Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party.

[Kaliwax]

Absolutely agree - I've heard it directly as well as from others. And it doesn't just affect people with disabilities.
I think it is pretty common for employers to specify 'Essential' and 'Desirable' skills and attributes in the specs of a position. As someone who has served on interview panels, I might have suggested some of the essentials, certainly I will have agreed with many. They were there because that is what the potential employee needed to have. No discussion. At home with a pile of application forms after a long days work sifting through them ready for a shortlisting panel at 08:30 next day, first task was to eliminate all those who didn't meet the essentials, scrawl the reason on the form and 'put' it in a pile on the floor. I have heard these 'advisors' or whatever they are called today say 'It doesn't matter' when a job-seeker questions their suitability. Yes it does. We do not want someone who can't do the job. We would rather readvertise or consider an alternative. Having halved the applications, look at the rest in detail.
Time is better spent completing four or five applications really well, considering the needs of the employer and the job, rather than twenty to thirty because you have a quota.


I endorse the comment in #8126. And you undersell yourself, the post is worth a sawbuck at least!!


Agree. I had assumed the charities are 'rewarded' for getting people into work?

A lot of employers hate advertising through the job centre, because they are getting applicants that are applying just because they're forced too, even if they are under qualified, it just wastes everyone time, the employers, the applicants and whoever's else's time and they don't want the over qualified ones, because they will leave as soon as they get something better, and then they will recruit again.

 

[Typhoon]

A lot of employers hate advertising through the job centre, because they are getting applicants that are applying just because they're forced too, even if they are under qualified, it just wastes everyone time, the employers, the applicants and whoever's else's time and they don't want the over qualified ones, because they will leave as soon as they get something better, and then they will recruit again.

If an applicant, who had wasted our time previously, applied for another job and HR flagged it up, there was a very good chance that they wouldn't get very far in the process

 

[Enthusiast]

Who said it would?

Well, the ridiculous Rwanda scheme is said to be required to "stop the boats". With Lord Cameron's contention that it would not be needed if we were EU members, it seems to suggest there would be no small boats if we were EU members. That simply doesn't hold water.

It largely seemed to have escaped notice that it was the UK’s membership of the EU and consequent participation in EU-wide migration governance mechanisms that prevented the Mediterranean ‘refugee crisis’ from becoming a British ‘border crisis’.

As far as I recall, the UK opted out of the "Emergency Relocation Mechanism" (or more accurately, retained its opt out of the EU's ongoing migrant relocation programme - which it enjoyed along with Ireland and Denmark):

UK asylum policy after Brexit - UK in a changing Europe

The UK's asylum policy has gone through various changes after Brexit, impacting UK-EU and international relations. Sarah Overton explains.

ukandeu.ac.uk

In terms of growth, we used to regard 2.5% as the normal long term growth rate for Britain as a mature and large but not exactly exciting economy. In those terms 17 years of less than 1% growth is pretty catastrophic.

That might be so if two years alone did not see a 15% reduction die to exceptional circumstances. (2009: -4/6%; 2020: -10.4%).

 

[AM9]

Well, the ridiculous Rwanda scheme is said to be required to "stop the boats". With Lord Cameron's contention that it would not be needed if we were EU members, it seems to suggest there would be no small boats if we were EU members. That simply doesn't hold water.

Where did Cameron mention that there would be "no small boats". That's your interpretation of his thoughts.

 

[bahnause]

Well, the ridiculous Rwanda scheme is said to be required to "stop the boats". With Lord Cameron's contention that it would not be needed if we were EU members, it seems to suggest there would be no small boats if we were EU members. That simply doesn't hold water.

Of course it doesn't hold water, the whole premise that the Rwanda plan is supposed to be a deterrent in any way is utter nonsense. But it is not what he said anyway:

Now, I'd love that situation to be the case again, that's the most sensible thing. People land on a beach in Kent, you take them straight back to France, you therefore break the model of the people smugglers. That's not available at the moment. It's simply not possible

 

[Magdalia]

That's not a picture the ONS presents. Their figures show an increase in GDP of 17.5% since 2007.

Perhaps @Magdalia is thinking of GDP per capita? https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/ihxw/qna shows it going from £31,493 to £33,257, an increase of 5.6% over that time period. Which implies most of that 17.5% increase has been due to population growth and in general people haven't seen that improvement.

In terms of growth, we used to regard 2.5% as the normal long term growth rate for Britain as a mature and large but not exactly exciting economy. In those terms 17 years of less than 1% growth is pretty catastrophic.

That might be so if two years alone did not see a 15% reduction die to exceptional circumstances. (2009: -4/6%; 2020: -10.4%).

I was thinking in particular of historic comparisons. The 17.5% growth from 2007 to 2023 is much lower than growth of about 55% between 1991 and 2007. The compound %age increases are about 1% per annum and 2.8% per annum over each 16 year period.

Using per capita figures makes this comparison even worse. The 5.6% growth between 2007 and 2023 compares with about 45% between 1991 and 2007. It is also notable that GDP per capita in 2023 at £33257 is still lower than in 2019 when it peaked at £33443.

The per capita figures are particularly relevant as a lot of the public expenditure funded by tax income is increased by population growth.

 

[takno]

The per capita figures are particularly relevant as a lot of the public expenditure funded by tax income is increased by population growth.

It's slightly more painful than that. The level of need and entitlement to pensions, health and social services grows with the number of old people, while tax tends to rise more in line with the number of working age people, and the number of old people is growing faster.

Admittedly the number of people in education is starting to fall, but that happens in awkward ways which don't allow you to close whole schools, and in any case the investment cost and possibly PPI deal for a school is still in place for 30 years whether you use it or not.

Meanwhile, most of Cameron's commitments not to cut spending didn't take into account population growth, or sometimes just didn't take into account ageing, so even "protected" departments have seen massive cuts per user.

These cuts in themselves tend to reduce growth of course - if the public sector at 40% of the economy is shrinking then the private sector has to make up for that before it can generate any growth at all.

 

[Falcon1200]

I mean, if it were me, rather than the Rwanda scheme I would have been spending more time working on a returns agreement with France which, in general terms, would be that anyone who crosses the channel in a small boat will be put back on the next ferry to France for France to process their asylum claim there.

Yes, I agree that would seem to be the basis for the most practical solution, and is probably something we should be pursuing more. I'm somewhat puzzled that, as far as I'm aware, no-one anywhere across the political spectrum is advocating anything like that.

I agree too that ainsworth74's idea makes a great deal of sense, yet wonder how this would work in practice. Presumably this would require a UK immigration assessment centre to be established somewhere in northern France, in which case would it not become a magnet for asylum seekers and economic migrants - which might not please the local populace or the French government? How would applicants be treated while their claims were being assessed, would they be accommodated, fed and given medical care, if so where and at whose expense? And would unsuccessful applicants not perhaps try to enter the UK anyway by illegal means, whether by small boat or hidden in a lorry?

Personally I am not convinced that the boats can ever be stopped, by any Government, given the huge draw that the UK has for people who are already in a safe and prosperous country but are still prepared to risk their lives trying to get here. Labour's policy appears to be 'smash the trafficking gangs', but given that they are operating in mainland Europe how the UK could actually achieve that is unclear.

 

[Kaliwax]

Post of the week right here. Not much more I can add, being someone else who's had to deal with the DWP personally and as a close witnes to family members also having to go through the process and can also attest to how utterly demoralising it is.

In all honesty, Sunak's 'sick-note culture' speech really got under my skin and it would've taken significant restraint on my part not to let the expletives fly and, in-between said expletives, lay out just how astonishingly cloth-eared, pig-ignorant and flat-out cruel his proposals are. I know it'd be a fruitless endeavour and that I really shouldn't interrupt them as they aim this particular cannon at their already badly mauled re-election chances, but he and his party deserve a dose of that little thing called reality (I know most of them would short-circuit on contact with it), just in case it should ever come and personally bite them in the backside (fat chance of that for Sunak post-election of course).

Reform UK are probably worse than the Tories and that's saying something. Isabel Oakeshott, claimed on question time, a lot on people on disability muck about. I'm sure some people do, but the clear majority are on there through no fault on their own. Media/Journalists on the right seem to have a vendetta against the disabled.

If it's Captia going to be responsible for sick notes, then no one will be on the sick, people will be forced into work or die early, because the people who carry out PIP assessments or LCWRA assessments, tend to be someone who has no idea about the person's conditions and how they struggle. They are there to trip people up, catch people out.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I agree too that ainsworth74's idea makes a great deal of sense, yet wonder how this would work in practice. Presumably this would require a UK immigration assessment centre to be established somewhere in northern France, in which case would it not become a magnet for asylum seekers and economic migrants - which might not please the local populace or the French government? How would applicants be treated while their claims were being assessed, would they be accommodated, fed and given medical care, if so where and at whose expense? And would unsuccessful applicants not perhaps try to enter the UK anyway by illegal means, whether by small boat or hidden in a lorry?

The way I would imagine it working, there would be no UK involvement at the application stage, and no UK presence in France. People would be expected to apply in France to the French authorities for asylum in France. The agreement between the UK and France would be that France could then transfer to the UK a certain number of those whom France has given asylum to, and in return France accepts back any people who have smuggled themselves to the UK from France. There would be lots of details to work out - including how and who decides which people France would transfer to the UK. I imagine though the most difficult thing would be getting France to agree to it. The French Government has shown little interest in solving the small boats problem up to now, so I imagine we'd have to offer quite a significant inducement to get them to be interested.

Personally I am not convinced that the boats can ever be stopped, by any Government, given the huge draw that the UK has for people who are already in a safe and prosperous country but are still prepared to risk their lives trying to get here. Labour's policy appears to be 'smash the trafficking gangs', but given that they are operating in mainland Europe how the UK could actually achieve that is unclear.

That is also possible. And it may be that the UK Government should be working to get people used to the idea that this is an unsolvable problem that will be here with us or the foreseeable future.

 

[AM9]

I agree too that ainsworth74's idea makes a great deal of sense, yet wonder how this would work in practice. Presumably this would require a UK immigration assessment centre to be established somewhere in northern France, in which case would it not become a magnet for asylum seekers and economic migrants - which might not please the local populace or the French government? How would applicants be treated while their claims were being assessed, would they be accommodated, fed and given medical care, if so where and at whose expense? And would unsuccessful applicants not perhaps try to enter the UK anyway by illegal means, whether by small boat or hidden in a lorry?

Whatever was to be set up on french soil would require adult discussions leading to full agreement with the french government. No chance of that with the current administration, but a fresh approach from a new UK government would probably get much further than the current echoes of the 'up your delors' attitude that still pervades the Conservative party.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Whatever was to be set up on french soil would require adult discussions leading to full agreement with the french government. No chance of that with the current administration, but a fresh approach from a new UK government would probably get much further than the current echoes of the 'up your delors' attitude that still pervades the Conservative party.

That seems to be making the mistake I alluded to in post #8122 - of presuming that the fault and the unreasonableness is all on the British side, while France has a completely reasonable and lovely Government that is just waiting to help us out and sacrifice their own sovereignty for our sake by letting us run UK Government agencies on French soil without any thought for its own popularity amongst French voters - if only we didn't have the Horrible Tories in charge here.

 

[edwin_m]

The way I would imagine it working, there would be no UK involvement at the application stage, and no UK presence in France. People would be expected to apply in France to the French authorities for asylum in France. The agreement between the UK and France would be that France could then transfer to the UK a certain number of those whom France has given asylum to, and in return France accepts back any people who have smuggled themselves to the UK from France. There would be lots of details to work out - including how and who decides which people France would transfer to the UK. I imagine though the most difficult thing would be getting France to agree to it. The French Government has shown little interest in solving the small boats problem up to now, so I imagine we'd have to offer quite a significant inducement to get them to be interested.

Doesn't that risk the French cherry-picking those who might be most economically productive and least socially disruptive, and diverting the others to the UK?

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Doesn't that risk the French cherry-picking those who might be most economically productive and least socially disruptive, and diverting the others to the UK?

Yes, that's certainly one of the issues that would need to be worked out if we tried to do a solution along those lines.

 

[JamesT]

Whatever was to be set up on french soil would require adult discussions leading to full agreement with the french government. No chance of that with the current administration, but a fresh approach from a new UK government would probably get much further than the current echoes of the 'up your delors' attitude that still pervades the Conservative party.

An agreement like the one we have already for the French to try and stop the boats? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-64916446

The UK will give France almost £500m over three years to help stop migrants crossing the Channel in small boats.

The cash was announced at a summit in Paris between UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and President Emmanuel Macron, who said France would also contribute.

The money will go towards an extra 500 officers and a new detention centre in France, but this will not be fully operational until the end of 2026.

That doesn't sound like a government unwilling to have adult discussions.

 

[YorkRailFan]

NEW: Rishi Sunak's Rwanda Bill has been granted royal assent by the King.

https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1783445304831828364

Well, the Rwanda Bill is officially law now. A Bill that has received criticism from both sides of the political spectrum.

 

[Enthusiast]

Where did Cameron mention that there would be "no small boats". That's your interpretation of his thoughts.

Already explained (post #8,132). My response was to this:

Ouch - David Cameron suggested there would be no need for Rwanda if we were still in the EU. Headache for Sunak

I took that at face value as I didn't know what Lord Cameron actually said. Investigating further, I found this in the Telegraph:

UK can’t return Channel migrants to France because of Brexit, Cameron suggests

Migrant returns agreement to help stop people making perilous journey across Channel is ‘simply not possible’

www.telegraph.co.uk

It seems what was reported is this:

Britain can no longer return Channel migrants to France because of Brexit, Lord Cameron has indicated. The Foreign Secretary said a migrant returns agreement with France to help break up smuggling gangs and stop people making the perilous journey across the Channel was “simply not possible”. He said “the situation we’re in” meant a deal that was in place when he was Prime Minister to send migrants back to France when they landed in Britain could not be replicated. Asked whether this was because of Brexit, he said: “Because of the situation we’re in, because of the attitude of others and all the rest of it.”

I presume that the "deal that was in place when he was Prime Minister to send migrants back to France when they landed in Britain" was the famed "Dublin Agreement" and he suggests if that deal could be replicated the Rwanda scheme would not be necessary. Perhaps he should take a look back at those apparently halcyon days. The Telegraph goes on to explain:

The pre-Brexit Dublin Agreement allowed the UK to return migrants to “safe” EU countries where they should have claimed asylum if they had passed through them. This was scrapped under Brexit and has not been replaced.

Their explanation is somewhat simplistic and considerably wide of the mark. Here is another quote from Lord Cameron on the same topic:

Cameron was asked: “Hand on heart, if this had come up when you were PM, would you have gone for this policy?” Noticeably, he did not immediately say yes.
“Well, we had a totally different situation because we had a situation where you could return people directly to France. Now, I'd love that situation to be the case again, that's the most sensible thing,” he told Asthana an interview for ITV News and ITV's Peston. “People land on a beach in Kent, you take them straight back to France, you therefore break the model of the people smugglers.”

I don't know who - if anybody - told Lord Cameron that this was the simplistic truth of the Dublin Agreement. In reality, it was nothing like that straightforward and he almost certainly knows it. Leaving aside that the numbers were miniscule, in the last few years of the UK's participation in the scheme it was not particularly beneficial to this country. In 2016, far from "taking them straight back to France", the success rate of requests for transfers from the UK to other EU countries stood at just 8%. In 2018 the inflow to the UK under the Agreement was almost six times the outflow (1,215 against 209). These figures also give lie to Lord Cameron's claim that people could be "sent straight back to France". Of the 209 repatriated in 2018 only a quarter of them (51) were sent to France, with the remainder going elsewhere.

The Dublin Agreement did not, as Lord Cameron suggests, provide the UK with the ability to "return people directly to France" so as to break up the smuggling gangs. It was simply a bureaucratic exercise which resulted in a few - comparatively very few - people being sent elsewhere and, in the latest years of the UK's participation in it, led to more people being sent to the UK than were sent from it. Either Lord Cameron knows that (as well as knowing that anything similar that the UK was likely to agree with the EU would be similarly deficient) or he does not. If he knows it he is being, at best, economical with the truth and at worst simply lying. If he does not know that he has no business holding the post of Foreign Secretary and even less business preaching to the electorate on matters of which he has no basic knowledge.

 

[najaB]

And would unsuccessful applicants not perhaps try to enter the UK anyway by illegal means, whether by small boat or hidden in a lorry?

And when they're discovered they can - quite legally and morally - be immediately put on a plane/boat to where they came from since they would have bypassed a safe route to claim asylum in the UK.

 

[nw1]

https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1783445304831828364

Well, the Rwanda Bill is officially law now. A Bill that has received criticism from both sides of the political spectrum.

If there was ever a good way of explaining why First Past The Post must be dumped in the wastebin of history, and why there needs to be an election whenever a PM resigns, this is it. This is solely the will of Sunak, his government and his MPs.

No government of any party should hold absolute power on 44% of the vote. And no unelected leader (i.e. Sunak) should be allowed to impose their will on the country without being chosen by the electorate over the alternatives.

 

[edwin_m]

And no unelected leader (i.e. Sunak) should be allowed to impose their will on the country.

I can't agree with that part. There have been occasions where leaders have resigned on health grounds and for either good government or humanitarian reasons we wouldn't want somebody feeling they had to continue when they were unwilling or unable just to avoid an election. It's also always possible that the PM might die in office, or be personally discredited while leaving their political agenda intact. As long as the successor pursues pretty much the same agenda, people still get what they voted for (or didn't as the case may be), and I can't see any problem with that. Examples would be Wilson to Callaghan, Thatcher to Major (sort of) and (perhaps controversially) Blair to Brown.

The real issue is when a government radically changes its policy away from what they were elected on. This may be triggered by a change leader, but doesn't have to be. However, it would be really tricky to establish when a change from the manifesto was significant enough to trigger an election or even to agree who would decide this. There might also be totally legitimate reasons to abandon swathes of policy due to "events, dear boy" - can't think of a recent UK example but the most obvious would be Chamberlain switching from appeasement to confrontation of Germany, or Roosevelt taking the US into WW2 after Pearl Harbor.

Perhaps there's a workable solution around something like requiring 10% of the voting population to petition a future House of Lords replacement, elected but with a different term and mandate to the Commons, who could then decide (perhaps needing a supermajority) to "recall" the entire Commons.

 

[nw1]

I can't agree with that part. There have been occasions where leaders have resigned on health grounds and for either good government or humanitarian reasons we wouldn't want somebody feeling they had to continue when they were unwilling or unable just to avoid an election. It's also always possible that the PM might die in office, or be personally discredited while leaving their political agenda intact. As long as the successor pursues pretty much the same agenda, people still get what they voted for (or didn't as the case may be), and I can't see any problem with that. Examples would be Wilson to Callaghan, Thatcher to Major (sort of) and (perhaps controversially) Blair to Brown.

The real issue is when a government radically changes its policy away from what they were elected on. This may be triggered by a change leader, but doesn't have to be. However, it would be really tricky to establish when a change from the manifesto was significant enough to trigger an election or even to agree who would decide this. There might also be totally legitimate reasons to abandon swathes of policy due to "events, dear boy" - can't think of a recent UK example but the most obvious would be Chamberlain switching from appeasement to confrontation of Germany, or Roosevelt taking the US into WW2 after Pearl Harbor.

Perhaps there's a workable solution around something like requiring 10% of the voting population to petition a future House of Lords replacement, elected but with a different term and mandate to the Commons, who could then decide (perhaps needing a supermajority) to "recall" the entire Commons.

I see where you're coming from though in some of these cases (Thatcher-Major and Blair-Brown) there was no health reason for the previous leader resigning and arguably a general election would have been the fairest step in both these examples. In Thatcher's case it was late in the 1987 parliament in any case, so arguably we were almost due an election: Blair less so but I'd still argue that an election would have been best there. And I say that as someone who rates Brown the "best" PM of my lifetime from Thatcher onwards; perhaps a 2007 election, which he'd probably have won, just, would have gained him the respect he never seemed to have.

Sunak, certainly, while he shares some attributes of Boris (pro-Brexit, for one) is very different in character in other ways. Much more authoritarian and socially-conservative, IMV; more fiscally tight-fisted; very different on "green" issues; and lacking the "personality" factor which appealed, rightly or wrongly, to the Boris fans. I think the 2019 Tory voters were primarily voting for Boris, not for the Tories.

In the absence of a GE, perhaps the population should be able to elect a replacement leader from the same party in these kind of situations, rather than the Party imposing its own choice on us. Otherwise you just get people like Truss, i.e. the will of the Tory right.

 

[YorkRailFan]

If there was ever a good way of explaining why First Past The Post must be dumped in the wastebin of history, and why there needs to be an election whenever a PM resigns, this is it. This is solely the will of Sunak, his government and his MPs.

No government of any party should hold absolute power on 44% of the vote. And no unelected leader (i.e. Sunak) should be allowed to impose their will on the country without being chosen by the electorate over the alternatives.

First Past The Post has previously helped the Tories, but at the next election it could make their loss far worse thanks to Reform splitting the right wing vote and giving the seat to Labour or the Lib Dems.

 

[edwin_m]

I see where you're coming from though in some of these cases (Thatcher-Major and Blair-Brown) there was no health reason for the previous leader resigning and arguably a general election would have been the fairest step in both these examples. In Thatcher's case it was late in the 1987 parliament in any case, so arguably we were almost due an election: Blair less so but I'd still argue that an election would have been best there. And I say that as someone who rates Brown the "best" PM of my lifetime from Thatcher onwards; perhaps a 2007 election, which he'd probably have won, just, would have gained him the respect he never seemed to have.

Sunak, certainly, while he shares some attributes of Boris (pro-Brexit, for one) is very different in character in other ways. Much more authoritarian and socially-conservative, IMV; more fiscally tight-fisted; very different on "green" issues; and lacking the "personality" factor which appealed, rightly or wrongly, to the Boris fans. I think the 2019 Tory voters were primarily voting for Boris, not for the Tories.

In the absence of a GE, perhaps the population should be able to elect a replacement leader from the same party in these kind of situations, rather than the Party imposing its own choice on us. Otherwise you just get people like Truss, i.e. the will of the Tory right.

Boris was actually rather "1970s concensus politics" in many respects, obviously excluding Brexit. I agree about detaching himself from the party, as he did to become London Mayor.

Getting the whole country to vote for a PM might be better than restricting this to party members, but toing back to the old system of having MPs elect the leader would solve a lot of problems for both main parties. MPs have a much better idea of how well a candidate performs as a politician, and in some cases a better understanding of what wins elections.

 

[najaB]

Getting the whole country to vote for a PM might be better than restricting this to party members, but toing back to the old system of having MPs elect the leader would solve a lot of problems for both main parties.

Having a direct vote for PM makes the role too presidential for my liking. I do support the idea that all MPs should have a vote since that's the whole idea of what a Prime Minister is supposed to be: the person who commands the respect of the largest body of MPs. Ideally it shouldn't be a FPTP election either, ranked preference would probably work.

 

[renegademaster]

- be immediately put on a plane/boat to where they came from since they would have bypassed a safe route to claim asylum in the UK

That's only if the home country accepts them and they didnt bin their documentation.

Having a direct vote for PM makes the role too presidential for my liking. I do support the idea that all MPs should have a vote since that's the whole idea of what a Prime Minister is supposed to be: the person who commands the respect of the largest body of MPs. Ideally it shouldn't be a FPTP election either, ranked preference would probably work.

It wouldn't make sense to do any other system other than majority(as in 50%+1 of all members )vote , otherwise your going to end up stuck with a lame duck executive that wont get anything done. Most countries where the legislature explicitly votes the PM works by submitting candidates until they find one who can get a majority.

 

[najaB]

That's only if the home country accepts them and they didnt bin their documentation.

The documentation that they would have needed to make an application, since the point was about people whose applications were denied crossing the channel anyway.

 

[The Ham]

Ah yes, the familiar immigration Ponzi scheme. Which of course will fail as soon as those people reach old age and need someone to support them.

Ponzi schemes generally require more people to enter the system to keep it going, the net migration number for 2023 (well the 12 months to June 23) was 672,000. To compare that to population by age:

Age	Population
65	729,714
66	700,435
67	670,275
68	666,984
69	652,412
70	628,269
71	627,866
72	631,149
73	640,644
74	667,797
75	713,349
76	538,909
77	512,867
78	501,297
79	455,378
80	397,329

Therefore there's quite a few ages beyond the retirement age which are larger than the net migration number.

2023 was abnormal for a number of factors. One being that there was a big increase in overseas students, over 90% of then will leave the country within 5 years. However, unless you want universities to start to close down (in part due to fewer native students and the higher income that those overseas students bring to the university), that's likely to be something which will need to happen - it's also a way which being overseas money to the economy (due to all the other spending that they do).

As such, even without those, the number retiring is likely to be the same as one of the age groups, which means that the net migration vs those retiring is likely to be fairly similar.

Even then that could be an issue if the net migration had been tracking like that for the last decade or more, however pre pandemic it was much lower, for example 2016 was 335,000.

 

[ainsworth74]

The way I would imagine it working, there would be no UK involvement at the application stage, and no UK presence in France. People would be expected to apply in France to the French authorities for asylum in France. The agreement between the UK and France would be that France could then transfer to the UK a certain number of those whom France has given asylum to, and in return France accepts back any people who have smuggled themselves to the UK from France. There would be lots of details to work out - including how and who decides which people France would transfer to the UK. I imagine though the most difficult thing would be getting France to agree to it. The French Government has shown little interest in solving the small boats problem up to now, so I imagine we'd have to offer quite a significant inducement to get them to be interested.

Yeah that's pretty much what I was driving at and I quite agree there would be a lot of details to be worked out! But it intuitively feels to me like a more logical starting point to try and come up with a resolution to the small boats issue than Rwanda. It may prove impossible to find an arrangement that works for both sides, it could be that we come up with a perfect agreement and for whatever reason thousands still take their lives in their hand even though they know that they'll almost certainly be returned to France to claim asylum there.

While things like Liz Truss's comment was strange and unwelcome, I'm not sure I really buy the idea that France is sitting waiting to do whatever the UK wants on small boats, if only we hadn't Brexited/the Tories would stop being so evil and say nicer things about Europe/etc. (I know you haven't exactly said that, but that's the theme that often comes across when people talk about agreements with France). The French Government is mostly interested in domestic French issues (doubtless including the electoral threat from the strongly anti-immigration Rassemblement National) and probably cares just as little about UK domestic politics as we do about French domestic politics. And people camping around Calais trying to smuggle themselves into the UK was an issue that France chose to do almost nothing about for years prior to the 2016 EU referendum - which implies France has its own reasons for not being particularly interested (I would hazard a guess that to many French people, a migrant trying to get into the UK is one less migrant they have to worry about). Besides, are we really saying that the French Government is so sensitive that it refuses to solve practical problems purely on account of bad rhetoric by the UK Tories?

Oh yeah I'm not trying to suggest that if the Tories simply need to be nice to France (and the EU) and a deal will fall into our laps. More that the rhetoric takes us even further away from a potential deal that might actually resolve the problem and is doubly frustrating that France (and the EU) being our closest neighbours as well as close allies (120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale, our alliance with France, was a couple of weeks ago*) are people who we shouldn't be deliberately seeking to antagonise them when we don't have any reason to do so. And whilst I don't think the France are so sensitive that something like Liz Truss being strange and unwilling to say that Macron, is in fact, a friend torpedo's any attempts at resolving practical problems it's the mood music of the thing, or the vibes as I believe the kids say. It's surely easier to do a complex and difficult deal when both sides are getting along and cordial with each other than when at least one side is intimating that the other party might be a foe.

It would simply be nice if the Tories (and to be fair to Sunak this is something that he has done for the most part!) would start behaving as if a) European nations are our friends and allies and b) remember that not everything that is said in the UK for domestic political reasons simply stays within our shores. Whilst other countries have their own concerns and aren't glued to the latest developments in the UK (lucky them ) it certainly won't go totally unnoticed either.

*Marked by an exchange of troops, the French taking part in the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, whilst British troops formed part of the French Presidential Guard. A lovely little gesture I thought. Short video here.

 

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Minister Chris Philp's Rwanda question raises eyebrows

The Question Time audience were surprised when Chris Philp answered an audience member's question about DR Congo.

www.bbc.co.uk

Minister of State Chris Philp was asked a question by an audience member from the Democratic Republic of Congo during BBC One's Question Time.

Mr Philp asked in response: "DR Congo is a different country to Rwanda, isn't it?" - raising eyebrows from panel members and the audience.

The government's Rwanda bill says any asylum seeker entering the UK "illegally" after 1 January 2022, from a safe country such as France, could be sent to Rwanda.

Video attached

 

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Words [insert expletive] fail me:

Was it a question about DR Congo, or by an audience member from DR Congo? Both are mentioned but are not necessarily the same thing!