To wonder why MN is so left wing/liberal?

[cdvegan2023]

MN hates Brexit, the tories, pink toys, violent video games... you get the idea. But in real life most women don't mind buying gender specific toys/clothes and the election/brexit female vote was about 50/50. So what makes this place 90% lefty/lib when general society is either split or completely reversed?

of course because there is no cost to immigration... financially or on services.

"And if the government invested more money in training people or hadn't made a degree for nursing mandatory we wouldn't have such a shortage of NHS staff"

I agree. This happened under a conservative government.

"of course because there is no cost to immigration... financially or on services. "

Of course because there is no benefit to immigration...financially or on services ...

Yes they are ineffective, but I think labour as they are is a worse option.
loads of would be nurses and doctors aren't given a place a university but then agency staff are paid over the odds to make up for the shortages.

austerity is an ideology imposed by the current government. It’s terrible long term - witness the massive increase in demand for children’s services for example as families fall into poverty and help for struggling families, drug/alcohol/ mental health services are cut.

It also means that the infrastructure struggles - we do have a rapidly growing population and we cannot not build schools/services. Immigration is not the cause of austerity - it does make the effects of it more visible. Immigration above the level a country can absorb and benefit from us not positive - right now the uk isn’t investing in the services and infrastructure it needs to benefit from it.

Immigration is basically a short term sticking plaster for our pyramid scheme style financial views - they will pay for our pensions! (Great, then who pays for that generations pensions..?) it kicks the can down the road.

My mum(former nurse) thought it was ridiculous to make nursing a degree. She sadly had to spend a lot of tome in hospital (refused to let on what her former career was) and rarely saw a nurse from one hour to the next. She saw auxiliary staff the majority of whom had great people skills and treated her with kindness and respect. The nurses were as distant as the doctors who she rarely saw.

Labour would want all degrees to be free, so loads could get into debt and acquire a degree in a useless subject. It would be a huge waste of money.

Fewer degrees, harder to get into uni. Return to polytechnics that offer a greater variety including apprenticeships. Make that free of tuition fees. Would be much better.

Immigration is basically a short term sticking plaster for our pyramid scheme style financial views - they will pay for our pensions! (Great, then who pays for that generations pensions..?) it kicks the can down the road.

I agree with this. They say our aging population needs boosting with immigration but once you inflate one end of the demographic they are eventually going to get older and also need care... so what do we do then, keep artificially inflating the population with immigration....

So how do you think we should staff the NHS?

Shhhfastasleep- yes, i think universities should stop offering meaningless degrees
If the goverment want to fund degrees it should do so where we have need.. i.e. Stem subjects

I think they should save money in the long run by increasing student intakes, training our own staff and then reducing the ridiculous sums spent on agency staff.
Or scrap the degree in favour of vocational training, as once was, making more accessible for all to join the profession

There are no shortages of willing applicants why shouldn't they have a chance?

There are benefits and downsides to immigration - those depend on many things. Volume, speed, the ability of a country or an area to absorb them. Age of immigrants, infrastructure and lots of other things.

It’s often touted in the press that the economic contribution of the recent immigration wave is a net positive. I don’t doubt that at all. But to who? To private businesses who are paying shit wages so that they need tax payers money to be propped up? Does this increase in people depress wages? Increase the pressure on workers rights and bargaining?

Does the increase go To the treasury? And yet they are imposing austerity. The downsides are pressure on schools, housing and infrastructure. And that what’s people see - they don’t really care if there’s a net positive in the country’s GDP. They see being unable to get a GP appointment.
You can’t ignore that or tell people they’re racist if they point it out. Most people aren’t. Most people have no issue with the actual immigrants themselves, they’re just pissed off that government isn’t using their tax money to build more schools, and is cutting back services at a time we need MORE of them, not less.

I’m an immigrant myself in a different country now - net tax contributor and yet I’m well aware that immigration has had negative effects on the country I’m in.

Immigration when you have a thriving economy able to absorb and benefit is one thing (the USA and Canada have done this spectacularly well, as has the UK at certain points.)

Immigration on a background of austerity is a recipe for social unrest.

Why do you believe it's favourable to draft in nursing staff from abroad- (where they too have shortages) to prop up our NHS, instead of letting us who want to do the job do it?

"There are no shortages of willing applicants why shouldn't they have a chance?"
Of course they should. What's stopping them?

It's true it's immigrants who change the sheets in care homes and do the nursing and cleaning in hospitals and homes.
But why is that?
Why do we need to bring it in people to do that?

Why do we need in import baristas and waiters and kitchen staff and so on?

I genuinely never understood why British people can't do all that?

This is not whether immigration is good or bad, it's about the why it happens.

Do we have mass migration of unskilled people?

I suppose that depends whether migrants pay in (in terms of tax and NI) more than they take out in terms of benefits, housing, healthcare costs, education cost etc. That is debateable as different reports come to different conclusions. I read a report that said what migrants cost the UK in terms of benefits and other costs (housing pressure, healthcare, education etc) is more than what they pay in tax and NI. Of course there are highly skilled migrants who pay loads of tax and NI but there are also huge amounts of migrants paid very poorly who cannot survive here without subsidies.

However, I don't really understand how it benefits the country to encourage mass immigration of people who are paid minimum wage (with no tax or NI payable by them), subsidised by benefits. It definitely benefits big business to have taxpayers subsidise their poorly paid workers and I guess that is why they love free movement as they haven't had to pay proper wages and don't have to worry about things like the added pressure on housing, education, health etc. Other taxpayers just have to suck up any negative aspects of unskilled migration or fear being called racist.

And I don’t think we need more uni places. We need more education places.

Uni should be for academic stuff. There should be much more emphasis on technical/vocational education and this shouldn’t be seen as second best to university. How can a technical industrial electrics education for example be seen as inferior to a poor degree? It baffles me.

We don’t have enough emphasis on education in the UK and we fail a lot of kids terribly. That needs to change.

We need to build more social housing and stop pouring taxpayer money into the pockets of slum landlords. Council housing rents go back to the council. It keeps the money in the public system. End right to buy.
Some sort of land value tax to stop land banking
Better housing standards - Parker Morris type.
Better education
International closing of tax loopholes
Everyone pays their bloody taxes
Better contraception - there are too many of us. Gentle non coercive methods to encourage populations to contract slowly to a more sustainable size.

Capitalism is fine. It really is the least worst option. What we have now is rampant free market capitalism which isn’t working in the interests of the majority. Capitalism is fine, it just needs a strong regulatory framework to reign in its tendency to fuck over the weak.

We just need to realise that the planet is a closed system. You can’t have constant growth in a closed system without killing it. We need to work towards sustainability. The rich can still be rich, just maybe not so obscenely rich and they need to pay their bloody taxes.

Bertrandrussel-
What's stopping them is a shortage or nursing places...
I think only about 2 in 10 people who apply get a place, far less for medicine despite having the grades. One thing holding me back is the age of my qualifications, has to be within last 5 years- even though my grades are high enough. Now I could spend money doing an access course, but I work shifts and have a mortgage and two under 3s... so there ya go..
The government don't feel a need to invest in training staff if they can just recruit staff from abroad to make up the shortages.

So why does the Labour Party get slammed for saying it will provide more training places for nurses and the Tories not get slammed for taking them away?

Hear - hear. Good points Missymoo100.

I remember someone starting a thread on the subject of over population a few years ago (I'm sure it was on here, but I could be mistaken) anyway it was all going along rather well and interestingly until someone called the OP a 'spreader of hate' or some such nicety and the thread was taken down.

Tories have created more but by making people pay for their own degree instead of bursary.
My problem with labour is that they promise the world, and would most probably crash the country.

Re nursing
I think gov should admit they made a mistake and scrap the mandatory degree- and have vocational qualifications that can be done whilst doing the job, so people are getting a wage.

They don’t get slammed from me. It’s a policy I’m all for. Stop poaching nurses from countries that need them and train our own staff up. All for it.

The op above who says that disagreeing with something isn’t hating it is spot on.
I disagree with several points of current Tory policy. I dont hate anyone who votes Tory, why on earth would I? They’re a mainstream political party whose policies I don’t universally agree with - they aren’t the SD or extremists. I see this this hating a person for their mainstream political leanings mindset all the time on line - ‘loony lefties, Tory scum.’ It’s ridiculous.
It also means people arent properly engaging with politics. It’s easier to fling insults at each other and call someone a Tory scumbag than it is to say ‘let’s debate the current policy on X. I disagree with this because...’ of course that benefits our current rulers well. No one in power wants a politically engaged educated electorate with enough time on their hands to get involved.

And frankly, if you only associate with people whose political views are exactly the same as your own you’re living a blinkered and restricted life. I’ve certainly changed my mind on some issues as I’ve lived out in the world and encountered people with different lives to my own.

My point about hating is not because people are disagreeing with each other, they’re positively vile to each other.
Of course we should be able to engage with each other. I even maintain that we need passion for politics and we need to hear all the views, including the extreme, because that’s how we work towards a middle ground that suits the society we need and want.