Thread 25 Starmer - Cheers for a falling out among thieves

[DuncinToffee]

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https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5338688-thread-24-starmer-casting-the-net-wider?

How do you know that none of us live in one of those towns?

Have any of you visited some of the deindustrialised towns in the north ?

Just spotted that that Bolton article is from 2017

Yes - Wigan for work. A deeply depressed (and depressing) town.
Don't think immigration has anything to do with it though. With the benefit of hindsight this is about a series of poor decisions made by governments and business owners from the 50s through to today.

I have often said on MN that crossings are weather dependent and it makes sense to up security even more on warmer, calmer days when more migrants cross. Last week or the week before when over 100 crossed in one day was an embaressment to the Labour Party, it's not as if they don't know this would happen.

I think we've found the only Northerner in the country.

No, really, you seemed quite flummoxed by the idea, last week. That busy week was all Labour's fault and you made no link to the atrocious weather last spring. You had it spelled out to you, in fact.

Ugh. Awful news from Austria.

but you seem to be belittling how some ordinary wc people rightly or wrongly feel

If ordinary working class people are blaming refugees/immigrants for the deterioration of their towns they are a) stupid and b)racist.

Luckily, many working class people are neither. We know the game that is being played.

Yep. Same for Preston, Blackburn and Burnley. Town and city councils pissing away investments, making stupid decisions about traffic control that force people to out of town shopping centres, allowing old buildings to mysteriously go on fire to make way for new developments, penalizing community organisations so they fold and move away from town and city centres. It doesn’t matter what the demographic of a town is if no one wants to visit cos it’s shit and inaccessible.

It is

Have just seen. How terrible.

Do you ?

You’re suggesting I’m racist which is unfair. My point was that the NW and Manchester/Liverpool in particular have taken in more refugees than anywhere else in the UK. I’m not complaining about them, I’m talking about the logic of some of the poorest parts of the country accommodating the most vulnerable and neediest groups.

I’m from one, live near another, frequent visitor due to family to another. Spanning the North, West to East. Family working class on both sides until last couple of generations. So I do feel qualified to say that fear of immigration whipped up by Tories and Reform is out of proportion, overplayed and a tiny, tiny part of why some areas have been left behind in the last 50 years.
I love it up here, but my god, some places have been let down by successive governments, not by immigration.

I did not suggest you were being racist.

Exactly. I was born in the South Wales Valleys, which are now one of the most deprived areas (if not the most)of Wales. Not caused by immigration.

So the fact that Rochdale and Bolton have taken on more asylum seekers over the last 20 years than the whole of the south east apart from London is sensible considering the actual mess the towns are in ?
My point is, I’m happy for asylum seekers and refugees to come here, I accept that migration is vital, but the fact that many parts of the country haven’t helped to integrate these people as well, has caused resentment.

My brother in law's mum was Rochdale born and bred. Her last job in the mill before it closed (1970s) was taking out 'made in India' labels and replacing them with 'made in England' labels. The problems of the de-industrialised North of England is far greater than immigration.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/where-do-migrants-live-in-the-uk/

Asylum seekers who receive government support and housing are usually given no choice as to where they live. As of March 2024, the majority are concentrated in London, the North West, and West Midlands, with ten local authorities (LAs) hosting 22% of this population (Figure 9). This distribution is partly influenced by dispersal policies, which incentivise contractors to house people in places where accommodation is cheaper.

The distribution of asylum seekers contrasts with that of people who came under the Ukraine schemes, mostly under the Sponsorship (Homes for Ukraine) Scheme. The ten authorities with the highest number of Ukrainian nationals on the Home for Ukraine Schemes host only 11% of this population. This is because the scheme works around individual families’ availability to support a Ukrainian citizen. The individual LAs hosting the highest number of Ukrainian nationals are located in the South West and South East regions of England: Buckinghamshire, Somerset, and Barnet. Scotland hosts more of this population than any other region of the UK (Figure 9).

And it's quite clear how that has happened.

It’s not the asylum seekers that people are chunnering about though, is it? It’s Brown Faces. Who, historically, we invited over to work in the mills.
Immigration is a separate issue to sustained and historic neglect of Northern towns once the industry there melted away. If we assess and process asylum applications in a timely manner we won’t have whole hotels full of displaced and often traumatised people. In fact, if hotels stop taking the government’s money to dump them there it would be a start. But if your business isn’t sustainable then I suppose it’s easy money - after all, if there’s a local outcry about your cousin’s wedding venue being used for Schrodinger’s Immigrant (simultaneously taking all the benefits and stealing British peoples’ jobs) you can just blame the people placedthere can’t you, rather than admit you failed to run a piss up in a hotel brewery.
See also: councils nodding through yet another vape shop, barbers or bookies.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said the Government is 'drawing a line under nearly two centuries of injustice' by abolishing the Vagrancy Act, which has been on the statute books since 1824

(the Mirror)

I idly wonder why national government didn't make any any central government subsidy to local authorities conditional on their accommodating a proportion of asylum seekers in line with their own population ?

Of course for all I know they may have, and some local authorities have been less than honest about it ?

I know I could educate myself. But why bother ? Much easier to write in soundbites, think in slogans and act in ignorance.

Already repealed in 2022 but not yet enacted, waiting for more up to date legislation to be drawn up.

Some background here
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/review-of-the-vagrancy-act-consultation-on-effective-replacement/outcome/government-response-to-the-consultation-on-replacement-legislation-for-the-vagrancy-act