AAAAGH Reform. Are people ignoring the racist?

[Peasnbeans]

And that he's no economist skills yet promising the impossible. And a racist. And mysoginist.

If Mumsnet is full of women, how is no-one talking about Reform and limiting women's rights?
I know I'll get flamed for this, but it is a boiling frog situation! Jump out!
And I didn't choose the AIBU board but I looked down all the Current Threads and this didn't feature.

He was correctly identifying the problem

Yes.

The UK is not a crowded island. It is a reasonably populated European nation for its area. Also, the most crowded area of the UK is it's richest and most productive. We need to share wealth more fairly across our islands, but space is not the factor holding us back.

He’s not going to resolve it so seems unwise.

@MasterBethdo you think the UK’s population should keep going up? Where do you see it in a decade or two

Look I work with a lot of immigrants (my company, obviously, is one that sponsors visas). There are a lot of great people from all over the world who work really hard and are excited and grateful to have the chance to live in Britain, and soak up as much British culture as they can, while starting businesses or paying high rates of PAYE taxes.

We also have immigrants who come here as a result of chain migration into populations like PP mentioned in Tower Hamlets where they live essentially parallel lives and are massive net takers from the system.

Voters (for Brexit, Reform, whatever) want considerably less immigration overall, and of the people who do come, for them to be more of the former profile and less of the latter. It's really not hard to have a system that filters for people who are willing and able to contribute, and which limits inward flows based on ability for the country to absorb them both economically and culturally.

That’s how it feels in effective though, especially for the people directly impacted. Increasing numbers of men escorted daily across the channel by the RNLI, put up in hotels, given taxpayer funded private healthcare (that far exceeds the standard we are offered) and the government has just increased funding for ‘human rights ‘ lawyers to fight for these people to stay for years at our expense.

Recent human right lawyers achievements include obtaining the right for convicted rapists to remain in this country, despite their clear danger to women, because their home country frowns on rapists.

Something has gone badly wrong if we are incentivising immigrants to rape British women in order to stay.

We have a higher population than France and Spain and much less space. We don't need to pave over our countryside to accommodate more immigrants, we need to vastly reduce the numbers coming. And ideally remove a good number who have settled here and committed crimes, made no effort to integrate or are a net drain on the British tax payer.

Why not?

People coming over on boats (risking dangerous crossings and detainment) are usually refugees, ordinary people fleeing dangerous situations.

What are the assumptions you have about them?

You are obviously positioning yourself as one of the 'good' immigrants, but a lot of Reform voters are hostile to all non-white immigration from overseas, skilled or not. Would you be OK with anti-immigration laws that led to your deportation?

You are (perhaps deliberately, perhaps not) conflating people arriving on small boats and (often) claiming asylum with the much larger number of people arriving through official channels post-Brexit as migration rules were changed by Boris Johnson's government (what Starmer referred to as "open borders").

As I say, inflammatory language that draws on racist tropes, including your focus on rapists.

We are the 8th most densely populated country in Europe. That is a pretty high ranking.

Increasing our population by 1% every year is not at all good especially if some of the immigrants are a net cost to the taxpayer as they have a far greater negative impact.

And we have a lower population density than Belgium or the Netherlands and much more space.

Our housing problems are not due to immigration and won't be solved by building more suburban housing but by regenerating our cities to become more dense and productive.

Could you provide a link to the details of an illegal immigrant who has been convicted of rape in the UK and who has submitted a successful appeal against deportation which was approved on the grounds that as a convicted rapist, he would be at risk in his home country?

Well whatever the excuse he is not really useful for his constituencies. if he is so scared he could hold it online.

Apart from pathetically sucking up to Trump, another big issues is his hypocrisy - being totally anti-Europe but nevertheless having a German wife, living in Germany and holding an EU passport; pretending to be "the man of the people" while being one of the rich elite; coming up with promises on immigration etc which he knows he would never be able to deliver.

I'm still puzzling over why so, so many people don't seem to be able to see the difference between central and local government.

These elections are for LOCAL government, yet most of the campaigning I saw in my area from Reform have been along the lines of how they will change central government policy.

Local governments have a number of very strictly mandated areas where they must carry out central government policy, so actually a local government cannot change policies on things like most social work roles, how asylum seekers are looked after or housed, most aspects of environmental health, immigration, housing etc. They may be able to tweak how these functions are implemented, but not the core requirements. And there is very limited funding available to local authorities, how many councils are declaring or on the verge of bankruptcy - they aren't all spendthrift wastrels they just have too many requirements for the money available.

An example may be roads. A local authority may wish to reduce the speed limit in a certain area and that is fine, but they can't say that a speed limit can exceed the national limit for that type of road. They may wish to only build a certain number of new homes, but they have to have plans to build the number dictated by central government.

A few people have noted that Kent CC and/or Dover councils can't impact immigration in any way, but people are citing immigration as a factor in voting for their local government?

Is that supposed to be a good thing? All these extra paid jobs and trips abroad by "sponsors" when he is supposed to be an MP and nothing else? Working week is 40 hours, so he spends more than half of it doing his news presenting, plus being abroad? While being paid for full time work as an MP.

Yeah, 8th. It's... 8th.

We increased our population by 1% in on year. It's not a regular occurrence.

I'm not a reform voter but the system is broken! How can it be that we allowed such massive inequality?

I had a look at their policies and there are things I agree with. The first thing every one should know is they plan radical reform in the first 100 days. So if you don't agree then you have to vote. Can't be complacent. It goes FAR FAR beyond immigration.

Don't agree - leave the EHCR, bar student dependents, higher NI for foreign workers except for health care and small businesses, cut foreign aid by 50% (this is a main reason I will never vote reform - too hard a cut), end net zero plans, scrap DEI in the police

Agree - process asylum seekers from safe countries, deport foreign criminal (bar small offences), increase tax threshold to 20k (this is surely very popular and who can blame people?? However should be accompanied by wealth tax at the very top), end stamp duty on homes below 750k, no inheritance tax under £2m and 20% over that with option to donate to charity instead, online delivery tax of 4% for large companies (despite shopping online a lot I agree in context of other reforms - but think maybe 2%).

Not sure I agree with their NHS reforms but I am not sure how else to reform it.

As you can see I agree with a fair bit, but there are some completely fundamental things I don't agree with.

And, some of the 'that sounds good' policies in their long doc can only be done if we leave the EHCR, and so people need to fully understand the implications of leaving.

There are PAGES and PAGES more reforms that would completely change the entire landscape and future of this country. If you are passionate that you DON'T want Reform, I don't see how you can't engage with this document and start to educate people about why specific policies are bad - because ultimately the top popular ones are what people will be drawn to.

Yes, they most certainly can. And I certainly think that the Tories and their current 'Labour' imitators have done a lot of harm, but yes, Reform are WORSE.

What do posters who argue we have plenty of space want to see in terms of UK population in the next few decades?

I've never known a platform on which so many women pearl clutch about Reform. The fact that Farage triggers you makes him almost the more successful. It's really quite pathetic.

This.. all day long 👏

So because we aren't currently THE most densely populated, there isn't a problem? We're already high up on the list for population density in Europe and we recently had record levels of net migration, with numbers the following year not far behind. Starmer was absolutely right when he said the Tories had operated a open borders experiment, the Boriswave was catastrophic and it needs to be undone. Not just addressed so that numbers come down a bit going forward, the people we've welcomed who have made our country a worse place to live need to leave.

Totally agree .