Is a more left Labour government what people want?

They didn't say it was acceptable, they said it was coming down, which it is - dramatically so.

Last year's net migration figure is a 78% drop from its peak in 2023. Now I don't care about immigration and have been happy while it's at all these levels, but obviously there are other things I want the government to do. And bloody hell, if it got 78% of the way to completely achieving them in two years (78% of the extra funding the NHS needs; 78% of the extra corporation and wealth taxes we need; 78% of the preparatory work needed to re-enter the EU etc. etc.) I'd be over the moon and think it was the best government for me ever.

And that's not even to say that you should necessarily be happy with that. But while MOST of the net migration has been stopped, it seems to have made ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE to the rhetoric coming from Reformites about it. Why aren't you saying "What I want Labour to do is continue on this correct path we're on of rapidly reducing immigration", rather than just pig-headly repeating the same soundbites as if the last two years hadn't happened?

Basically you just love being victims and complaining, don't you? Nothing would devastate you more than taking away your precious hobby horse and leaving nothing to moan about.

So anyway, OK: 240,000 is not low enough. Can you give a number that would be? And can you give a reason why, based on actual evidence and reasoning why that would be the sweet spot at which immigration benefits the economy, rather than just because that's the number it was at in some previous year chosen at random?

And here's another question: Net migration has fallen by 78% in the last two years. Have you noticed the cost of living and quality of public services get 78% better? (or get any better at all?). If not, has it ever occurred to you to wonder why?

Because they were stirred up by Farage, Johnson et al. Nobody gave a shit when immigration was at around 200,000 in 2004/5. The irony is that Brexit created higher levels than ever before.

It wasn’t “the masses” by the way. It was 37% of those eligible to vote.

I think Labour should get rid of Starmer, put someone else in charge and go back to their traditional voter base. I don’t think that’s necessarily ‘more left wing’ as such, but traditional labour could be firmer on immigration and cut welfare under the guise of standing for the working classes maybe?

Nobody cared? Why did the masses vote for brexit then, in your opinion?

@ThisOneLife
thank you for picking it up!
Of course I meant immigration. Don’t know how it happened, it absolutely doesn’t make sense with “emigration”.

Immigration was becoming a problem in 2006 (i.e. 20 years ago!). There was a lot of criticism levelled at Blair for not implementing the same kind of restriction re Eastern Europeans as lots of other EU countries were implementing.

Then we had Brown's "Bigoted woman" statement in 2010.

I think it's a massive mistake to think "nobody cared" about immigration around that time!!

There’s nothing wrong with that but that’s all costs money so where does that come from? Labour policies have resulted in working people being taxed to the hilt and preventing the growth required in the economy to pay for it. The benefits bill also needs to be cut and those that genuinely need it should be prioritised.

Sorry don’t understand the connections you have made or why you think your questions have anything to do with the point I was making.

Great riposte.

Oh, they did care. It was the start of the beginning of Brexit. You can't have numbers coming over which equate to the size of a small city every year and not have people notice or care. Resistance to high levels of immigration began within a year of the A8 countries being given open access to our labour market, courtesy of Blair, when all other major developed countries in the EU kept their doors firmly shut for 7 years.

How long do you want to go back? 200k is the level it was over 20 years ago. When nobody cared.

You're being gaslit into thinking that net migration of 240,000 is acceptable. Prior to the A8 Eastern European countries joining the EU and being given full access, net migration was running at around 50,000 a year. I think most people wish it had stayed at that level. We certainly wouldn't have a housing crisis if it had done.

TBF I think you could probably answer that yourself, looking at (a) improved diagnosis/life expectancies and (b) outcomes e.g. quality of life.

The old Lefties dont like paying tax, do they?

Zack Polanski is facing new questions about whether he underpaid council tax on a London houseboat where he stayed, as scrutiny of the Green Party leader’s background increases. Polanski, who has established the Greens as a serious leftwing threat to Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour, has already apologised for misrepresenting himself as a British Red Cross spokesperson. The tax issue relates to a houseboat in a marina in Hackney, the borough where the Greens took control of the council in last week’s elections. The Times newspaper found evidence that the houseboat was Polanski’s primary residence, citing an advert for the boat, in which his partner wrote: “We are moving to a house and so will sadly be leaving the gorgeous community behind.”
FT

I think the fragmentation of family has led to a lot of problems. Go back a few decades and most people lived and worked in their home towns, so they had a "network" of family and friends, often living very close to each other, sometimes the same street etc.

The centralisation of decent jobs into London and a few other big cities, along with the push to get 50% of kids to go to Uni, has meant lots of "children" never return to their home towns and stay in their Uni towns or move to the bigger cities for professional jobs etc.

That obviously means a much smaller "family" is left behind in their home town. So, fewer people to "look after" the elderly relatives. Likewise, in their "new" cities, the younger people don't have the same "back up" of family and friends that they had back in their home towns.

Add in the almost inevitable requirement for women/mothers to work rather then be stay at home Mums, so that's another aspect of them not being available to "look after" elderly relatives even if they did continue to live in/near their home towns.

Quite simply for these reasons, there are fewer people (particularly women) who are able to spend much time caring for their elderly relatives. Likewise the same applies for disabled family members of all ages.

When you had family and friends living a short distance away, it was easier for them to "pop in" to "help" out a bit. The more there were, the less each one would have to do as the burden was spread out amongst more people.

Take that away, and professional carers become essential, or you're left with just one or two relatives bearing the full burden, which often they can't do without professional care help eventually.

Ah, the good old days when women in their 70s ran themselves ragged to look after their 90 year old parents like my mum did. Yes, let’s go back to them.

The left exists but is split between labour and green now. People are leaving labour for failing to represent the left.

And as far as immigration goes, its been going down for a while youre all just easily gaslit by the television

It is absolutely the case that disability benefits increased when the eligibility for other benefits tightened, be that people who could get by without benefits before deciding to claim, or people hopping to the most generous benefit.

I have questions. How did it work before? 40 years ago we weren’t paying out billions for disabled people to not work or their family members also not to work as their ‘carers’?

I'm not trying to catch you out - I saw you post and I felt you'd be willing to engage (even though we probably disagree on a few things!). And you have, I appreciate it.
I agree with you on ESOL - I think it should be mandatory, not least because it's beneficial all round. I actually meet quite a few people who don't speak English in the UK and I think life must be so stressful and difficult. Actually that might be the key to solving a lot of issues because better English = better and more secure jobs (where those are available) and also more ability to integrate, therefore reducing people's preconceptions of 'us and them'.
Not sure about disability benefits. My controversial view is that low levels of other benefits increase the incidence and severity of disability and that if they were increased, many people would be in a better position to recover or to mitigate the effects of their illness or disability. Likewise we need a functioning NHS so people don't languish on waiting lists for ages, getting no better and often worse. Anxiety - I struggle not to be a typical Gen Xer, going on about "in my day" but obviously there's something going on that needs addressing. Again I think a lot of it is about the extreme pressures of modern life - high housing costs and COL, job insecurity, social media, consumerism... Humans weren't really set up to deal with it all and anxiety is the result. But I agree it's not good for anyone to be forgotten about - I've seen first hand (family member) how anxiety can take over and destroy lives.
Again, thank you for taking the time to respond. It's so good to get different viewpoints especially when we can have a respectful exchange of views!

@ForWittyTealOP

I'm sensing you're trying to catch me out, but I'll answer in good faith...

Looks like you have some points. I have some questions.

How does this 35% look in practice? How many are carers, how many are disabled, how many work part time and don't earn enough to pay income tax, how many are looking for work? What would the impact on the economy be if they all started to work, for example in terms of paying for care because unpaid carers weren't available, funding the NHS so that people weren't too sick to work, paying UC top ups where applicable and so on?

I don't know how it breaks down into the individual groups you mention, but I would like to see more detailed statistics coming out of government, in particular the numbers who only work part time because it affects the benefits they claim and makes more hours not worth it, as well as the % of young people claiming for mental health issues and not working at all as a result.

Exactly what proportion of the 35% you cite are foreign workers and how are you defining foreign workers?

If I had the % on that I would have provided it. I'm defining foreign worker as foreign worker, i.e. someone in work who is here either through FOM and has settled status, ILR, and those on visas. With FOM we were told that people needed to be able to support themselves. Categorically, that didn't happen. If you're being given top ups, you're not self supporting. A non contributory welfare system is not compatible with high levels of migration.

Could you provide some evidence and context for your second paragraph? What steps should the government take to ensure that disabled people are in work, and would you change the status of PIP as an in-work benefit? Are you working on the basis that only "low paid workers from elsewhere" (where?) are paid top-ups - is this included in your calculations?

Disabled people still face plenty of discrimination and prejudice in the workplace and those who are able to contribute ought to be given full support to reach their full potential. What that looks like I have no idea and I appreciate it sounds like some woolly bullshit from a manifesto. For the sake of a few tweaks, someone being overlooked all the time because it's too difficult to accommodate them is wrong. That said, I would overhaul benefits in general. The system we have is not compatible with the explosion in poor mental health and I would separate this out from physical disability and give it a different framework for claiming. I have little time for anxiety, in the majority of cases it can be overcome with support and determination. Sorry if that offends you.

There are plenty of Brits being paid top ups. I have an issue with Gordon Brown's tax credits and have done from the get go. It was an unthought through work around in response to crappy low paid service jobs replacing actual skilled manufacturing roles. I would rather have kept our manufacturing base and transitioned the skills from dying industries to emerging new ones, maintained decent salaries and put a stop to Thatcher's managed decline. A good example of this is in wind turbine production. We had plenty of men from the shipyards who could have moved into this area and then passed all that knowledge on. There are no welders anymore and all that experience has been lost. We could have been world leaders, but we import it all like so much else.

Are you looking at factors other than immigration that might have affected GDP since 2008? Do you accept that GDP has in fact increased since 2008, albeit more slowly than pre GFC?

I take umbrage with the 'immigrants are, on average, a net benefit' and we've been told this crap for years. Anyone using averages is massaging figures. Some will be, many aren't. And it doesn't take many French bankers in London to cover up those not working or claiming top ups.

Do you have a source for your figures on translation and interpretation services? Would you agree that it was a false economy for the coalition government to cut spending on ESOL classes by 60% and a mistake by subsequent governments not to fully reinstate that funding? Are you arguing that people who don't speak English shouldn't have access to these services or that they shouldn't be in the UK?

The source is from a FOI request and, on looking again, I am now not sure whether this is for the NHS in total, or whether the figures I posted are solely for Gloucestershire, which is where the FOI was directed. I think it may be the latter, which makes those numbers even more appalling.

ESOL classes should be mandatory and, no, funding shouldn't have been cut. Another example of neo liberal short sighted 'cost of everything, value of nothing' mentality so beloved of Cameron & Osborne, although Blair was partial to it as well. That said, if you move to a country it is incumbent on you to learn that language otherwise you can't fully participate and need to have allowances made for you, or you fall through the cracks and become isolated, neither of which is acceptable.

Moving to the left isn’t going to help Starmer.

You have to wonder why they didn’t sit down the day after the election, figure out who their voters were and immediately prioritise that group in every aspect of their policy decision making (like the Tories would have). Instead they have punished that group of voters while pursuing the votes of demographics that are long gone to them.

A large part of their voters largely don’t want higher taxes on the middle class to fund ever increasing pensioner / welfare spending. I will never vote for a Labour Party that is “more left-wing” than Starmer’s, as I know its idea of fairness is I work ever-increasing hours to fund those who work far less than me.

‘Walking away' as if he's honour bound…

Hilarious.

He would crawl over broken glass to cling to power.

Shameless little shit.

No, they're not mandatory.

Oh ok. When I refer people for ESOL, it can be very difficult for them to get an initial assessment. Perhaps more money needs to go into that? I used to work for a charitable organisation that offered ESOL to families and the funding for that was massively cut. It was a shame, because it benefited more than just the individual. It enabled people to make contacts, engage in the community and gain confidence. It also provided employment to the tutors of course! I think a lot more funding should be put into ESOL although of course translation and interpretation services aren't a zero sum game.
Out of interest, I wonder whether Welsh translation services are included in that figure? By law they have to be available in Wales - large organisations often have in-house teams I believe. And I don't think most people would see that as a negative.