Whereas of course a bunch of shareholders that are only concerned about this quarters numbers is a great way to ensure capital-heavy long term investment.
Hmm, I honestly don't know where they sit on that scale, I suppose you could call them a chemical manufacturer if you really tried
As the good people of Richmond demonstrated, the most effective way for Labour to lose votes in a London constituency is to stand Christian Wolmar. He's a perhaps not-particularly perceptive commentator, who in this case seems to have a whole shed of axes to grind.
www.bbc.co.uk
So Labour seem to want to stop the recruitment of care workers abroad:
Care worker recruitment from abroad to end, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper says
Up to 50,000 fewer lower-skilled workers will come to the UK under new measures aimed at tackling net migration, the home secretary says.
And what, exactly, do we do if we can't find enough care workers?
A silly decision. The Labour Party seems to be only interested in Reform UK voters, and to hell with the rest of us. Don't they understand that people with hardline views on immigration will just vote for Reform or Badenoch's Tories, and no amount of trying to poach those votes will make them come to the Labour Party? Don't they understand that the local election results were more about Labour and the Tories losing rather than Reform "winning", in the sense that former Labour and Tory voters likely stayed at home out of disgust.
It just shows how pathetically useless the Labour Party are at domestic policy. They don't seem to realise the problems that this kind of policy will create. I will give Starmer the credit of being decent on the international stage, but his clueless ministers are doing nothing for the home situation. The winter fuel cuts, other cuts, somewhat anti-trans statements in recent weeks, and now this. Remind me of what, exactly, the point of the Labour Party is. Right now it is a right-wing party, both economically and socially. IMV it is to the right of the Conservative governments of Major and Cameron. All they are doing is persuading people whose votes they need to stay at home, or vote for other parties instead. Labour are not supposed to be a right-wing party: they are supposed to be a left-wing party, they need to start acting like one!
And the Tories say it doesn't go far enough!
I just hope employers fight this all the way. The priority should be to ensure there are enough people to fill jobs, not worry about whether they were born here or not.
It will also project an image of the UK as an insular and unwelcoming nation. We need all the international friends we can get right now: we don't want to go around telling other nations that their people are not welcome to work here.
Put it this way, the only reason I would vote Labour is to keep Reform out. Thankfully I live in a constituency which my preferred party, the Lib Dems, do fairly well - so who to vote for is never in question.
It means that there is less and less of a choice for those of us on the left economically and socially. Who is fighting this anti-immigrationist rhetoric? The only parties not taking this line are the Lib Dems and Greens, who have little power. All three leading parties are right-wing to some extent. We have a right-wing party, a hard-right party and, IMV (others' views may differ) a party bordering on far-right. It's bad for democracy to have so few parties appealing to liberals and the left.
Instead of all this, to boost their popularity Labour need to row back on recent cuts, winter fuel and other; reverse the farmers' inheritance tax; drop the anti-trans rhetoric; and work with other parties (including the Tories if they ever move back towards the centre) to form a tactical alliance to keep Reform out. Not to mention fast-tracking PR to ensure that only 30% of MPs in 2029 are from Reform, and not 50%+. In such a situation, even if Reform are the largest party they can be kept out of power by other parties refusing to work with them, while if they get a majority (possible under FPTP), we're screwed until 2034. With Covid happening in 2020 and just about nothing good having happened since then, it will then be basically 15 lost years for the UK.
So Labour seem to want to stop the recruitment of care workers abroad:
Care worker recruitment from abroad to end, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper says
Up to 50,000 fewer lower-skilled workers will come to the UK under new measures aimed at tackling net migration, the home secretary says.
And what, exactly, do we do if we can't find enough care workers?
A silly decision. The Labour Party seems to be only interested in Reform UK voters, and to hell with the rest of us. Don't they understand that people with hardline views on immigration will just vote for Reform or Badenoch's Tories, and no amount of trying to poach those votes will make them come to the Labour Party? Don't they understand that the local election results were more about Labour and the Tories losing rather than Reform "winning", in the sense that former Labour and Tory voters likely stayed at home out of disgust.
It just shows how pathetically useless the Labour Party are at domestic policy. They don't seem to realise the problems that this kind of policy will create. I will give Starmer the credit of being decent on the international stage, but his clueless ministers are doing nothing for the home situation. The winter fuel cuts, other cuts, somewhat anti-trans statements in recent weeks, and now this. Remind me of what, exactly, the point of the Labour Party is. Right now it is a right-wing party, both economically and socially. IMV it is to the right of the Conservative governments of Major and Cameron. All they are doing is persuading people whose votes they need to stay at home, or vote for other parties instead. Labour are not supposed to be a right-wing party: they are supposed to be a left-wing party, they need to start acting like one!
And the Tories say it doesn't go far enough!
I just hope employers fight this all the way. The priority should be to ensure there are enough people to fill jobs, not worry about whether they were born here or not.
Put it this way, the only reason I would vote Labour is to keep Reform out. Thankfully I live in a constituency which my preferred party, the Lib Dems, do fairly well - so who to vote for is never in question.
Instead of all this, to boost their popularity Labour need to row back on recent cuts, winter fuel and other; reverse the farmers' inheritance tax; drop the anti-trans rhetoric; and work with other parties (including the Tories if they ever move back towards the centre) to form a tactical alliance to keep Reform out. Not to mention fast-tracking PR to ensure that only 30% of MPs in 2029 are from Reform, and not 50%+. In such a situation, even if Reform are the largest party they can be kept out of power by other parties refusing to work with them, while if they get a majority (possible under FPTP), we're screwed until 2034. With Covid happening in 2020 and just about nothing good having happened since then, it will then be basically 15 lost years for the UK.
What would help is if many of those concerned about illegal immigration actually accepted some of the solutions. Chief amongst them is ID cards, where we have no idea how many people are here illegally, as there are plenty of ways to get under the radar. But cries of civil liberties (despite the fact the government has all sorts of means to track someone now anyway, while several other democracies get on fine with them) have prevented this being achieved. ID cards would have added benefits around simplifying data access/storage, settling the debate on issues with voter ID types, etc.
Immigration control from an economic perspective is inherently left wing, as it's state intervention in the labour market. This is why the Tories in particular didn't cut it, despite promises to the contrary, as they would have known their economic philosophy in backing the free market needed whatever workers they could find.
The problem I have with ID cards is once somehow has one, if it was obtained by deceit, that then legalises that person. If said person was an illegal immigrant, and by fraud / deceit / misidentification etc obtained an ID (e.g. stand-ins take driving tests for others), then we are probably in a worse state than we are now. And that does not include fraudulent ID cards (passports can be forged, identities can be stolen etc.). I would not trust a state-run system (or worse, contracted out) to introduce a fool-proof system.
I take your point. Whatever the solution(s) are, I think the government's best bet is to do whatever has the most compelling evidence, but not make any public fuss about what it's doing on the issue until it is resolved, and/or very clear progress can be seen. While getting broad agreement on the existence of a problem and the need to solve it is easy, as soon as a particular path to solving it is pursued, suddenly everyone has a fight and we don't actually get anywhere. All matters pertaining to both legal and illegal immigration is top of the list of examples of this.
The argument Labour are making is that we have brought a lot of care workers in already, and not many of them are now working in the sector. Many of them turned up and the agency didn't even have a job for them so they have been left in limbo. Others quickly moved into other jobs. However you look at it foreign recruitment into the care sector isn't actually working especially well.
Spot on. Care work is part of the ‘gig economy’ using abusive employment terms much like zero hours contracts.
It doesn’t need to be fool proof, it simply needs to be better than “no need to prove who you are, at all”.
I'd have guessed 10% at most! Perhaps more like 5%.
And when you do need to prove who you are relying on an odd assort of random bits of paper most of which weren't actually designed to be use as ID in the first place and are open to being made fraudulently with varying levels of difficulty (knocking together a fake bank statement to prove address, easy, just needs photoshop, putting together a fake passport, much trickier but then most places don't only require a passport).
Though, ironically, illegal migration is in all likelihood (though it's hard to be sure) a small fraction of migration generally. We go back to my issue with everything frothing at the mouths about small boats and how disastrous it is for our migration figures. You knock out the number of small boat arrivals from the migration statistics and the overall net migration figure comes down by 20,000 odd. Which considering net migration is still in the hundreds of thousands doesn't make much difference.
Yes, BBC reports (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ce810e3z6dkt)
and although there are other categories of “illegal entry” I doubt they add up to another 6%.
Alternatively we could exercise a bit more control over our broken higher education sector so that we weren't so dependent on foreign student fees to cover deficits. Foreign students doing prestige courses is good for us as a country and good for the sector. Filling courses at third rate institutions that probably shouldn't exist with rich foreign students who aren't good enough to get into universities elsewhere isn't really good for anyone.
I can just imagine the headlines of the right-wing papers now, even for a situation that sees a slight decrease in channel crossings.
But there are other consequences of immigration. Unless all migrants fully integrate and consider themselves to be British rather than their country of origin, there will be problems. For example, Indians and Pakistanis who live in Britain will be upset about the outbreak of hostilities in their home countries, and may create problems over here. Likewise Palestinians and Jews, Tamils and Sri Lankans etc etc. This happened at least in Bradford in 2001, and the more migrants we have, the greater the potential problems unless they fully assimilate. It's also part of the reason why we have the Prevent programme.
