AIBU to feel so weary of labour voters going on

I take your word for the gangs issue, thanks.

No, it's not isolated to Rotherham. Don't forget this isn't limited to the areas where rapists prowl the streets. Girls from neighbouring towns are trafficked, bailed alleged rapist are bailed into communities & often in very inappropriate locations (near schools). There is absolutely no trust between community/police/council/govt. But the salt in the wound is people (usually left wing) dismissing these very valid concerns for so damned long. It's now hit crisis point, there's no more rug left to sweep things under.

Someone put together a map of areas affected by grooming gangs

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/fldkWdd2lU

That’s not possible given the grooming gang activity was broadly confined to one area - Rotherham, no?

Otherwise, I agree with you.

I think you'll find the correlation is more closely associated with grooming gang activity. I wish people would stop ignoring the elephant in the room. Children in these communities have been harmed & the people asking for action silenced by accusations of racism & stupidity for years. It's now coming home to roost.

@ExitPursuedByABare yes of course it helped. She was able to have some independence she wouldn’t have otherwise got. It helped pay for online education because she couldn’t get to school.

What does 'getting tough with the French' look like to you? We're no longer in the EU. Why should the French take any steps to stop the boats coming across?

Introduce ID cards? That's going to go down well with Reform supporters. Do you remember the vitriolic backlash when it was suggested Labour may be going down this route?

I'd be interested to know how many teens receive benefits for anxiety. I think you'd be surprised at how few do. I don't think taking these benefits away will supercharge the economy.

Employer NI rates? Govt benefits are propping up businesses paying wages that are too low for people to live on. Perhaps if businesses paid adequate wages, government wouldn't need to pay in work benefits and could reduce employer's NI.

If civil service 'gold plated' pensions were reduced, perhaps civil service wages could be brought into line with private sector wages. Many civil service staff earn little more than minimum wage. There are very few 'gold plated' civil service pensions.

I’m sorry your teen suffered but did receiving benefits help?

@ExitPursuedByABare to medicalise normal human emotions.

As the mother of a teen who suffered with panic disorder and agoraphobia I find your trite summary of that terrible period of her and our lives offensive, ill informed and ignorant.

Those points sound simple, but they mostly fall apart once you look at how they’d work in reality:

“Get tough with the French” ignores that small boat crossings are driven by demand as much as enforcement. The UK has already paid France hundreds of millions for patrols, fences and surveillance & crossings still continue because people are desperate, traffickers adapt routes & there’s no legal route for many asylum seekers. You can’t just demand another sovereign country to solve it for you.

ID cards wouldn’t magically end illegal working. The UK already has right to work checks, biometric residence permits, HMRC records & employer verification systems. The issue is enforcement. Illegal labour exists because some employers knowingly exploit it for cheap labour. An ID card would just be something else to ignore.

Calling anxiety in teenagers “normal human emotions” massively oversimplifies what PIP is for. PIP isn’t awarded because someone feels nervous sometimes. It’s based on how severely a condition affects daily functioning. Plenty of young people with autism, severe anxiety disorders, PTSD, eating disorders or physical disabilities rely on it to function and stay in education or work. Pretending all claims are just “medicalising emotions” ignores that.

Employer NI absolutely affects hiring costs but the jobs market has wider problems too. Stagnant wages, weak growth, housing costs, Brexit related labour shortages, automation & years of underinvestment. Blaming one tax rise for everything is politically convenient but economically simplistic.

The “gold plated” civil service pension line is also a bit misleading. Most civil servants are not highly paid senior officials, they’re ordinary admin staff, job centre workers, prison officers etc. Their pensions are generally decent defined benefit schemes because salaries are often lower than comparable private sector roles. The real issue is that private sector pensions got worse, not that millions of public workers are living lavishly.

There’s a bit of a contradiction running through all of this. You want fewer benefits, fewer worker protections, lower employer taxes, tougher border enforcement & better public services but all of those things cost money and staff. You can’t endlessly cut the state while also demanding it does more.

An easy fix for Keir would be to stop the boats coming across the channel by getting tough with the French.

Introduce ID cards which I’m inherently against but now believe their introduction would get rid of the frankly embarrassing black market we are sitting on.

Stop giving pip benefits to teenagers and young people with anxiety. It does them no favours to medicalise normal human emotions.

Reduce the employer NI rates back to what it was. It’s killing the jobs market, particularly for those anxious young people who need to get a job.

Get rid of the Civil Service gold plated pension scheme.

They are a benefit and have been classified as such since 1948. You don’t “pay into it”, there’s no pot labelled “X’s Pension” - your contributions pay the pensions of those currently claiming, then the tax payers of the time will pay yours when you claim.

They are included in the welfare budget, the one that equalled income tax receipts for the first time last year that everyone was up in arms about when the info was published this year.

And plenty of people haven’t contributed and will still receive a state pension - topped up by pension credit if it’s below a certain amount.

Pensions are not a state benefit, we pay into those and you need to achieve a certain contribution level.

The two child cap removal wasn’t the reason the benefits bill was through the roof though was it. No one has even received the new amounts yet. And when they tried to address benefit spending by means testing the WFA the country lost its mind.

So unless they’re going to demonise parents and the disabled, no one really wants to tackle the benefits bill. Pensions make up 50% of it and you can’t even breathe the idea of looking at that 🤷‍♂️

Wes Streeting has told Sir Keir Starmer that he is preparing his case to be the next Prime Minister, The Telegraph can disclose.

The Health Secretary is preparing to launch a leadership campaign if Sir Keir is forced from office this week, amid mounting speculation that the Prime Minister will have to resign.

When questioned by Downing Street about his intentions, Mr Streeting is understood to have told No 10 that he is not planning to challenge Sir Keir directly, but is preparing a “case” for a leadership challenge in case it “all falls apart” and a contest is triggered by another candidate.

Where have I said it’s not?? I clearly said that both Reform and Green are both extremist positions.

Im sick of people moaning about the boats, and things like benefit cuts being the reason they support reform, when Farage helped cause the boats and intend to slash benefits even more. Either plain ignorance or an excuse to justify their racism

Do you not think that despite her poor start Angela has done well, made a success of her life, spent a lot of her time in public service, been active in the unions and raised her children? Surely if anyone understand what working class people want first hand then it's her.

It just seems like people judge the established parties by a very different set of rules than the populist ones, who are allowed to get away with anything.

So Angela Rayner calling people scum is a problem, but Nigel Farage singing “Gas them all” to Jews is not?

Angela Rayner? The one who dropped out of school pregnant and calls people scum? Er… maybe this is the problem- the establishment class thinks Ange is the poster child for the working class which exactly illustrates my point!

I voted Labour all my adult life. Im really disappointed.

I used to like the greens when they cared about the environment.

Yes I said upthread (or possibly on a different thread as on a few today) that I agree Farage is racist.

It's more surprising with the Green party though. They used to be a party that was seen as gentle, kind, inclusive. It seems particularly abhorrent that they have been hijacked by people with a racist agenda and upsetting that their leader hasn't rushed to condemn that.

I agree racism is worse but the hypnosis claim was pretty bad - exploiting vulnerable women for money.

The difference is, not in the speed at which racist party members were thrown out of each party, but that Farage HIMSELF has a history of making horrendous racist and antisemitic comments. So many people have come forwards as witnesses of this. Instead of saying, I was young and an idiot, I’d like to massively apologise to the people I bullied with racist insults, he denies it.

I don’t believe his denials. There are too many witnesses and it fits in with his actions and beliefs in adult life.