To think Starmer has shot himself in the foot.

[TheQuickRobin]

This isn’t about my own opinion but political strategy.

So he does this Island of strangers thing wanting to appeal to Labour heartlands who have gone to Reform. But.

I just think Reform voters won’t believe him?

Tories hate him becaus he’s Labour.

Middle class Labour lefties will be put off by the message.

Who does he think he’s winning over?

Anyone on here had their opinion of him changed?

IABU - I thought he was a prat now I think he’s on my team

IANBU - EITHER I thought he was a prat, still think he’s a prat OR I liked him now think he’s a prat.

Very unscientific poll here!

Well I'd like to think he wasn't thinking of any of these things, but was just speaking as he saw and outlining steps that would be positive for the country. But I doubt it. He sees the tide of public opinion turning and follows that, just like he did with the whole lockdown bullshit.

Let's be honest if Starmer said tomorrow we're freezing all immigration for the rest of this parliament, to try and get a grip of the Boriswave, that would be the next election won there and then.

His plans don't even touch the sides of what is actually needed.

If be freezing, you mean stopping all immigration for the next ~4 years, that'd plant the seeds of economic catastrophe. He'd certainly lose my vote if he was quite that stupid.

Net zero at least. Let people in who are actually going to be net contributors and not a burden.

We lost a lot of those with Brexit. Immigration was fiscally net positive until then.

I've also lived and worked in a place like this. An island also as it happens.

They didn't regularly stop people but it was easy enough to find out if a person in question was working illegally, in fact I knew a man who got in trouble because he was a remote contractor who came to vacation and did some work while on vacation! He was allowed to finish his holiday but had to stop working while he was there. (He could have had a permit to come and visit the business he was contracting for and do his regular work while on holiday, and it would have been fine and not unusual, but he didn't get it sorted in time and figured it wouldn't matter.)

Small islands seem able to get away with these things without people claiming they are evil.

That's fine, but open borders of the kind that existed in the past aren't compatible with a welfare state.

And it's terrible for the working classes in terms of things like labour protections.

So you need to decide what you want, and I suspect the nation wants a social welfare net, national health of some kind, and labour protections.

Even a cut to net zero would cause big problems, though it is more realistic. We'd probably have to increase the pension age in the short term and explore, with much greater urgency, solutions to the aging population issue.

Why would it cause problems, it is already shown that increase of GDP is false, the NHS is about to go through mass layoffs, which doesn't include the the newly qualified doctors seeing the impact.

If you want to go full neolib and think of people as easily replaced economic units so that you can get a coffee in pret or the fruit is still picked, then own up to it.

Political historians are going to pick through this timeline where the supposed "left" are parroting right leaning capitalist talking points

The overten window has shifted alright, but it's not in a way the supposed left think it has

I don't think of people as easily replaced economic units. We are, however, moving slowly towards population collapse, due to our ailing birth rate. Fundamentally, the birth rate needs to be addressed, or we need to profoundly re-imagine society in a way that allows if to survive with an ever-dwindling proportion of younger people in comparison to elderly.

High immigration has delayed the crisis, so we're not at the same stage as South Korea (where the crisis has become existential) or Japan, but it can only work as a short-term, stop-gap semi-solution and not a long term one. It bridged a gap, but is unsustainable.

I would like to see the birthrate issue tackled (or at solution to our society surviving it, found) so that we can swiftly reduce immigration. I think it would be foolhardy to slash immigration first, without some sort of viable medium/long term strategy.

What exactly the solution is, I'm less sure, as no country seems to have cracked it yet.

Europe has been absolutely flooded with third world immigration since the turn of the century, it's just not sustainable. The likes of Poland resisted it and the Poles went west after joining the EU and free movement. A lot of them have gone back as their economy has improved and the places they moved to (like the UK) have become unrecognisable over the last 20 years.

If we'd had net zero for the last 20 years then an ageing population would be more pressing but we've had that much immigration for it to kick the can down the road - include the millions and millions we've let in who will also age.

The Boomers won't be around forever and even the youngest Boomers are now approaching retirement age so that's going to be an issue for a while because there's a lot of them. But we'll see increased automation in the labor market. A lot of immigrants we bring in don't pay taxes or if they do will take more out than they put in because they're on low wages and bring in non-working dependents.

Immigration was fiscally net positive until then

To be fair, the limited number of studies relevant to EU immigration are mixed - several fiscally negative. You are thinking of the study which received the most publicity, not necessarily the most accurate, and even then the study concluded that migrants from new member states contributed half that of migrants from older member states (per person).

Most gay men and lesbians in England weren't facing murder though during the time of the gay rights movement. I would imagine the risk of murder in Albania for gay people now is much higher than 60s-80s England.