To think Starmer is utterly reprehensible

[Thegreyhound]

I know everyone will disagree, that’s ok- But I just have to say that Starmer today seems to have sunk lower than I ever believed he would with his incendiary ‘island of strangers’ and ‘incalculable damage’ rhetoric.
I find it particularly shocking because he has calculated this and decided it’s worth it to throw immigrants under the bus and essentially give all the ground in the debate to Farage, Tommy Robinson and Enoch Powell types.
Policy can be altered without making statements that are designed to impact race relations and make life even more difficult for people who are just trying to get along and make a living here.
Starmer is vile. This country does indeed feel like an island of strangers these days but the strangers are not the immigrants :(

Do you realise that Costa is well known as one of the highest payers when it comes to UK tax payments?

Whatever you think of immigration, it's incorrect to think that the left traditionally was more open to it than the right. Traditional left wing trade union ideology was to protect the working class from exploitation. Mass immigration allows the big business owners to obtain cheap labour enabling the exploitation of the working classes by bringing wages and working conditions down.

So the latest Starmer rhetoric is fairly traditionally Labour. It's the Conservatives who traditionally favour immigration, as it brings down costs for businesses.

That is actual total BS. Blair and Brown opened the floodgates of immigration and they have been very publicly and openly pro immigration right up until yesterday!! Labelling us all racists for caring about the acute housing crisis and the ballooning immigration bill!

The amnesia and gas lighting by Labour supporters is startling…

You're now a minority I'm afraid

The country is still reeling from the unprecedented Boris Wave and it's woken people up. At least apart from middle class MNetter in their suburban bubble.

We need to pause immigration for a few years to deal with the effects.

It’s always the case. But yeh

I hope the polls keep showing how many feel about that.

Overall though I welcome Labour’s shift into reality. Up until now they have hidden behind a woke agenda that has left this country in a perilous state. Whilst I recognise the 360 - better late than never.

Anyone involved in crimes like the Rochdale scandal or involved in covering it up in higher levels should have citizenship taken and be deported...

Would free up a bit of room.

They've got no choice because Reform are eating them alive.

Starmer is a human rights lawyer and a globalist. He doesn't want to do this.

We need net zero immigration for at least a few years..net 400k or whatever is still way way too high.

Well if I had to make the choice between being parochial, and rejecting anyone who happened to be born on a different piece of land to me, and insane, I guess I'll choose insane.

My family were Jewish migrants in the 19th century and my husband's were European migrants in the 20th century. Without migration we wouldn't be here with our years of public service and funny foreign names.

The boats are the real problem, not the care workers. So why doesn't he tackle that?

You wish and hope for that to be the case. Fortunately not everyone is you.

Responding to the first paragraph - yes, I fundamentally believe that it would be a bad thing economically and socially.

Britain would lose huge opportunities and productive advantage from not allowing immigration in a global knowledge economy that relies on skills and knowledge moving around. The university sector would collapse. Fewer businesses would grow and we'd lose global and European headquarters of international businesses. Scientific research would be damaged. Families would be kept apart, marriages would be prevented and children not born.

As I've said, I think we need to restructure away from a reliance on high levels of low-skilled immigration, with a more sophisticated Treasury view of balancing short- and long-term costs, and I think the idea that companies relying on immigration should also fund skills and training domestically is an excellent one. I think pursuing integration as an explicit policy goal in immigration policy is a good one, and language skills are a vital part of that.

But we shouldn't downplay the complexity of the immigration question or position it as axiomatically bad or not fulfilling legitimate societal needs.

Actually @Almostwelsh is right. The labour party was set up to specifically fight for the rights of working class citizens. Traditionally labour would have been very strongly against any measure that drove down wages. The Labour Party from the 90s onwards is nothing the like the Labour Party prior to that. The only reason for the shift was that the Labour Party had fulfilled its original purpose of better rights of the working class and so needed a new cause or lose power. Immigrants tend to vote labour - without them the party would pretty much have been obsolete by now

What???

Nobody has a problem with Jewish migrants. Or European migrants.
But you know that.

Labour sold out the working class a long time ago and only care about the middle class who are sheltered from immigration and benefit as it keeps their house prices high with population explosion.

I completely agree with you. The Labour Party was completely different before Blair and New Labour. I remember too that the LP truly represented the working class. Who represents the working class now? They have been largely ignored and vilified for the last thirty plus years. We can’t expect that will continue…

London, with its rampant knife crime, gang warfare and muggings certainly do not make it a safe place. You're being disingenuous to claim it's not got more dangerous, unless you're the Mayor of London.

Possibly higher taxes - we can't expect services like Norway but takes like the US. But more important for me would be getting back the money which was mis-spent.

It's a big city with millions of people, lots of cars and phones, huge wealth inequality. Of course there will be a level of crime. How do you link this with immigration?

I didn’t link it with immigration. You said there was wealth inequality in London so ‘Of course there will be a level of crime’.
I pointed out in a previous post that cities such as Tokyo, Seoul and Busan also have wealth inequality but they don’t have similar crime.
Therefore it can’t just be down to inequality.
Why do you think there is so little crime in the cities I mentioned?

Yes totally agree with this and I have been backing them up so far. This is going to lose so much remaining support that they had and Reform supporters are still manically laughing!

Who the heck is advising him?

2 years (or even 1) none of that would happen. You can process temporary visas in that time for short term movement of people for work but I don’t think a short term pause of all permanent immigration would cause a devastating effect.

the issue clearly is not at the high skilled side of things but the low skilled where all we hear is that British people don’t want these low skilled jobs. I don’t actually believe that- either the pay is too low to make it financially not worth doing it or people aren’t essentially be forced to do these roles - they have low entry level requirements so most able bodied people could do them. If you stopped immigration and let the principles of supply and demand take their natural course I am 100% sure the positions would be filled by the resident population.

Just 20 years too late. Brexit didn't have to win.