AIBU to not understand why people will vote Reform when Brexit is the reason for the migrant boats.

[LIGHTSNACKER]

We did not have a boat problem before Brexit due to the rules/agreements, so why do people want to vote for the man who had a big part in causing this and his company party?

More gaslighting. Brexit is not the reason, you don’t have to shoehorn it into everything just because you didn’t agree with Brexit.

The reason for small boats is that our ruling classes have decided that they will impose mass immigration on the people of this country, not matter what.

They could stop it tomorrow, the just don’t want to. That’s the point of being a nation state, you can do whatever you want, legislate however you want. They want open borders and are gaslighting the nation into thinking mass immigration had been good for this country. It hasn’t, it’s been a disaster.

Because they just believe those who shout loudest and won’t listen to reason.

I voted remain and would again, but even I know this is bollocks. You’d have a better argument to say why are people voting Reform when Brexit has been a total shit show.

People are voting for Reform because the two main political parties do not listen, do not adequately address people’s concerns, and do not offer any meaningful change.

Labour under Keir Starmer don’t think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the status quo - it just needs to be run better. I suspect most people disagree with that analysis and believe more significant and fundamental change is necessary.

Politicians generally are deeply uninspiring. Very few of them actually say what they think, or speak with any passion or conviction about it. They parrot the same old party lines.

I recently saw a video of Margaret Thatcher speaking and it was genuinely energising. I didn’t agree with her politics but to hear a politician communicating ideas and vision with such passion and conviction was a stark contrast to what gets served up these days.

Nigel Farage is, for many, a throw back to those days - he’s viewed as speaking his mind, even if it’s ‘controversial’. He’s been highly successful and is too often written off - he’s a canny operator.

I desperately hope that Britain doesn’t go down the Reform route but I fear that it’s almost inevitable due to abject failure of ‘mainstream’ politicians to offer anything worth voting for.

Brexit was a clear signal that the country did not want mass immigration. And the ruling classes did the exact opposite.

It’s a lie that we need mass immigration for any reason. We don’t. It’s a lie that mass immigration is good for the country.

It’s a lie that channel migrants are refugees. They are economic migrants. You can’t blame them for coming over when the border is wide open and everything is on offer for free. You’d do the same.

It’s a lie that ‘sbash the gags’ will work. It won’t. There hasn’t been one trade in history, not one, where controlling supply has worked. You have to control demand. As long as people are willing to pay, they will be able to get in. ‘Sbash the gags’ is just Two Tier’s attempt to treat the country like it’s stupid.

It’s a lie that mass migration is good for the economy. It’s lowering GDP per capita and making the country poorer.

And then of course there is the fact that migrants of certain nationalities are over represented in crime statistics. Foreign nationals make up 12% of our prison population. Thats right. These people are not even British citizens of first and second generation. They are not yet citizens and already making up a significant proportion of criminals.

The whole thing is a disaster. And that why Reform are surging. It makes no difference whether they will be effective or not. It’s the fact that government of both colours have mugged off the public for so long means that anyone else is considered a better option.

Of course Brexit isn't the reason. The reason is illegal immigrants get a better deal here than they do in France. That's why they want to come here.

I think this is it. Since Thatcher, we have basically had spineless, thickos in power and the country is done.

She said what she believed and she did what she said. People knew what they were getting.

War Criminal Poodle Blair, Gordon ‘honey I sold all our gold’ Brown, ‘Call me Dave’ Cameron, Maybot, Boris ‘the turd’ Johnson, Liz Dud, Rishi Supine and Two Tier are like 25 years of continuous nightmare which just never ends.

The reason for small boats is that our ruling classes have decided that they will impose mass immigration on the people of this country, not matter what.

This is very plainly untrue. Small boats represent a tiny fraction of migration to this country. The overwhelming majority of immigration to this country is legal.

It would be entirely possible to shut down all legal routes of migration as long as you're fine with universities going bust, farms going bust, care homes going bust, the NHS failing and having to be privatised, foreign companies being prohibited from setting up branches in the UK, performing arts and sports being restricted to those who were born here, and the pensionable age being raised to 80. The problem is that most voters are not, in fact, fine with that.

More propaganda and lies. Don’t fall for it folks.

No one is saying zero immigration. This is an attempt to deflect and confuse people. We’ve had more immigration since 1997 than the entire period before that since records began. That’s not okay and it’s not sustainable.

We don’t need mass migration to fund second rate, phoney universities. Apart from elite colleges, the rest of the university sector is basically selling visas. Students are the second largest cohort of asylum seekers. This is insane. These second and third rate institutions are selling visas for people to come in and claim asylum or just disappear. We don’t need these universities and we don’t need these students. Elite universities are a different matter.

We don’t need low skilled workers, we have millions on out of work benefits.

We don’t need millions to do any of he jobs you have listed. The billions spent on asylum system and paying for public services for net taker low skilled migrants could easily be channelled into training our own benefits dependent population. Save money on benefits and save money because you don’t have to fund low skilled net taker migrants.

The ruling classes could do this. They just don’t want to. And keep lying about the NHS, care homes, universities.

How do you know Nigel Farage is lying? His lips are moving.

voting for reform really is turkeys voting for christmas. Absolute embarrassment to the country held up by the billionaires who own the press while pretending taking pictures of kim kardashian’s arse is journalism. Nevermind, enjoy the sex and violence and 2 minutes hate of migrants while they quietly take away your rights and protections and advocate to you how wonderful it will be when you’re at their mercy in every conceivable way.

enjoy the sex and violence and 2 minutes hate of migrants while they quietly take away your rights and protections and advocate to you how wonderful it will be when you’re at their mercy in every conceivable way.

This last sentence is an accurate description of what is exactly what’s happening right now.

Thanks for pointing out what Labour and Consocialists have done to this country.

I do hold out some hope that when the Reform offering is put under some scrutiny (as it will now they are, in effect, the opposition), it’ll be exposed as a simplistic sham and start to fall apart. But Labour MUST get a grip on immigration in a way that commands public confidence and wrest momentum on that issue from Reform, or they’re toast.

Brexit didn’t cause the small boat crisis! It was a combo of the Syrian war and Islamic State waging havoc on the ME, with Putin fuelling the migration by empowering Assad.

Mass migration is not filling up second rate universities. Lots of jobs and Brits refusing to do them. Refuse training too and cannot access a lot of it due to low level academic achievement and pip payments. Lots to unpick but do not blame it all on migrants. We do not like working in certain jobs. Plus everyone speaks English - of course they want to be here.

I'm not sure you're here for a reasoned discussion if we're already into "propaganda" and "phoney" but okay - would you be satisfied with 1997 levels of immigration and a government which worked towards that, or would that still be too much? And which specific categories of the Immigration Rules* would you abolish? I would guess you'd want all family migration abolished, which could be done by statute albeit there would have to be some sort of safety net for exceptional circumstances. But that then leaves students and workers which are the greater numbers by far. Fretting about small boats and families really is fiddling while Rome burns.

I would tend to agree that university education should be restricted to the academically elite. I think we would then have a struggle on our hands as to how to ensure that what we don't end up with is university education being restricted to the financially elite. I would also agree that students should be scrutinised if they claim asylum after being in the UK for some time - but they already are, by operation of s.8 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004 which requires a decision maker to treat their credibility adversely as a consequence of their late claim. Did you know that? I'm pretty sure you didn't know that.

And I'm sure that anyone who genuinely cares about asylum would also say that a teenager who comes to the UK as a student and realises that they are gay, or converts to Christianity, or whose country suddenly descends into civil war while they're here studying, shouldn't be prohibited from claiming.

I didn't list any jobs. I listed, very generically, the groups contained within the Immigration Rules, which relate to legal migration.

If you want to look at specific jobs, then you need to know that the "shortage occupations" are mostly very highly skilled. There's a lot of media focus on low-skilled fruit pickers and care workers, and it's right to say that if we really wanted those jobs filled by locals or let go if they can't be filled by locals, then it could be done, although fruit would then be extortionately expensive, and care would be hugely restricted and would have to be done largely by families - with the biggest impact on women, which then affects women's participation in the workforce as well as the way women are viewed by society in general. It would be regressive. But yes, it could be done, as long as you don't mind too much about that.

What I think could probably not be done would be for the UK to remain competitive in research academia, or technology, or science, or banking. And my view is that if we were to abolish those then we would sink into a huge recession which would be irrecoverable. When you talk about training our own benefits-dependent population to do this work I am not sure that you have the shortage occupation list in mind at all. Because Disaffected Dave** is probably not going to be a chemical scientist (shortage list, occupation code 2111), or a biochemist (2112), hydrogeologist (2113), civil engineer (2121), programmer (2136), vet (2216), actuary (2425), architect (2431), principal orchestral musician (3415), high integrity pipe welder (5215), and I can't be arsed with the rest of them but it's a very very long list of things that Disaffected Dave is eminently unqualified to do. Getting him into work is indeed a priority for any government but imagining that the Disaffected Daves of the world can "just" be trained up to meet all of the shortage occupations currently met by migration is magical thinking.

*not black letter law but a statement of the Secretary of State's policy at any one time, but for the purposes of these discussions, it counts as law

**sorry to all Daves, your name was chosen for alliterative convenience

How could they “stop it tomorrow”?

There was a boat problem years before brexit. Decades.

This nails it. Brexit wasn’t just about immigration. It was about politicians brushing the concerns of so many under the carpet as they didn’t want to listen to uncomfortable views so ignored them.

I have family who live in a massively Brexit-voting area. Brexit was voted for because people thought their lives couldn’t get much worse anyway. They wanted a change. Politicians refused to engage seriously with the issues they faced (lack of jobs, rampant crime, general lack of hope) and politicians turned a deaf ear to the fact that Brexit offered them a change and therefore hope.

They like Reform as Farage is non-PC and they’re sick of the ‘lanyard classes’ telling them they’re wrong for worrying about a hotel full of young asylum seekers looking at their daughters as they walk to school, and telling them they ought to respect someone’s pronouns when they have endless more important things to worry about. They’re sick of not getting a GP appointment but seeing the pride flag whenever they pass their local hospital. They have big issues the current politicians seem to be ignoring.

This is why Farage will get in. He promises change and that’s what they want.

(I mean the guy talks out of his arse and couldn’t give a damn about making their lives better, but they blank that out and rely on the hope of change offered instead).

How do you explain all the people arriving in the rest of Europe? It’s a problem throughout Europe, not just the UK.

The boats are nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit. You’re confusing correlation with causation.

The current major wave of irregular migration from the Middle East, other parts of Asia and parts of Africa to Europe kicked off in 2014-15 - before the referendum, over 5 years before Brexit was actually implemented. It coincided with the peak of the Syrian Civil War - and at that time, Syrians and Iraqis made up the majority of the migrants.

Those migrants reached Greece, Italy or Spain - and a proportion made their way northwards through Europe to France in order to try to reach Britain by small boat, and the numbers have increased steadily ever since.

Withdraw from the ECHR and revoke the right to asylum - it was designed to deal with far smaller population flows and has sadly become entirely unsustainable.

Any irregular migrants who arrive are detained until they can be deported to their home country or a third country where the former is not possible.

None of the things you have described as gaslighting are actually gaslighting.

It would be interesting to see if that did indeed stop the boats.

All the government needs to do is declare the situation a nation security threat and suddenly they can do anything. France and other EU countries do it quite regularly when they close their borders to migrants.

Our government(s) just refuse to do so.

Why do the ruling classes want open borders? What is the benefit to them?

I am actually genuinely interested in why that is. One of the reasons I am curious as to what a Reform government would be like is I wonder if they would be any different when in power given that the Tories and Labour, despite being openly hostile to most classes of migrant have overseen large increases in immigrant numbers.