To think that net immigration…

[Libertass]

Of 745,000 people a year isn’t what the 17 million people who voted for Brexit in 2016 thought they were voting for?

YABU = Yes, this is what Leave supporters voted for.

YANBI = No, they didn’t vote for this.

What? You've never heard a politician say something they didn't mean in order to get votes?

There always seem to be significant numbers of posters on here who think he should have continued to call her and people like her bigots and they seem to think that would have been a vote winner - who knows?

Strange understanding of what has been said.

I agree with what he said, but I also agree that he had to apologise so as not to alienate the other bigots out there.

Why would you worry about alienating bigots?

Unfortunately there are so many around that you need some of them to vote for you.

Hang on, why is this a Labour problem to come up with an answer for?

When they left power, net migration was 210k, this is a Tory created problem, i also think that people like Sunak, with very strong links, both politically and family to India, is going to ever do anything about it, he simply doesn't see it as an issue.

I've asked this before "How is a new international agreement going to stop people crossing the Med?" or any other border.

Physically impossible to send people back to many war torn countries and if the country of origin refuses to take them back e.g France, what do you then do? start a war? parachutes?
Many countries, such as Russia or Iran (and plenty others) wont obey current treaties they ve signed up too, let alone new one.

People don't think through the realities of what at first seems easy solutions i.e Rwanda or New Treaties, over to you Suella!

It's a lack of good resourcefulness of the country we have.

Go to many towns in the UK and they're ghost towns. Houses boarded up, a lack of jobs, high streets deserted. These are the places where you need investment in housing and the local economy.

Everything has been built around London for the last 40 years. Similar has happened with Manchester or Leeds (the north) and Birmingham (Midlands) in recent years. Yet many of the places around them are post-industrial relics.

She's a victim too. That generation have been fed a diet of the Daily Mail and Rupert Murdoch for too long. At least younger people don't read the right wing press (social media brings its own issues)

I've been saying this for years. People go on about lack of infrastructure, houses, transport links, etc., but the reality is that there are town and cities in the regions that are virtually ghost towns, where there is the power/transport/water infrastructure, and lots of derelict/empty buildings. We need the politicians to come up with a long term plan to bring these places back to life - encourage people to live there, encourage businesses to relocate there to give locals the jobs they need. It's completely stupid to keep building new homes on the edges of "successful" (mostly Southern) towns where the infrastructure is crumbling, or on flood plains, etc., when there is so much potential in all the run down towns and cities. This country and it's politicians have been far too "London Centric" for a fed decades and it's clear how stupid that kind of blinkered thinking has been when we look at all the run down towns and cities that have been "asset stripped".

It's a lack of good resourcefulness of the country we have.
Go to many towns in the UK and they're ghost towns. Houses boarded up, a lack of jobs, high streets deserted. These are the places where you need investment in housing and the local economy.

Exactly. But the Conservatives don't want the population to think about just how much they have stuffed the country over the last 13 years, how there have been 16 (!) Housing Ministers in 13 years (and consequently no overall policy or plan for housing), how Hunt's poor decisions and underinvestment during the time he was Health and Social Care minister have resulted in the poor state of the NHS (staff shortages, 7.5m people in England waiting for treatment etc) and all of the other things that have got worse rather than better - and all at the cost of doubling the national debt which now stands at trillions.

In 2016 and 2019 they wanted people to believe that all the problems facing the UK were caused by the evil EU and the unelected bureaucrats - with the implication that once the UK left the EU, all of these woes would magically disappear and according to Boris, the country would experience "untold prosperity."

2023 - and now they have found other scapegoats. Now "the problem" is a different group of foreigners - the immigrants and small boat arrivals. Some of the loudest voices are the unelected Lord Cameron, Lord Frost and Farage.

Don't be fooled. Don't be distracted. The housing shortages were there long before the recent immigrants arrived. The pressure on the NHS has been there since before the pandemic. The towns suffering from decline and decay have been doing so for the last decade or more. Even if immigration stopped tomorrow, nothing will improve in the next 5 years or more - which is the trap that the Conservatives are setting for the next government.

There isn't even that much of housing shortage, that is made up as well. There is a problem with the distribution of housing.

@Havanananana

The towns suffering from decline and decay have been doing so for the last decade or more.

You can add a decade or two before that too! The rot set in to today's run down towns a 2 or 3 decades ago. Neither political party have shown any interest in stopping the rot. Yes, Tories have ignored it for 13 years, but so did Labour in the 13 years before that. My own seaside town was showing all the signs of dereliction, decay, etc in the 90's and we had a Labour MP through the Blair/Brown years, but literally nothing was done to target the very clear decay and rot. Local politicians just sat by and shrugged as the major chain stores closed down, they watched as the boarding houses were turned into squalid HMOs where ex-prisoners were literally brought in by bus from prisons, and then wondered why localised crime and anti social behaviour was increasing! Tories have been hopeless and couldn't care less, but neither did Labour under Blair and Brown. And not seen anything from Starmer about tackling it and rejuvenating the run down towns either.

Caused by the distribution of population and jobs! Govt needs to incentivise employers to move some or all of their locations out of London and back into the regions.

Run down town are always going to remain run down towns if there are no jobs to encourage people to live there. That's exactly the problem with the way they've moved immigrants and ex-offenders into run down seaside towns - there's no work for them, so it perpetuates the reliance on benefits.

I think posters credit the tories too much with ‘evil genius’ long term plans and traps for future labour governments. I just think of them as opportunists more like rats or vultures, there to pick off what they can while making it all up as they go along because public have short memories

Same as Labour then. I think both main parties are pretty much hopeless and clueless, sadly. We're desperately short of politicians who are in the job for the right reasons AND are competent.

How do we make these ghost towns places where people will willingly move to? The problems are often so entrenched. Even if you invest financially, unless you also solve the problems of high criminality, and the high levels of drug addiction, alcoholism and homelessness, people still wont want to live there.

We didn't do it when the country was in a much better situation financially, so we're not going to do it now.

It's a bit like labour telling us they're going to pay for everything by growing the economy.

I'll believe it when I see it.

I think I have understood the evidence to the Home Affairs select committee this morning correctly that the Home Office has unilaterally withdrawn more people's asylum applications this year than there will be failed asylum claims and addtionally the Home Office has no idea where any of those people are.

I guess it is another example of Sunak's reverse midas touch.

Well we could stop spending more per head on infrastructure in London and the SE than other places for a start.

Nail on the head. Per a recent labour party document, they say that London and The South East "enjoy double the average UK infrastructure spend per head". How is that even justified? No wonder it's the richest part of the country if everyone is getting twice as much spent on their infrastructure compared with other areas. No wonder public transport etc is totally useless in so many areas of the UK if all the spending is going to London!

Tony Blair should shoulder some of the blame for this as he encouraged everyone that they were suitable to get a degree and get a decent job rather than putting value into being a plumber or a nurse or blue collar worker
these workers need to be valued and their careers being respected
A lot of kids went off to do a crap degree when they were more suitable for a vocational training role and came out the other side looking down their nose at the local lad that was a labourer for a building firm
The Eastern Europeans came over and mopped up these jobs in the Uk and the middle class loved their polish plumbers and immigrant NHS staff
it’s all coming home to roost now with UK kids not wanting to pick fruit , build houses or nurse patients
no doubt we will all clutch our hands and wonder what to do
we need to regain our work ethic and not be frightened of getting our hands dirty
Charity begins at home as does fixing a society

In the interests of factual accuracy I would like to point out that to become a nurse you do a degree in nursing. Additionally nursing degrees are some of the most oversubscribed at many universities.

Blair never got more than around 34% of children to go to Uni, thats approx the EU average, its about 37% now & the Uk needs far more skilled and qualified people, not less.
The number of EU trades people working in the UK was a tiny % of trades people that work in the UK

Yes in Agri we have have always relied on overseas nationals, quite simply because they are single, very mobile and in all honesty, by living in terrible conditions (which the UK authorities wont act on) they can earn a lot more money than they ever could in their home countries.

As to "rediscovering our work ethic" what a load of tosh, people in this country work hard, often for very low salaries, whilst the companies they work for make huge profit.

Unfortunately, once they start work in the NHS, they often very quickly leave or go PT, such are the awful work conditions, low pay, high loan repayments and car parking charges.
eg 29 out of 30 midwives leave within a couple of years.

The trouble is paying nurses more causes inflation. Where as belittling them and undermining the profession is a much more effective way of running the Health Service.

jasflowers
eg 29 out of 30 midwives leave within a couple of years

You appear to have misunderstood what was being claimed;

2018
The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) said attempts to boost staff numbers had made little difference, because so many are leaving the NHS or taking retirement.

Its research shows that even though universities trained an extra 2,000 midwives in 2016/17, the total number rose by just 67, because so many workers left the service.

RCM chief executive Gill Walton said, “It is of deep concern that we’re only seeing an increase of about one NHS midwife for every 30 or so newly-qualified midwives graduating from our universities. The problem is that so many existing midwives are leaving the service that the two things almost cancel each other out.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/12/nhs-loses-29-midwives-every-30-trains/

Leavers' survey 2022 - The Nursing and Midwifery Council

The three most commonly selected reasons for leaving the register were the same as in previous years: retirement (42.9 percent), personal circumstances (21.7 percent), and too much pressure (18.3 percent).