AIBU to hope the greens do very well today?

[ForGreenHiker]

That’s it really. go Zack! 💚

That’s not quite how it works. We were talking about local people making decisions about planning. My comment related to central government overriding that.

I think preventing deaths and encouraging people to engage with services is addressing the actual problem. But yes, if you just pick out one thing and ignore the rest it certainly sounds like it's not addressing the problem. That's why you have to read the whole thing.

No I can't. It's disingenuous because there is no answer. No one knows an exact number of how many immigrants this country can handle. Do you?

Great reply! Its rather like the MH issue so many people claim to be suffering from. Firstly it spoils it for the genuine. As everyone knows there are You Tube videos to help you fill in the forms.

There will be a black market for drugs. People go to GP and claim to be a user. GP's according to a survey done recently are loath to refuse a claim from someone who might kick off or worse assault them so they cave in.

Its a stupid stupid policy along with Open Borders and no landlords

However, to counter that, we have an ageing population and our birth rate has been below replacement rate for many decades.

397000 old age deaths in the U.K. per year

591000 births in the U.K. per year

Given that, we probably need all of those new people to help keep our population stable and economically viable.

We don’t though - that’s just propaganda from the pro immigration lobby. Our overall population has grown by nearly 10 million in 20 years and 35% of total population is under 30 - we are in no danger of running out of young people soon. The median ‘ageing population’ has increased by a few months in 15 years - this mass immigration is using a sledgehammer to crack a very small very theoretical nut.

Everybody with IDLR and refugees can claim a significant list of U.K. benefits after a limited time of making NI contributions. That still costs us far more than it gains. Hence why our benefits bill outstrips income tax for the first time ever. And we have 5 million unemployed - we don’t need to import more workers.

Immigrants with ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ can generally claim the following:
Benefits based on National Insurance contributions (e.g., Contribution-based Jobseeker's Allowance).
Child Benefit in some cases.
NHS healthcare, school meals, and some maternity payments.

Our housing and NHS crises, and unemployment rate, is nothing to do with migrants.

I didn’t say it was but bringing in another Birmingham and Leeds worth of people every 10 years (with current ONS projections, not the turbo charged immigration plan from the Greens) is not going to help.

Also the health (or lack of) in many migrants is a serious issue with a serious rise in diseases like TB with 80% of reported cases being in people from outside the U.K. and there is also a vastly increased incidence in serious birth defects and disabilities in children born in communities where first cousin marriage is the majority.

Most of our NHS staff are, in fact, migrants.
That’s not remotely true - the NHS is staffed by majority British.

Unbelievably naive.

That’s most of them in my experience. Nice and not so nice.

I understand that Jacob Rees Mogg is generally very polite to women.

😂 quite

What a fantastic contribution to the conversation

Very interesting result in Richmond-upon-Thames where all 5 Green councillors lost their wards to the Lib-Dems. The council is now 100% LD.

Think on. I was a Green voter for many years. Not any more. The party leader isn't an MP. In my view he's a chamaeleon who will change his name and his views to whatever suits at that moment. He seems to have little regard for women and is fixated with events far away, not our environment.

Happy to be proved wrong but that's how he appears to me.

I noticed that too. Richmond has long been Lib Dem though so the loss of Greens there is probably unsurprising just as Westminster has turned Conservative after 4 years of Labour. I'm in Wandsworth which has had a disastrous 4 years of a Labour council. We are back to Conservative too but no overall control which is bad news.

I doubt very much that he thinks a woman can have a penis. I don't know him personally, obviously.

The near collapse of the NHS is due to the aging population not immigrants who generally speaking are young and healthy.

Do you have evidence for that as I’m seeing a rise in terrible diseases like TB and approx 80% of those are from immigrants. There is also a significant additional load in some areas from the increased rate of birth defects and severe disabilities caused by repeated guest cousin marriage - highly prevalent in immigrants from countries like Pakistan.

Similarly most immigrants want to work and pay taxes frequently much harder and in jobs which white British people can't or won't do

Well that’s a rather sweeping negative generalisation about people based on the colour of their skin. It sounds like the Daily Mail circa 20 years ago. Try reversing the colour of skin and see if you still think it sounds ok. Can you show what evidence you have for that?

There is, however, evidence of white (especially men) being discriminated against for recruitment into organisations like the NHS, Armed Forces etc (who knows how far it goes). The ‘Rooney Rule’ (automatic shortlisting for minorities) and using race as a tie breaker in the NHS for starters. So the state makes it harder for white people to get the jobs yet you blame them for not wanting to work.

So are not the main cause of the increased benefits bill

I didn’t say that immigration is the main cause of the vast benefits bill but the huge and continually increasing numbers around immigration are exacerbating it. Something has to change. Any government that tries to make it harder to claim disability benefits meets enormous resistance from the Left so immigration is something we should have control over.

I agree we have a housing shortage and high unemployment.

Cool. So bringing in more people that need housing and benefits is not helpful.

Well it’s not going very well at the moment is it?

Housing crisis, benefits bill exceeding income tax revenue, high unemployment, a severe issue with terrorism, increasing civil unrest, vast billions spent on looking after migrants, many of whom are economic migrants not refugees that we struggle to deport, a vast increase in rapes and violent attacks (the rise in numbers tracks the rise in immigration and this has been replicated in countries across Europe with high non EU migration) very poor ability to deport even the criminal migrants .

You tell me. Is our current situation feeling particularly good or successful?

How do think think it will go if we continue to gain another Birmingham and Leeds worth of people every 10 years? Is that going to improve anything?

Apologies - I was wrong about the NHS workforce mostly being migrants, as I can now see around 21% are migrants. I think your other points are good too. I’d always understood that our birth rate is under replacement rate, so thought it’s a good thing we’re bringing migrant workers in to help make sure we’re economically stable and active.

Don’t be silly. It’s perfectly rational for your friend not to want to go back to a war zone, but having that friend doesn’t make you non-racist. You're sounding like the classic antisemite:"I’m not antisemitic! One of my friends is Jewish!"

I have no idea whether you are racist/antisemitic or not, but I note that you don't seem to have answered @IsEveryUserNameBloodyTaken 's point about whether you are as concerned about Hamas's atrocities as about the misdeeds of the IDF.

For example on his poscast he regularly has female guests and I like the way he treats them, never tries to talk for them. He recently had 2 women on to have a really interesting discussion on prison reform for women.

How do you think he would treat women who disagree with him that TWAW? It would be interesting to see his reaction. He got a bit testy with a young woman who was just asking questions on the topic - I’ll try and remember who she was.

Thank you. I normally get shouted at for making points like that so it’s nice to have a productive and calm conversation.

@CornishDaughteroftheDawn you are right that there is a rise in TB - over 5,000 cases in 2025. The cost of this is minuscule compared to the cost of treating diseases of the elderly: cancer, diabetes, COPD etc.

Go to any hospital and you will see that the wards are filled with elderly people, many on extended stays as there is nowhere safe for them to go on discharge.

Have a look here: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/acute-patient-level-activity-and-costing/2018-19/age-and-gender

You can see the costs by age for various NHS interactions (A&E, outpatients, admissions). For outpatients and admissions, the costs for the 60+ contingent dwarf all others. It's only A+E where the young have more money spent on them - but then the costs of A+E admission is far lower than outpatients and admissions if you look at the scale.

So you can't answer the question either.

The thing is we fundamentally disagree on the main cause of the issues. I'm not saying there are no problems with immigration. But a strong, stable, well-managed country should be able to handle immigration without falling to pieces. We take fewer refugees than many other European countries relative to our population and we can't handle even that, because the country was run into the ground by government. THAT is the issue.

Reducing immigration is a sticking plaster, maybe a temporary measure, but we need to fix the root causes so we have a country that can actually handle immigration. The immigrants aren't the cause of the issue, they've put pressure on an already broken system. Thinking that heavily reducing immigration will fix the issues is like turning off the tap on a leaky bath. The bath still has a leak.

When I moved to my area there was 1 GP. A few years prior there had been 3, and 4 a few years before that. One by one they'd all closed due to lack of funding and resources. That is complete mismanagement of the country by the government. You now have people in the local Facebook group ranting about how you can't get a GP appointment because the country is full up with immigrants. As if they've forgotten the reason we only have 1 GP in the first place!

So what would you like to happen? Should everyone over the age of 65 for example be given a pill to send them off on their way?

Um, no? And I'm not sure how you infer that I would want that from my post.

I was pointing out that the elderly are responsible for the majority of medical costs. This isn't something that needs to be fixed, it's just a (completely obvious and unavoidable) fact of life.

He told the Times

“When you look at polling, there’s a very, very small amount of people whose No 1 issue is around reducing the rights of trans people. But I’m not interested in having that conversation.”

He just can't accept that this as a women's rights issue, and I think that is because his understanding of rights is very shallow. It's based on tribalism rather than analysis.

Women need sex based rights regardless of their religion or gender identity or political affiliation because sex has material consequences.

Unlike other people on this thread, I don't have a strong opinion on immigration or drugs policies, but I do need arguments to be evidence based and pragmatic.

If Polanski and the Greens can't get to grips with the basics of sexual reproduction in mammals then it's going to be an uphill struggle to persuade me that their other policies are serious.

This is a problem when we really do need to get a grip on environmental issues and energy supply.