Reform UK neck and neck with Labour?

[NeatDog]

Absolutely shocked to read that in a poll Reform UK are neck and neck with Labour...

About 25% polling share for Reform and Labour.

I thought Blair was the worst PM ever, but Starmer seems to be giving him a run for his money.

Yes @Jumpingthruhoops how dare he not fix 14 years of the country being utterly fucked by the Tories in 6 months....the waster...

It seems rather a strange coincidence that it’s happened to two different posters on two different threads in the space of a couple of hours. Of course posting on threads you regularly criticise isn’t a tactic either, is it @Rummly?

Yes, I've been really amazed by how many Labour mnetters wanted conservative policies to be delivered. It seems they are Labour first and, actually, not very left at all. Apparently any class analysis and care for the vulnerable is for someone else.

Just been doing some "back of envelope" calculations.

35,000 asylum seekers came to the UK from France last year by boat. How much will each of them cost the taxpayer? Maybe £20,000 a year each? It costs a lot of money to put them up in hotels and provide them with health care and lawyers.

So one years worth of asylum seekers will cost the taxpayer £700 million. That's a lot of money! How many nurses would that employ? How many schools could be built? How many hospitals could be built?

Then you consider how many hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers have come in the previous decades. How many more will arrive this year?

Britain is becoming poorer and poorer due to immigration. Public services are failing and we don't have enough housing. We need an honest discussion on immigration.

A good idea not to decrease growth in those 6 months along with the private sector

Particularly when the intention was the opposite

@Rummly there are some extremely paranoid people out there.
This is a chat forum with millions of users
This isn't labour party private forum for like minded people to babble in an echo chamber.

I see it as a badly disguised way of shutting down proper debate from intellectual people who can like a bit of this and dislike a bit of that

There are jobs the indigenous population won’t do. There were farmers in Lincolnshire whose crops rotted in the fields last year because the foreign workers who used to harvest them returned home after Brexit and they couldn’t replace their labour.

The situation was more complex than Brits not being prepared to do seasonal farm work.

In our area the farms relied on agencies to supply workers. The agencies did all the recruitment, HR, H&S, transport etc. The agencies generally provide accommodation and expect 6-months service and complete flexibility on location. A big shift from our grandparents' day when people, often mothers, would be employed directly by local farms in part time seasonal fruit picking jobs that fit around family life.

When Brexit happened the agencies were not able to find British people prepared to work under the same conditions. There were Brits keen to do the work, even at minimum wage, but they wanted to work for their local farm so they could return home each night. However, the farms had been promised staff by the agencies so were not set up to train people, manage payroll and rotas etc. It was a logistics and HR issue.

This was our experience in Norfolk anyway.

I couldn't find any good links to explain it better, but the following links give a good background to how the system is set up:

https://fullfact.org/online/farm-workers-coronavirus/

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/12/no-running-water-foreign-workers-criticise-uk-farm-labour-scheme

Migrant workers are important to the UK, food prices would increase without their cheap and flexible labour. However it is not fair to say that these are jobs the indigenous population will not do.

Would you like to unpack that a bit? What conservative policies did you have in mind?

It depends who’s being hit

Pensioners, students and PIP ok

Labour means unions, so other groups will get it first

Public sector cuts will happen, it’ll be interesting to see when they come up against pay, they can’t borrow out of it. Well not more anyway

No it doesn’t seem like that at all. And if you’re implying it’s me both times, no it most definitely isn’t. I made that comment once on this thread to a poster that wasn’t you.

And why shouldn’t I or anyone else post on any thread they want to? That’s not a ‘tactic’, it’s being a poster. The fact that I think the Starmer threads are risible circle jerks is neither here nor there. I don’t post on them very much anyway, as you well know; just when some antidote to the stream of Labour adulation becomes irresistible.

edit: added a missing ‘here’.

@Flustration why? Was it a pay issue?
I know a common pattern was they lived in substandard housing, often crammed in paying very little and saving money to go home.
This is what created some social issues within the local community because there was no sense of investing in a new community it was a short term solution for them.
Also it created massive issues with modern slavery and slave gangs from Eastern Europe setting vulnerable people to work and housing them in the cheapest way.

So I'm not sure who was winning there really?

How did fields get cleared before Tony Blair in 2007?

I don't think starmer is bad at all

Post where you like as the pp said it’s not a private Labour party forum

I didn’t imply it was you both times. I know it isn’t, you inferred that. As a pp said, there are some extremely paranoid people out there.

@Rummly what could be called a tactic however is deliberately sending posters over from long running threads to deliberately disrupt and drag down debate.
I do believe it's been seen and reported.

As Rummly so rightly said, it’s called posting. Nobody is “sent” anywhere.

That sounds awful and I am very sorry you went through that. I wanted to find out about this area. Maybe I am being useless but I am having trouble finding references to Everton in Leicester. There is a place called Evington, so I wondered if that was where you meant? Thanks

I am not disagreeing that we could use that money well in the NHS. However, the annual NHS spend on salaries is around £71,100,000,000. Increasing this spend by 0.98% alone will be helpful but will not save it - and will be quickly cancelled out by the looming problem of our aging population.

That's why Farage himself is proposing a co-pay system to bridge the gap.

If we also chose to limit low-skilled migration that 0.98% will be wiped out completely as wages for care workers, NHS cleaners etc will increase. Only a relatively small proportion of NHS salary spend is for highly-skilled jobs like doctors. Of course this will be a great thing for British people working low-skilled jobs in the NHS, but we will need to find a way to meet the additional costs.

There are jobs the indigenous population won’t do. There were farmers in Lincolnshire whose crops rotted in the fields last year because the foreign workers who used to harvest them returned home after Brexit and they couldn’t replace their labour.
^The situation was more complex than Brits not being prepared to do seasonal farm work.
In our area the farms relied on agencies to supply workers. The agencies did all the recruitment, HR, H&S, transport etc. The agencies generally provide accommodation and expect 6-months service and complete flexibility on location. A big shift from our grandparents' day when people, often mothers, would be employed directly by local farms in part time seasonal fruit picking jobs that fit around family life.
When Brexit happened the agencies were not able to find British people prepared to work under the same conditions. There were Brits keen to do the work, even at minimum wage, but they wanted to work for their local farm so they could return home each night. However, the farms had been promised staff by the agencies so were not set up to train people, manage payroll and rotas etc. It was a logistics and HR issue.^.

This. Too many farms and business got reliant on exploiting cheap labour willing to work in dire conditions - long shifts, poor pay, expecting you will be poorly housed on site, no flexibility etc.

The migrants were only willing to put up with that because they were mainly young people who would return to a country where their pounds would buy far more than they do in the uk. I worked on a factory line one summer with a group of polish students. They were doing degrees in IT and finance, had good jobs line up for after uni. The local workforce couldn't compete because they couldn't do 12 hour shifts etc. Its not fair.

It also doesn’t take a genius to work out that there are also other factors - e.g. an in increase in an ageing population, and years of underfunding in the NHS and mismanagement that has led to huge inefficiencies. The NHS needs huge investment and reform. And we need a government who will do that - Reform are not the ones.
A pause in immigration won’t magically remedy any of those things.

It’s still a political
party.

@Sherbs12 some very good points- it annoys me when people imply Labour rapidly ramped up immigration from developing countries- remind me who was in power for past 14 years, who enabled Brexit etc ( which led to shortages) - it certainly wasn't Labour

I stopped reading after you said 'I stopped reading after that'. I don't think I can be bothered listening to someone who can't get to the end of a post that they disagree with.

I think you'll find uniform agreement from Reform supporters that neither Tories nor Labour have any enthusiasm for reducing immigration.

Cameron initiated the vote, but are there any statistics that show the votes to leave by reference to political leaning before June 2016? It's the votes that count.