Zack Polanski

[BlueSkySunshineDay]

I’m seriously impressed with this guy. Anyone else find him refreshingly honest and sensible?

He spoke about the capitalists who are deliberately taking our money and keeping the masses poor. Take away their money and we shall fund everything. Utter lazy Left Wing nonsense. There is not the volume of money available month after month.

Women and girls are 50% of the population. We have a need for single sex spaces. That is something that can be fixed in the UK. It holds far greater weighting than Palestine (something the average woman and girl can't do anything about).

Of course you want to hear a politician speak with compassion. But in a capitalist world, I’m afraid you need to stop being naive. Zack can say all the nice words in the world but he needs to explain how his policies make sense. Currently, they don’t. Taking money from nasty rich people is not going to raise enough money or last more than a few years. What happens after that?

I'm not too bothered about the gender stuff, but his "legalise all drugs" policy is seriously worrying

Exactly.

Making drugs illegal doesn’t stop people taking them though - and costs our NHS millions…

Legalising them reduces deaths and kills the black market and associated criminal behaviour around them.

Have a read about the actual debate:

https://oceanrecoverycentre.com/2022/11/pros-and-cons-of-legalising-drugs/

Green Party policy:

"A carbon tax set initially at £120 per tonne of carbon emitted and rising over ten years to a maximum of £500 per tonne, would raise up to an additional £80bn."

Actually no it wouldn't because companies would simply transfer their operations to places like China and the US with weaker environmental standards,creating large scale job losses in the UK and actually raising global CO2 emissions. Just look at Ineos.

"We are prepared to borrow to invest. Allowing ourselves to be trapped in a self-imposed fiscal straitjacket is a false economy."

Hmm unfunded Government spending and raising national debt didn't work out too well for Liz "the lettuce " Truss or for that matter the Labour Government.

That said I can see the appeal in voting for a party that promises lots of spending and bashing anyone wealthier than yourself, especially if you have absolutely no understanding of economics.

Anyone who wants drugs legalised has never seen dead heroin addicts, know how tiny a dose of heroin can kill, nor seen what crystal meth can do to a person's attitude, behaviour etc let alone teeth and skin. Anyone who wants these drugs legalised is living in fantasy land and should be made to go with the ambulance out to collect the bodies of those who overdosed on heroin. And speak to the parents of those teens who lost their life to it. The Greens are beyond dangerous!

The Office of Budget Responsibility has projected that the average migrant, who moves to this country at the age of 25 and lives until 80, will contribute £341,000 to public finances over the course of their lives - more than the average Brit. Compared to the average UK adult, skilled worker migrant tax receipts were approximately £4,100 higher. There are currently more than 150,000 unfilled roles in the health and social care sector, and 400,000 additional workers are expected to be needed in the next decade. Prior to Brexit, the sector relied on the 'relief valve' of EU migration, in a system that didn't (and still doesn't) have an effective way to train and keep British care workers. ONS data shows one in four care workers and home carers was born outside of the UK

Forgive me if I have little faith in the OBR’s ‘projections’ which are often wrong.

We have record numbers of Brits out of work and reliant on benefits while migrants do those jobs. If migration was positive for the economy our GDP per capita would be rising. It isn’t.

Training British people to do jobs is what’s needed. Employers have been able to get away with doing this thanks to the constant flow of cheap labour from the EU and beyond since Tony Blair turned the taps on (which has also created wage stagnation).

Does no one ever join the dots as to why so many low paid jobs are filled by migrants??? Yet all I hear on Mumsnet is how we need more migration, not less. It’s crazy.

The problem is that for political reasons, they group all different immigrants together, which is very misleading.

Motive and origin of the immigrant makes a huge difference to outcomes. An economic migrant from Singapore or Australia, with a university degree going into a skilled biotech job will bring hundreds of thousand £s of benefit, and also likely a well-educated English-speaking spouse and bright, eventually-productive children to add our population. An uneducated economic migrant from Eritrea coming in on a dinghy or a care visa and becoming an Uber driver will cost hundreds of thousand £s of benefit, and will bring over family members who - the detailed statistics show - are likely to become generationally benefit-dependent.

Why do you think they combine those very, very different outcomes into one single statistic for all immigrants? Do you think they genuinely don't realise there are such huge differences? Really?!? Or do you think they are deliberately trying to mislead?

Here is a detailed study from the Netherlands (in 2024, looking at economic impact based on motivations for migration and origin (Western vs non-Western). It's very, very stark. (They've got some very clear tables and graphics further in, don't be put off by the maths formulas!). The UK impact will be very similar to the Netherlands.

Source: IZA - Institute of Labor Economics https://share.google/MgaQEmo4yuhjJJBUh

Those brits don’t want to do those jobs. Hence we need migrants.
What is complicated?

I have never said it's complicated. I do think it's bonkers and if you're ok with that, god help this country.

If 'those Brits' are not living off benefits, that's fine. They get to choose.

If they are living off benefits, they don't get to choose. I think we'd see our reliance on migrants drop.

To be more accurate:
Those Brits choose not to those jobs at the salary on offer in comparison to what they can earn on benefits (paid out of taxation).
So in order to fill those jobs migrants are needed who are also eligible for benefits and whose additional numbers create additional demands on healthcare, housing, roads, water infrastructure etc etc.

The alternative approach is either:
A) Increase the salaries of those jobs so that those Brits will be incentivised to do those jobs over what they can get on benefits. Note: this will have an impact on inflation and economic competitiveness.
B) Decrease what is available on benefits so that those Brits will be incentivised to do those jobs. Note this would be politically challenging and seen as forcing Brits into employment through financial necessity
C) Some combination of both

But unlike some I am not prepared to write off 9 million economically inactive Brits as unemployable.

Its fairly simple.

I have listened to what he said and quite frankly he is terrifying.

I can assure you that if the Greens got into government and did actually implement any of those policies, then this country would be in a worse decline than it is now… and I know that seems impossible, but it would.

But they know this, so their policies, like other parties policies, would just become ‘aspirational’, and you will have been fooled into more of the same, so a handful of MPs can get rich.

To be more accurate:
Those Brits choose not to those jobs at the salary on offer in comparison to what they can earn on benefits (paid out of taxation).
So in order to fill those jobs migrants are needed who are also eligible for benefits and whose additional numbers create additional demands on healthcare, housing, roads, water infrastructure etc etc.
There is also at the other end, young med an nursing grads unable to get jobs in the UK because recruitment is worldwide, and companies becoming wedded to trained and experienced immigrant labour instead of taking the time to train young people.

If the migrants are here to do the jobs that the British people aren’t doing, because of tue wonderful affluent life they are leading on benefits, then they’re not on benefits are they? You’re talking rubbish.

Government spending on each person isn't just benefits.

Whilst some state overheads like defence have to be paid for anyway, we employ teachers, doctors, police etc in proportion to the number of people in the country. Number of trains, buses to be built and maintened also goes up in proportion to the population, even wear on the roads.

We're not talking small numbers of people here, it's 1% of the population being added every year. So in 10 years, you need 10% more trains, buses, hospitals, doctors, nurses, teachers, garbage collection, road repair etc. The transport budget alone was £32billiion in 2025. So about £3billion of that was needed because of the extra immigrant population who has come in the last 10 years.

Those costs are easily hidden though, and paid out of different pots, by different people. It isn't the care homes - who want lots of immigrants so they can keep the wages down to NMW - who will be paying the extra 10% transport budget. Or 10% extra police budget. Or all the rest.

Worse, hiding those costs suits the government too. They get to point to nice GDP figures (FDP is a total, so it gets bigger as the population grows - regardless of the cost of that person). They can just ignore the higher state spending ("what can we do?! Don't you want your state services to work??"). And they definitely kick the £7k per year pension liability we're accruing for each immigrant down the road!! State pension is worth £250k, with eligibility built up over 35 years, so each year a person is in the UK costs about £7k in future pension payments - but no one needs to worry about that for a few decades...

Let alone dependants the immigrant is allowed to bring in - without a job, but still using buses and trains, getting credit towards a future pension - so the costs multiply.

It makes absolutely zero sense to bring in immigrants when we have unemployed UK citizens who can be trained to do the jobs. It costs us much, much more. It's just that the cost is hidden, some of it for decades.

It would make much more sense to cut immigration right back and only bring in genuine shortage skills - and I mean post-grad level bio-tech research, not care assistants - and then let the market force wages up so that the work attracts enough UK people. That would still cost much less.

Of course, we should also not sabotage that with excessively high and freely-given benefits. Getting benefits for sitting in the garden is always going to be nicer than working, but shouldn't be an option unless the person genuinely can't work.

Women should always trust their gut reactions to men, and telling them not to or that they are wrong is bang out of order - sometimes our gut feeling is the only thing that helps us be safe from creepy women hating men, which Polanski definitely is.