Kemi B just suggested about Southport....

[Noangelbuthavingfun]

...murders.... that the reason these things happen is because people / immigrants are not being helped to integrate in our society and feel alienated. On Laura K show. Dear lord I'm sorry but that's ludicrous ... if I've misunderstood please help me out. Its really angered me !

Yes Blair and Brown. I have said this on another thread. Blair opened things up in 2004, when most other countries closed the right to work to new EU countries, stating that there needed to be transition period so everyone headed to the UK. Labour thought it would boost the economy which it did for a few years and then they also opened up to non - EU skilled workers in 2008 and basically we had an 'open door' policy. The Tories could not tame the beast and here we are.

@BoredZelda The country was built on immigration. The economy does better with immigrants.

Not this crap again. Yes, immigrants have contributed to this country, but it was ‘built on the backs of’ the white working class in the main. The argument that immigrants built Britain is reductive nonsense. Not a single Western country on earth was ‘built on immigration’ rather than its own population, and certainly not England from the Industrial Revolution onwards.

What values? What are our shared values as a country?

We have laws. Everyone has to abide by the law or face the consequences.

We don’t have shared values as a country. When I look around I see leaders and people in general that clearly don’t share my values.

Yeah, it's civil servant's pensions, not the £5.8 a year of tax avoided.

There's more demand, because there's more poverty, In the five years before the pandemic (2014-2019) life expectancy went down in almost one in five communities for women, and one in nine communities for men, according to the new study published in The Lancet Public Health journal and funded by the Wellcome Trust, Imperial College London.

Using Private healthcare costs the NHS, it's yet another con to funnel money into private hands. E.g. Analysis from We Own It found the NHS loses £10m a week to shareholders or £6.7bn since 2012.

98% of road length is maintained by local authorities, whose budgets have been cut in real terms.

Apart from the Irish navvies who built England's canals and railways, docks and roads, the Indian, Asian and West Indians working on merchant ships bringing in raw materials and goods, the Benelux immigrants dragging the East Coast from under water, the Irish, Welsh and Scottish immigrants flocking to English cities and towns and then ignoring the fact that most of the wealth that went into funding those enterprises came from the profits from slave plantations in North America & the West Indies. Then yes, the English did it all themselves.

It was certainly built on the backs of the working-class, but capitalism doesn't care where the labour comes from as long as it can pay it as little as possible.

...and invention and ingenuity?

@MonkeyToHeaven Yeah, it's civil servant's pensions, not the £5.8 a year of tax avoided.

£5.8 billion? That sounds like a lot, but it's not a massive loss in budget terms. The annual budget is about £1.2 trillion a year, last time I checked. So a loss of £5.8 billion is a loss of roughly 0.5%.

It would be akin to checking your bank account for £100, and finding you had lost 0.5% and only had £99.50.

Supply of council housing, specifically. House price inflation is due to net loss of council housing (still happening right now) combined with financial deregulation of mortgage lending, including demutualisation of building societies and introduction of buy-to-let mortgages in early late 90s.

Back in the day, people didn’t need to buy because they could get a decent council house. Because fewer people were interested in buying, house prices were lower. By 1970s around a third of the population lived in council housing. Prices were also lower because people couldn’t borrow as much and weren’t competing with buy to let landlords. Borrowing affects house prices because people will generally pay as much as they can borrow.

BTL (especially on shared houses, where each room can be let for £500-£1k a month, depending on location) has created added competition and pushed up prices for families. Before, you could only buy a home to let out if you had the cash to pay for it outright. And increased house prices, in turn, push up private rents, which those priced out of buying by BTL investors, and shut out of council housing, have to struggle to pay. It’s a shitshow.

Only way out is building council housing and scrapping BTL mortgages.

Newsflash. Immigrants don’t do these jobs for charitable reasons. They do it for pay. It’s called a transaction. It doesn’t make them saints. They are just peoples

Quit with the hyperbole. It’s embarrassing

When you're forced to sell your labour to feed and house yourself, and you don't get the value of all of that labour, that's a shitty transaction. As a pp pointed out, Britain was built on the backs of the working-class, I was simply pointing out it wasn'tjust the English. Quit with misusing hyperbole, you're only embarrassing yourself.

Council houses were built as "homes for heroes". People who had served their country in WW2. What have today's young people done to deserve to be given a council house?

Wrong. Council housing began in the 19th Century as an attempt to give ordinary working people secure, decent homes. The phrase ‘homes for heroes’ was coined by Lloyd George in 1918. Council housing boomed in the 1960s.

Why don’t young people “deserve” to afford stable homes.
why don’t they “deserve” to bring up children in one place, where they can decorate bedrooms, have pets and friends. And more importantly have stable schooling where they don’t have to move.

using the phrase “deserve” implies there are those that are worthy and those that are not.

the housing boom after the war was as much about driving the economy, getting people out of bombed towns and cities e.g London and now Greater London. Not just council homes but affordable homes for sale.

these also enabled communities to be built by being thought out. Shops, bus routes, train lines, factories and jobs, hospitals, doctors and local schools.