Portsmouth this evening

[Shmoigel]

Has anyone else seen the news about what’s happening in Portsmouth this evening
A boat has arrived in Hampshire and the protesters from Dover are currently in the sea blocking passage with hundreds more on the quay blocking coaches waiting.

Darling, the UK is an incredibly wealthy country, in fact the 6th wealthiest in the world. We have a GDP of £288 trillion.

It’s bonkers how rich we are.

Unfortunately, the wealthiest evade taxation due to an unregulated system.

We don’t feel wealthy because our wages haven’t risen with the cost of living.

There are also large swaths of the UK disenfranchised by post industrialisation.

And our statutory services have been buggered up by privatisation.

This is what Burnham means when he talks of the “wrong turns” the country took. He is being nicer than me, I just call it Thatcher!

But seriously, we aren’t skint. It’s to do without the way wealth is distributed. The trickle down economy doesn’t trickle to you and me.

Obviously, this pisses us off. But being pissed off about 600 frozen, frightened people nearly perishing at sea is what they want us to feel.
Sad pun but they are literally a drop in the ocean compared to what’s being thieved us by the super rich.

Millionaires like Farage, Dacre, Tice, Lowe will happily let the Portsmouth thugs stir up shit as a smoke screen so they can pocket the wealth.

It’s the oldest trick in the book: get the workers, the vulnerable and the disenfranchised to squabble amongst themselves while the rich pickpocket us. That’s why they peddle their lies and misinformation. The old boy network has won the war again!

Where did I say unfettered immigration?

Shame on the billionaire, he should be made to cough up his tax before he goes and not allowed to come back when Greece burns . What’s this myth about billionaires being talented?

Being ruthless isn’t a talent. Exploiting people isn’t a virtue. Killing the planet is nothing to be proud of.

We are the ones doing the heavy lifting, the dangerous, the boring, the dirty, the sad, the stressful, the responsible. Not bloody billionaires.

You want to bankrupt ordinary working people and punish them for the 'sins' of their forebears.

I’m really not sure if I should bother but here goes.

Everyone knows (those who deny it are lying) that wages at the lower end of the wage scale have been kept down by all-together-now IMMIGRATION.

Darling, the UK is a country collapsing under a debt of £3 trillion - the size our our GDP, (which was not the figure you quoted). We're constantly borrowing money to pay the interest on that debt. We are effectively bankrupt.

I don’t mean to do that. The whole situation is a terrible tragedy

Sounds eye watering until you consider that that bastion of right wing capitalism the USA owes 40 trillion. China 18 and Japan 12.

We absolutely can afford our welfare state with taxation. Getting the 60 billion uncollected tax would be good. Cancelling the 260 billion on trident as well.

We can’t afford not to have a proper regulatory system for processing refugees because the problem is going to get much, much worse with climate emergency. International infrastructure needs putting in now.

Just to clarify, you mean people who employ immigrants illegally and pay them way below minimum wage with no sick pay or indeed NI contributions. You mean them?

No I want to assure our children a future

@GentleSheep is proposing a reason why the demonstrators have not joined the army. She is not saying that the army should be used (to visit violence - your interpretation) on the boats (and by the way the army doesn't only do violence).

It is a reasonable point if there was an arm of state which was seen to be actively doing something about small boats some of these protestors might apply to join that institution. However the most likely explanation why these people have not signed up is that they have records, are too old, just don't fancy it, have families etc

Really your problem should be with @piscofrisco who first inferred that the army could be used against the boats. Although she used it as a device on which to hang an argument about the protestors' character

It sounds so much, doesn't it - £3 trillion.

But actually that's just £40,537 per person.

The state spends an average of about £12,000 to £13,600 of that on our behalf on state services: the NHS, schools, police, government etc. That excludes welfare and pensions, but includes £1800 each per year of national debt interest.

So if all our GDP was completely equally shared out, people would get £27k post-tax income per year.

Full time median salary is £39,039, which is £31,627 after tax. Even full time NMW is £24,784, which is £21,364 after tax.

UK workers are absolutely not being exploited. If you actually work full time, you get a minimum of 79% of your equal share of everything the UK makes. Even on NMW. The average-earning full time worker gets 117% of the equal share.

If you don't work, you get less, but actually not that much less. That's why large-scale immigration of people who don't produce much over their lifetime makes us all so much poorer.

Notice they don’t go to Switzerland deposit it bring considerably closer /wonder why?

Is this what you’re thinking @SevenYellowHammers?

Just in terms of what you envisage, what kind of ballpark, and yes it will fluctuate. But an idea of how many roughly?

Actually, Switzerland recorded 25,781 asylum applications in 2025 . 7,382 people were granted asylum and 4,589 received temporary admission.

Given Switzerland's size (just under 10 million) that's proportionally more applications than the UK's 100,625 people.

Switzerland does actively deport failed asylum seekers though, whereas we don't. So we kept a far higher percentage of ours.

It does highlight a fairly significant problem with your proposal to share out asylum seekers according to wealth though @SevenYellowHammers . Surely a country's size and ability to absorb more must be taken into account?

You've got the UK's wealth pretty significantly wrong @SevenYellowHammers . No wonder you have such unrealistic wants!

Not only is your GDP 100 times wrong (!!) but your ranking is misleading, since GDP doesn't take account of population.

It's a bit of a politician trick actually. If an immigrant brings just £1 productivity to the UK, then our GDP goes up. But of course, they cost £10s of thousands a year, plus our infrastructure must stretch further.

GDP per person is a far better measure - and even better if you use Purchasing Power Parity to compare cost of living. When everyone's salary is 10 times lower, then it costs much less to buy anything. (Worldwide, 648 million people subsist on less than US$2.15 per day - which would obviously be physically impossible in the UK)

The UK ranks around 37th in the world for gross domestic product per person adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), out of 202 countries.

It's still a pretty nice place to rank (hence so many economic migrants coming here illegally), but we are far from rich compared to other Western countries.

www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/?source=imf&region=worldwide&year=2026&metric=ppp

No of course not.

There’s around 1,500 in Calais camp, 1000 in Dunkirk, and around 800 in Paris camp.

Never have I said let’s let millions come and stay.

I’m advocating for humane, swift and peaceful processes upon arrival. Which doesn’t equate to “here’s the keys to a shiny new council house and why not jump the queue.”

In most cases it’s a plane ride home.

What’s NOT acceptable is the “Brave Boys” (Proud Boys?) getting in everyone’s way, shouting their gobs off and wasting everyone’s time, money and resources. It’s just blokes wanting a punch up and a shout.

Burnham needs to update country with accurate figures every week because the situation is actually improving but you wouldn’t think so with efforts of X and Tommo’s Black Shirts to destabilise the UK. We also need numbers on British nationals who are leaving.

Longer term ( but sadly it’s the near future not the distant) we need to face up to climate migration . This doesn’t mean preparing to take 25 million people, this means stepping up drive for net zero, reparations, foreign aid projects and a move to plant based farming to phase out the waste and pollution of animal farming.

All things that Reform will screw up if (please God no) we end up with them in government.

Facing up to to climate migration absolutely doesn't mean reparations or foreign aid projects.

It means strengthening our borders and coming out of ridiculous treaties invented for the world of 100 years ago.

Maybe eventual net zero and a more plant based diet. But history shows that allowing these things to happen naturally is far more effective - and far less harmful to the population - than imposing them.

The UK has an incredibly competitive, inexpensive food - I know it doesn't feel like that with recent increases, but we spend an astoundingly low proportion of our income on food compared to almost everywhere else. As prices come up, people will naturally move more plant-based.

Agreed that we need better figures on arrivals and on British nationals who are leaving.

That absolutely has to include data on age, education and income level. Unfortunately, we're losing educated young people who see that they will just be wrung dry in the UK and replacing them with people who will never do more than illegally drive a taxi and claim benefits alongside.

Yet politicians try to hide that by pretending that 'net migration' is what matters

Watch that 37th ranking fall...

The only slight silver lining I can see to the UK's dire finances is that surely, surely no politicians will ever now flirt with the idea of 'reparations' which would sink our children yet further into the mire for generations.

We dodged a bullet, because that could possibly have happened during the 90s boom years, when Gordon Brown boasted that the bust would never come.

Yes although people might vote for a politician who appeals to say @SevenYellowHammerssentiments, who then tries.

Ok so no to 25 million. Btw those camps are not fixed numbers, the more you welcome the more people will travel to get here.

But back to the climate refugees, how are you stopping more people trying to get here?

Scary.

Also, as other countries see the UK weakening they move to take advantage. Argentina with their recent rhetoric on the Falklands is a clear example.

Being 'the nice guys' who will give other countries the shirt off our back really doesn't work as international policy. They'll just take advantage of it to steal our trousers too.

And yet we’re in G7?

I don’t doubt that we screwed a lot of our wealth up. Lots of it lies dormant in overseas accounts producing no tax and not being used to generate our wealth.

We have no or very little manufacturing industry. We have no or little energy production. Our utility companies and transportation services are being run to serve shareholders. Even our education system. And that, embarrassingly was a Labour government, even mad Maggie stopped short of that one.

But in short, she sold off our assets, made millions unemployed, gave away our energy and proclaimed it economical success.

It’s amazing we remain in the richest 1% . We should all be a lot better off though.

So no, we shouldn’t allow millions of needy people to move here. But nor should we allow a loud minority to shout and get in the way of public service workers who are trying to do their jobs.

Of course, Musk and his band of wallies are jumping around with glee at the sight of it. Home goal! What next? A lost election for Farage but the Brave Boy Black Shirts storm Parliament? Worked for Donald, eventually.

Despite the battering our economy takes from successive projects to keep the poor poor and billionaires richer, we are fortunate. The myth that there isn’t enough to go round is a handy idea for the super rich.

It wasn’t us or immigrants who nearly Bankrupted the economy in 2008. It wasn’t LGBT+ people, it wasn’t libraries, it wasn’t the NHS, it wasn’t schools, it wasn’t unions. It wasn’t sure start. Yet we got punished. And the billionaires got richer. And richer. As they did during Covid.

Of course it suits them to blame a few cold souls huddled on a temu boat. And like Stalin, Hitler, Franco before them enlist working class men to do their dirty work.

we used to have more about us. We didn’t use to let Black Shirts speak for us.

You know that is being driven by Trump right?