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 :(

I despise Farage - but both things can actually be true!

Wankers saying that the jobless should go into care work which is seen as easy and unskilled don't know what they are talking about either.

Would you want a family member being cared for by a skilled, foreigner or some idiot the job centre sent that has no intention of doing a good job and could cause harm? Not everyone can or should become a carer that goes for unpaid carers.

So you keep saying. I know them well.

Er no actually. That makes zero sense. Having people from overseas having jobs instead of British people will not boost the economy!

Bit cramped tho isn't.

Being a metropolis

So, we don’t want immigration.
We don’t want to pay higher taxes.
We don’t want to look after our elderly, off they go to that fancy care home.

What do we want?

most people in Ilkley probably should be paying a bit more tax...

So you’ll know that Manningham has 72% poverty rates? Do you think it’s fair those people in poverty should have further strain on them?

They do not share our values of tolerance for other people's beliefs, their right to hold them and express them or for women's right to wear whatever they choose to wear.
Not that it should be a race to the bottom but the UK isn't exactly a feminist utopia - women in the UK have just had to fight to have the supreme court rule that the handful of rights intended to address some of the inequalities that women suffer by virtue of them being women actually apply to women.

So are people here saying that British men never rape, abuse or harass women

Or is it that they're allowed to do it because they're born here

Or is it somehow worse to be abused or harassed by an immigrant than a British man?

Men who abuse or harass others should be dealt with no matter where they're from.
They're not because this country is run by men who don't care about women at all.

@Keirawr

Regurgitating cliches from the guardian dictionary doesn’t an argument make 🤣

Thats really good.

Yes it wasn't a good idea for the coalition government to slash ESOL.funding after 2010. ESOL.lessons are over subscribed now, and hard to access.

I don't blame migrants for the actions of our governments past and present though.

I wouldn’t go by mn. Many vote Labour regardless.

The proof will be in the polls over next few weeks. Also take a look at the DM for non Labour views.

When I did community postnatal work especially in certain parts of Sheffield I often couldn't support the people I was trying to support because of difficult language barriers in multiple generation households where hardly any one spoke English and the translator booking service was terrible.

We couldn't get these women into our support groups because they couldn't understand what we were saying nor could we guarantee we were getting informed consent for some quite intimate observations. Having to visit them in their homes reduced our community support involvement with others who did want to access our groups and services.

That meant we couldn't help them build up a community outside of their own culture, or do our jobs.

I don't like Keir at all, but in this instance I don't know how else he could have worded it, and I do think we need to be able to talk about immigration without being shouted down racist for having concerns about the ways in which this lack of integration affects everyone. As you've pointed out, it affects their ability to access healthcare appropriately for starters and when you center people first of course you want them to be able to access healthcare and be able to make informed decisions and understand the implications and outcomes of their treatment without either having to rely on the woeful translation services or sacrificing their dignity and privacy by having family members with varying abilities in English translate for them.

Sometimes appointments had to be booked and rebooked and rebooked again because the translator services just weren't able to be coordinated which cost time and money and meant others had to miss out on otherwise suitable appointments.

When you work out in the community you do notice these pockets of people that are so codependent on each other because there is no effort or ability to integrate.

It’s hardly the same as believing women should be murdered over mundane things like having a boyfriend though is it.

Why?
I think quite a lot of people in Manningham-with their cash only businesses-should start paying tax.

This is dreadful. If those who criticise Starmer had first-hand experiences like you do, they might not think he is so “vile”

But he called ordinary people far right, disgusting and racist already. It didn’t work.

Oh don’t be so melodramatic.

British rapists, rightly or wrongly, still have a right to British citizenship. We shouldn’t be adding rapists who don’t have that right.

And let’s not pretend that all cultures in the world are the same. Why would you want men from cultures that hate women to the point they happily murder them for disobeying their father, as part of our own culture? Or men who believe in child marriages and marry off young girls to their older cousins?

Compared to most of the world, the UK IS a feminist utopia.

We really should start appreciating that and fighting to keep the rights we have before they disappear. The supreme court ruling is a step in keeping those rights and was won by some courageous women.

Because the cheapest way to sort out the childcare and elderly care crisis is to go back to forcing women to do it all for free. They can look after everyone - the men, the elderly, the children, the house - like 'proper' women do. They can also work - and go back to handing over their wages to some man - husband, father, brother - like they did not very long ago.

I'm not very keen on going back to that myself.

@Xis I live in Bradford - born and bred and year on year I feel more like an outsider. I was at school in the 1970s so this is my life.
I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been could imagine what it is like to live here.
i drive home from work to be faced by beggars approaching my car at traffic lights. Last week 2 men rode past me on the pavement on a horse. I’ve seen someone defecate in a doorway in the city centre.
My Dd was in a care home where none of the staff had functional English - a role was advertised for a new member of staff and the advert stated English was not necessary. People joke about the standard of driving - again, unless you experience folk driving at you down the centre of the road or on the pavement you wouldn’t believe it. It seems like the law no longer applies.

Its more complicated than that, as far as working immigrants are concerned. Many of which weren't as significant in the past or existed in a different context.

Governments have been using immigrants to try and overcome the problems of a shrinking population, to avoid investing in education in things like trades, to suppress wages (supply and demand is one of the most important elements of wage setting), and also to artificially boost GDP.

The claim has always been that they will add more in tax revenue than they take, but that isn't actually the case for the class of low wage workers. So they will, through no fault of their own, be bleeding money from the social welfare systems. The boost to GDP is also misleading in the sense that it looks good to economists but when it means things like higher rents, it makes like worse for real people.

Have people really said that? Really?

I think quite a bit of recent analysis/research has shown that that general assumption that immigration is a net economic benefit long term is based on a particular mix of immigration - which is more the mix we had a decade or more ago, rather than now. It's a fairly complex picture that needs to take into account prior skill levels, earning potential, dependents and propensity to stay beyond working age.

We already have a system where the labour market is addicted to welfare so that it can pay below subsistence wages. Extending that corporate welfare bill via low-skill, low-paid labour immigration is unlikely to have the same economic impact as importing labour into higher-paid jobs with a higher skills base that has been funded in another country.

The economics are really interesting but unsurprisingly really complex.

The problem is that we’re not solely getting skilled care workers from abroad. We are getting people who equally don’t really want to go into care but understand it’s a very easy loophole to access the UK. The care visa system has been massively exploited but again unless you mix with and live in a popular area for immigration you’re not going to see outwith your bubble to the reality.

I know my mother would have rather had English speaking carers who couldn’t really be arsed to be in the field than what she had - migrant carers who couldn’t be arsed to be there OR communicate with her.