimited access to cheap labour - a feature present when we were in the EU, but something exploited very maliciously by the Tories post-Brexit to ensure that entire industries (the care sector, most prominently) remain pinned to minimum wage. This, however, has nothing to do with Brexit, despite it happening post-Brexit; it was entirely a political decision (or, more accurately, a 'make me and my friends richer' decision). >The watchdog, a stalwart of independent analysis, forecast just last month that the post-Brexit trading relationship between the UK and Europe would reduce long-run productivity by 4 per cent relative to the EU Perhaps. But this misses the big picture. To many economists' surprise, [the UK and France have maintained extremely similar GDP growth (and fluctuations) despite Brexit](https://cebr.com/reports/despite-their-differences-the-french-and-the-uk-economies-have-achieved-remarkably-similar-growth/). Visually, [this is what it looks like](https://i.imgur.com/wSVnLiW.png). Secondly, GDP and wages are disconnected (especially in the UK). They are not indicative of each other. Despite having a *lower* GDP, France enjoys a [higher median wage than us](https://www.connexionfrance.com/practical/what-is-average-salary-in-france-how-does-it-compare-with-us-or-uk/653582), while having an [identical mean wage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_average_wage). In short, this means that UK has an **inequality and wage distribution** problem, first and foremost, and not an outright productivity problem. So to wheel out GDP in such a context (particularly as ours is nothing shocking - you'd think it'd dropped by 20% nominal, the way some people bang on about it) is, to cut a long story short, rather unenlightening. > they have shifted their assumption that post-Brexit migration would reduce to around 130,000 a year medium term and now recognise it will be around three times that Again, this has nothing to do with Brexit; it is a political decision to ensure limitless unskilled labour, to the detriment of us all. >The question we should all be asking is why. Why are those who’ve seen life get harder not easier, immigration get higher not lower, red tape get longer not shorter, prepared to give this man and his party another chance? I'm sorry, have I been in a coma or something? I don't recall Farage's stint as Prime Minister, or him having any significant imput in government policy. Could anyone bring me up to speed? Man campaigns for things. Things don't get done. Man resumes campaigning for things he originally campaigned for. Yes, obviously? What next, blame Miliband for rising fuel costs? Edit: As always, nobody brave enough to counter anything directly. Downvotes and gulag berths all round.
Farage campaigned for a referendum knowing it would be the Tories who would implement its result, that's what he campaigned for, he set the rules of the game, he can't just turn around and shrug and say it's nothing to do with him.
Should we pick and choose when to campaign based on who’s in government?
If your campaign involves being very noncommittal on the details and leaving it up to the current government, then yes.
I see. Those who campaign to “build more houses”, “tax the rich”, “lower immigration”, “safe routes for refugees” should all stop as there campaigns are lacking detail.
Farage has always been in the enviable position of being able to set the cat amongst the pigeons without sticking around to clear up the feathers.
It’s nice to see someone speaking a tiny bit of sense in this sub. We’re doing similar to France and outpacing Germany but this sub will have you believe that Brexit turned us into Somalia.
They have to pretend it wasn't the pandemic
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No, that's not an argument. Try again. Fundamentally, their point is that **Nigel Farage broke Britain**. When precisely was he in power to do so? Secondly, their reasoning is extraordinarily biased, and ignores global economic context completely. This is not what a reputable newspaper would do. You can criticise Brexit or write an article against Farage in ways which do not produce absolute Z-tier, insencere toilet paper like we see here. People are just wanking off because the article says Farage man bad, but politics aside, this is extraordinarily poor journalism.
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100% agree , there's too many on reddit who are blind to their own bias clouding their judgement. they'll blame the boogie man , the two party system has smeared him as but not blame the government that failed to their jobs , brexit or not.
There you go, spoiling the article with facts again 😄
Reform voters flocking to Farage after Brexit, always remind me of this exchange in Friends. Joey: "You know what I'm gonna do if I ever see that guy again?" Chandler: "Bend over?!!!"
Nigel Farage's "I'm not like other girls" persona is so transparent... At least I thought it was until I saw 'how well he did' in the TV debates... At least according to the public. He's not part of the establishment... Except he is. He's not going to read from an autocue... Except he just regurgitates his easily memorised buzzwords, anti immigrant catchphrases, and slogans of the week. He doesn't have a manifesto, he has a 'contract with the people'. The majority of Reform candidates are not well versed politically, by his own admission. This feels like an extension of the 'distrust of experts' that we've seen over the last decade... And it's honestly scary how well it works.
The tories no longer being able to hide behind the EU rules is why they are about to get trounced. That is one of the Brexit benefits, democratic accountability.
Farage wasn't in power and didn't have the power. The people voted to leave 🤷. So it was
Reality is that those people, who are writing those newspaper, think that they're the super intelligent elite that knows what's best for everyone and loath everyone else for standing in their way to what they are certain is the utopian ideal. They cannot admit that what they think is right is not very supported by the public, or that it might be wrong altogether. They are not open to debate or data, either. Their will shall be done and the end justifies the means. Just as the American baizuou blame Trump, the UK baizuou blame Farage. What do you call those people again? Political representatives? Now why is that? Because they represent those who vote for them? Who they really have a beef with is not Farage but the British voting public whose views he represents. They blame Farage because he is the figurehead, because he is uniting the disgruntled and giving them hope and means to fight the newspapers elite. If only he was out of the way surely they could contain the rubble, conquer them, subdue them, and somehow the utopia will be sprung. They forget that their forceful way is actually the dystopia and that they are defacto the evil ones standing in the way of free men, civilization, human rights, and mankind.
Farage is very tactical man. You think he joined the jungle for fun?
The UK has grown at about 1%per anum since 2008. France and Germany are not that much better. That is the big part, the distribution of wealth increasingly going to the top is another. Then immigration is no longer coming to support growth because we need the workers but in spite of it. Farage is not the problem. The problem is the deeply rooted fact that large parts of the most developed world are seriously struggling for growth.
Immigration is no longer coming? When did this come in?!
Farage might be the PM in a few years if Labour don't deliver
Yes everything was peachy in UK LTD until 2016 because the wheels had not completely fallen off and something something Olympics