Mumsnet is now backing Reform UK - survey

[IwantToRetire]

The ladies are for turning after all – as a new survey reveals that one in five of the politically engaged mothers on the social networking site are ready to pledge allegiance to Nigel Farage

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/mumsnet-labour-reform-school-gates-keir-starmer-b2894524.html

Also in full at https://archive.is/V5P6n

It always cracks me up when people who proclaim themselves to be very left wing are also huge fans of the CBI's enthusiasm for cheap foreign labour.

You know I hate to be cynical, but it's almost as if UK society breaks down into

1. Upmarket natives
2. Downmarket natives
3. Immigrants

and category 1 are using category 3 as a prop to assure themselves of their moral superiority to category 2.

If categories 2 and 3 happened to find a common interest, they'd be the first people complaining about populism.

The current situation is that illegal immigrants aren't allowed to work (probably rightly) however, given they're otherwise free a reasonable number then end up working in the black market / underground economy, not paying taxes for months or years.

It seems naive at best to then assume they'll all (or even a majority) end up getting jobs and paying taxes to prop up elder care at the point where they are allowed to remain. Or indeed do caring jobs which are soul destroying and woefully underpaid. Not once they've already been working in the underground economy with no negative consequence. There is piss poor data (maybe deliberately) but it is known large numbers just disappear from the system, presumably once they're earning enough to pay rent. It positively encourages and welcomes criminals (which incidentally hardly makes the lives of genuine asylum seekers easier).

It also should be noted that many have no intention of staying. In the widely publicised case of the convicted sex offender who was accidentally released, given a free plane ticket home plus £500 once convicted of sexual assault it was widely estimated that £500 was equivalent to many months salary on a median income in his home country. By sexually assaulting a child in the UK he's ended up significantly better off (i.e. rewarded) compared to when he started out.

He doesn't seem to have got any punishment, he didn't serve his sentence. Unlike his child victim who is now scared to go out. It's repugnant to any decent human being.

And let's not forget the waste of taxpayers money the court case was given he's essentially just been paid for his crime.

It's quite likely that eventually some reasonable number of these illegal immigrants will just disappear taking large sums of money out of the UK economy which will be a fortune and enable very enjoyable lives in their home countries. To be replaced with other young men arriving with nothing, intending to contribute nothing and just taking money out.

Combine this situation with the fact that a lot of low level and mid-level crime (theft of many types for example) isn't even investigated by police, who'll just give people a crime number, then you have a situation that rewards going off grid and criminality, particularly for people who can just pop off to their home country cash in hand if things go pear shaped.

No, I think he was saying why he thinks migration numbers have become so high compared to the past.

I didn't take him overall to be particularly positive about the effect of that migration.

When I was working in another country, this was basically the rule. I could stay as long as there was a job that could not be filled by a local person. There was a term contract and that had to be renewed after that time, so if a local worker materialised you could expect the contract not to be renewed - in fact in many cases sectors were expected to be taking steps to make sure they could find local workers in the future.

Health care was private and managed through the contract, you could use local schools for your kids, but no access to social welfare type benefits at all. A very few people could become naturalised non-citizens which gave somewhat more access to certain things, usually those were the entrepreneurial class who contributed sums to the economy. There was no way to gain citizenship other than marriage.

No one, including workers from outside, seemed to think that was weird.

This really does my head in. I just do not understand how this can be a left wing position. I mean - actually, I think it just isn't.

There was a thread a few weeks ago in AIBU where a woman said that her daughter, a graduate in an area of cultural studies, was struggling to find work, and that there seemed to be few good jobs in that sector compared to numbers of grads. So she was surprised to find these kinds of jobs were open to applicants from pretty much anywhere.

She was pretty much eviscerated by people claiming she was some awful right wing racist, of course people from anywhere ought to be able to apply for jobs in the UK. Because obviously it is racism and discrimination to preference your own citizens in employment.

I think it's totally self serving tbh.

The left's attitude to immigration is a really colonial mindset actually. Oh we're so morally superior, we will welcome these poor peasants so they can do the jobs we don't want to. Some of which will potentially send any genuine asylum seekers with PTSD over the edge.

It never seems to cross their mind - if the working class Brits don't find the pay acceptable for the job why should immigrants? It's a teensy bit racist really. Why should they accept crappy working conditions and poor pay? It's such a shitty attitude to just assume artificially badly paid jobs can just be filled in this way (in order to maintain the artificially suppressed pay so that the 1% get more profit). It's also highly unsustainable. Go to any care home, find out the turnover of the lowest paid staff. This is not good for the patients. It also means safeguarding failures if you have people only doing the job as a last resort knowing it's not long term. There will be no accountability if corners are cut, food isn't provided etc. Seen it with my own eyes.

The obvious genuine socialist / humanitarian solution to the care home dilemma is to make them all have to be by law not for profit, with no shady artificially inflated high-interest profit making 'loans' via venture capitalists for 'improvements'. You could then pay staff an appropriate decent living wage, encouraging greater investment in the job, invest in proper CPD and everything would improve for everyone - staff and patients (just not the profiteers).

I believe this is what the Reform pitch on immigration going forwards is going to be, or some close variation of this.

We are the worst offenders for taking migrants from the healthcare sectors of red line nations, those countries that can ill afford to lose their nurses, carers and doctors.
I believe there are more Gambian nurses in the NHS than back home in Gambia.
Every Gambian nurse lost is incalculable to their country.

The way it works in Australia is, as I understand it, you can immigrate if you've got specific skills that are in demand, or you can immigrate if you've got some money that you're going to use to start up a business, but you can't immigrate to do jobs that blue collar Australians are already doing.

Dom Cummings (I know, take this with as much salt as you like, but it seems correct) explains the Boriswave as follows.

When Boris became PM in 2019 he had to draw up a manifesto for the election. Dom Cummings and Lee Cain told him he had to have an immigration policy and stick to it. This would be possible under Brexit and it would differentiate him from previous Tory leaders who had talked restrictionist on immigration but done the opposite.

Boris was relucant, because he's always been basically super-liberal on immigration, but Dom and Lee said, you've got to have an Australian points system, this will bring the numbers down and also reorient the immigration towards high-skill high-salary immigrants who will contribute to the economy.

Fast forward to 2021. We're coming out of Covid lockdown, and the economy has taken a massive hit, it's flatlining, the government feels it has to do something. The old Vote Leave crew, Cummings and Cain and others, have mostly been ousted from No10.

So a number of factors come into play:

• The guys advocating for a points system are out of government;
• The Treasury want something, anything, to get the economy moving;
• The CBI are calling for more cheap migrant labour to make that GDP graph go up;
• Boris, without Dom to tell him what to do, has reverted to his Tory Wet comfort zone, and he whimsically thinks that, by leaning into immigration and Net Zero, he can get the establishment to love him again, just like they did before Brexit.

So Priti Patel goes on a massive visa-issuing spree bumping net migration up to a million a year. The big idea of levelling up is abandoned (though HS2 limps on for a couple of years) and in place of an industrial policy we've got basically "growth through Deliveroo".

Matt Goodwin (that man again) was briefing Tory ministers based on his polling, and his takeaway was that, as far as Sunak was concerned, voters only cared about stopping the boats, and record levels of legal immigration were a non-story.

This is basically why the Conservative Party are fucked. They had ownership of an issue where a large majority of the voters supported what they said they would do, and they did the exact opposite.

Kemi isn't stupid, and there are aspects of her that I like, but she can't get away with just saying "the party is under new management" without explaining what went wrong and showing she understands it, and certainly not with Priti Patel in her top leadership still defending her own record.

Labour are in the same boat. Shabana Mahmood is staking out an approach to immgration that would have the support of maybe 70% of voters, and less than ten Labour MPs.

Hence Farage. You might not like him and you might reasonably doubt his ability to sort out immigration, but he's been saying exactly the same thing for 20 years and there seems little chance of him doing a 180 like Boris did.

It's not just the direct loss of a nurse either. Gambia, a poor country, has used their resources to raise and educate these children.

There is an element where many people in this position send money home, which makes it a source of foreign currency for nations like that, but it's all a bit underhanded. Like the UK can't afford to train its own nurses?

It is because we've been trained to associate immigration concerns with racism. It becomes a knee jerk response and the discussion is moved on to racism and not the discrepancies around immigration policy.

We would be able to talk about it on a local level, i think. If lots of people moved from Norwich to Peterborough, we'd understand that would put pressure on both cities, but it cannot be discussed internationally.

The problem is, the longer it goes on, the least likely there will be a solution.

Mnetters do not back Reform UK. We are not a monolith.

Reform UK will not win the next GE. They don't have it in them.

• The CBI are calling for more cheap migrant labour to make that GDP graph go up;

And this is really key. You artificially make GDP go up by adding bodies, and increase the number of people spending money, and it staves off certain problems temporarily.

Except that all of those people and their families need their own services and healthcare and education and places to live, and that starts to cost money. And if they are all in low wage jobs they are not paying enough taxes to support those increases.

That series of events rings true, Sionnach.

It's also quite concerning I think sometimes for the nurses themselves and generally speaking working conditions. Some of the immigrant nurses have accommodation provided by the NHS trusts. How can they then speak up if they think things are going wrong in the NHS or there is medical malpractice? Their visas and accommodation are linked to their jobs, so they have to put up and shut up. Not healthy, can potentially be an abusive employer - employee relationship. And we've seen how badly some nurses have been abused by NHS managers quite recently.

Yeah.

I mean, I think as a potential immigrant, you assume the country is looking out for its own citizens and economy when you are given permission to live and work there. And it's going to be really shitty to go to the considerable effort and expense to make a move like that, and find people resent you because the government wasn't doing their job. Or that there really aren't enough local jobs. Lots of people won't be able to go back even if they want to, it's too big an investment to make a move like that.

It's also shitty to arrive and find you can't get a doctor or adequate housing, or the schools are shit and overcrowded.

There have been a lot of stories recently in Canada of the people admitted under Trudeau - also a GDP inflation exercise - arriving to find that while the salaries are higher, the cost of living actually leaves them worse off. And they are fucked, their families have paid everything they have to get them here. And people are dying in hospital waiting rooms waiting to be seen.

None of it is "kind".

Labour are in the same boat. Shabana Mahmood is staking out an approach to immigration that would have the support of maybe 70% of voters, and less than ten Labour MPs.

I've been quite impressed with SM so far. She seems to be a rarity in current politics (Bridget Phillipson I'm looking at you) in that she actually seems to want to try and solve problems, get on and do the work not just talk about it. But it's right that the Labour Party will block her.

Wouldn't it be wild if she defected to Reform?!!

What we really need is an alternative political party with some momentum behind it made up of people who actually get stuff done and want to address real world problems for the benefit of the people living in this country. Seems unlikely.

True and of course ultimately this will be what limits migration. The UK will soon become (if not already) a place not many people will want to move to (other than criminals who of course will be happy to pop over here for a few years to squeeze what they can out of the terminally fucked system).

I think you're already seeing it with foreign students (with money), they're going elsewhere.

I've got to admit, I wish quite strongly that we'd stayed living in the 2 other countries we previously lived in and not returned to the Uk.

Notably I was not eligible for state benefits in either country.

Yes, Zack/Dave basically said the quiet part out loud.

I am politically homeless. Traditionally I am to the right of the conservative party but they have made a mess of things and I cannot in all conscience vote for them. I agree with many Reform policies - a tough line on immigration, cutting down on benefits and getting rid of all this net zero and woke rubbish. There are other policies I cannot agree with. However I did vote Reform in the last GE and will probably do so again.

Yup @Friendlygingercat this is the current thread for the politically homeless of FWR (and the sundry ploppers who like to drive-by virtue signal and/or scold us for having the temerity to even discuss our dissatisfaction with Labour and the possible voting options other than Labour) 👋

It's worth pointing out though that this is just a restatement of the central (centuries old) liberal tenant: market participation is (in itself) prosperity. People come to the mark to exchange labour for money and money for goods and services. The invisible hand intervenes to translate that into durable cumulative wealth formation. No one on today's political stage, not starmer, not Kemi, certainly not Farage, doesn't believe this is fundamentally the case. They are only arguing for special cases and doing so dishonestly IMO.

There has only ever been one coherent counter-argument to economic liberalism: socialism, i.e. instead of markets you can allocate labour, capital and distribute value though democratic means. After the collapse of Bennism, Mitterrandism and the Soviet block in the 80s there has been no coherent torch-bearer to that intellectual position.

Yes, Zack "I wouldn't want to wipe bottoms" Polanski.

True but the way in which different countries regulate and operate markets can be quite different. E.g. I once lived in a country where the CEO could only earn some multiple of the lowest paid worker's wages. That country had a better quality of life for normal people than the UK.

In the UK, successive governments have interfered with a true market in various ways - housing being the most obvious area. Also banks, which weren't allowed to fail which they would have done in a free market.